Shifting Perception

The Density of Ideas 9/24

He had warm brown eyes and straight brown hair that fell across his forehead in a swipe. He was mens-catalog cool, with great posture and a breezy “I’m here because I want to be and will leave when I’m ready,” kind of energy. His vibe made him an outlier in our youth group and in true-crush fashion, I was as smitten as I was fascinated.

The boy was an intriguing church kid because he came late in the game—in high school, on his own, without being forced by his parents or having grown up there. Church was part of his life but not all of it. He attended because was curious, probably carrying the same hunger to belong that we all had, but he wasn’t yet sold. He asked our leadership a lot of questions, sometimes saying out loud the thing we were all thinking but learned a long time ago not to express. His curiosity carried doubt and he didn’t know to keep curiosity a secret.

Nothing catches a missionary-in-training church kid’s hunger faster than an elusive fish that kept swimming in our waters before darting away. So in addition to leadership’s efforts, he was also evangelized by peers. This often broke down someone’s resistance, because they wanted to shed the conversion pressure and finally feel accepted. But acceptance in evangelical youth groups is conditional: think like we do or you’re dangerous.

He knew girls like me were ga-ga for him, buzzing like bees around a flower for his attention (in keeping with purity culture, of course.) So that looked like longing to sit by him at church. Praying to God for a sign that “he’s the one.” And eagerly participating in any kind of Bible study or thoughtful conversation about God and faith, so we could prove what a godly wife we’d make him.

He was always kind about that, never embarrassing the girl. I was one of many. In hindsight, I came to understand that sometimes boys rejected girls because they were secretly gay. Sometimes they sheltered horrific family lives they were trying to escape at church, and had no capacity for girlfriends. Most often, they were just teenage boys not as into marriage as they were told they should be, and while they liked the idea of someday having sex, the idea of a wife felt daunting. (AS IT SHOULD IN CHILDHOOD.) This guy, though, always let the girl down easy. He listened well and participated in conversation, without ever giving more of himself away than he wanted.

That’s how I ended up the lucky girl sitting next to him on the pew on Wednesday night after weeks of smiles while passing each other in the hallways and shy glances from the orchestra to the choir. I couldn’t believe how God was working things out!

Because, on Wednesday nights we held hands with “our neighbor” while we prayed on our knees. I got to hold his straight, strong fingers in a clasp, and feel how cool and dry his hand felt—not clammy like other boys. I noted the air between our palms and how he held my hand in such a straightforward, easy way, without pressure or avoidance.

And here was my chance to show him how devout I could be, how spiritual. On Wednesday nights, we dove into scripture for line-by-line study. Our pastor once spent three whole years going line by line through the book of Ephesians. The onionskin-thin pages of my Bible were falling out because I’d highlighted every line. My margins were full of teeny-tiny notes. So I’d taken to writing my favorite quotes and notes on the endpapers. When I took out my purple gel pen to write something the pastor said, my pages caught the boy’s eye.

My heart pounded like a Derby race as he did what I never dreamed could happen. In one romantic, saxophone-laden smooth move, he reached over my lap and calmly took my Bible into his hands, laying it over his own. He slowly turned the pages. He ran the tip of his index finger over my cursive, purple quotes. He read my words. I held my breath. He returned my Bible to me. Thank you, dear Jesus, for this sign that he is the one!

Warmth washed over me and my armpits felt wet. Suddenly I could see the faces of our children, smiling for a holiday card. Then we were fifty, and he was giving a speech at our wedding anniversary, calling me his Proverbs 31 woman. Then we were lying in bed at one hundred years old, holding hands and deciding tonight would be the night we see Jesus together.

The orchestra starting the Invitation snatched me out of the daydream. I demurely completed the actions that ended our service: bowed my head to pray, folded my hands in my lap, listened attentively to the decisions made at the altar call, and sang the closing hymn with enthusiasm. But then, as the congregation dispersed and I was wondering how to navigate an awkward goodbye, the boy had a surprise.

“I love that you take philosophical notes,” he said. “May I share one of my favorites with you?”

I genuinely lit up. While at the time, I thought my spark was only because of a girlish crush and our sure-fire marriage, I know now that kindness and intelligence ignite me. I love smart conversation. I love writing and knowing my words impact a reader. I love men who read. There was so much happening in this scene that would take me years to unpack.

“Perception versus reality is deceiving,” he said. “Donny Osmond said that.”

The actual quote is longer and my old teenage Bible is in storage. But that line has always stuck with me. When I heard it, the room spun a little, as if the spotlights above us weren’t our megachurch but the Tilt-a-whirl at the fair. Here was a boy who was cracking the fragile glass of our carefully constructed world and my first reaction was puzzlement.

I didn’t know what he meant and the second angle threw me. To me, my perception and reality were one and the same. There was what was (reality)—and there was what I believed about what was (perception), which happened to be what “they” told me to believe. In our high-control environment, there were no deviances allowed.

Of course, real life isn’t like that. And the boy was from Outside. He was from real life. There are real and painful reasons why he was so independent at sixteen. He’d had experiences unlike the rest of us and it resulted in curiosity and seeking. He wasn’t a body bag of finite answers and solutions like the rest of us: the boy was human.

Years later, when I too felt human, in all my foibles and imperfections and messy loose ends, I came to understand the quote a little better. My perception was often skewed. When I relied on it to interpret my reality, I often found myself deceived. And whether that deception was other or self-generated became its own journey.

The truth is, our senses can be off. Our thoughts can be manipulated. Two people can come away from the same experience with different interpretations. Our perceptions influence our decision-making, worldview, and conceptualization of identity and ideas. And trusting our perception alone is like stepping onto Spring-soft ice.

I’ve played within this tension for years. What part does intuition play? What about my deeply empathic nature and highly sensitive awareness? What realities can be changed, and do change, because of perception?

The gift the boy gave me that day was a shade of gray in a very binary, finite world. A world where preachers taught from the same book for years, line by line, drilling dogma into our under-developed minds. A world where every person around us represented a convert. We didn’t ask about their backgrounds except to use that information to assimilate them. We fantasized reflexively about integrated futures, because eventually, we knew, their resistance would break down.

The boy and I never sat next to each other in church after that, most likely just because of logistics. Our youth group was four hundred kids strong—if we changed one tiny habit we might not cross paths again. Later, after my escape from the Christian Patriarchy and all the violence that entailed, I looked up my old friends on Facebook. The boy was one of them. He accepted my friend request and we did that “FB friends” thing where you like each other’s posts and occasionally comment, but don’t really talk. Because of that, I know he grew up and has a family and a job that seems to merge technicality and art. He still has a keen eye for photography. He likes Neo from The Matrix—the ultimate perception versus reality movie—and he brushes that side swipe of his bangs straight back now. His eyes still sparkle just as warm.

We were Facebook friends until the MAGA years. So many of us saw changes in our relationships with evangelicals from 2016 on, but I don’t know him well enough to know how much he played into 45’s frenzy. What I do know is that he unfriended me and he was far from the only one.

Our Southern city is evangelical in flavor, MAGA in texture, and conservative in taste. It’s hot here, metaphorically and literally, almost all of the time. It’s not accidental that Florida hosts both Trumplandia and DeSantis—the soup has been brewing for years, in an altered state of reality influenced by religion, Southern culture, racial tension, and sweaty fears. The perception Floridians carry is often at odds with the reality the rest of the world knows, and that’s more evident to me now than ever before, having finally traveled so far from home. But just like we sought out individual connections in a youth group of four hundred, and in a megachurch of ten thousand, I find value in remembering the sea of MAGA adherents is a collection of individual souls.

Those souls believe their perception matches reality, and they believe what they’re told to believe and think because it’s all they know. Sometimes some of them knew better once—they carried questions and curiosities, doubts and healthy, critical skepticism. But the pressure to belong is powerful. I believe it’s at the heart of the MAGA movement.

What I’ll never forget is that all it takes is one crack in such a fragile, high-control house. One snag to let the light through to set the prism of your soul free. I held that thought as a bookmark for years and when I trace my deconstruction process backward, that’s the page I find. A well-mannered boy. A purity culture girl. A purple gel pen and a sentence I’m still pondering, thirty years later.

Working in the original Density of Ideas in 2016, surrounded by mood boards, plot lines, and worries about what was happeneing to people I thought I knew.

READING

I picked up Hester at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris and bumped it to the top of my TBR. It’s a reimagining of The Scarlett Letter, a pondering of “Who was the real Hester? And what if she could tell her own story?” Since I’m on a similar line of thought with the novel I have underway, Hester makes a fascinating comparison title. And it’s incredible. The kind of novel that’s immediately immersive and made me want to carry it with me everywhere, even to meals, as shown above.

LISTENING

Recommended by a friend. Irresistible title. The description reads, “An album for the ADD afflicted this is not, but if you’re looking for something truly transcendent, this is it.” It’s twenty years old so…old enough to be one of my kids. I was in the peak of my fundie years when emo music hit. I have catching up and reclaiming to do. This album begs repetitive listens and I makes me want to paint to it.

POETRY

ABSENCE by Pablo Neruda

I have scarcely left you
when you go in me, crystalline,
or trembling,
or uneasy, wounded by me
or overwhelmed wiht love, as when your eyes
close upon the gift of life
that without cease I give you. 

My love, 
we have found each other
thristy and we have 
drunk up all the water and the blood,
we found each other
as fire bites,
leaving wounds in us. 

But wait for me,
keep for me your sweetness. 
I will give you too
a rose. 

NATURE

From my mother’s flower garden. I think it’s a trumpet lilly.

I hope you find art today. Beauty. Inspiration. And perhaps, a shift in your perception.

Love,

Tia

P.S. The Density of Ideas is a weekly post for paid subscribers of The Anti-Fundamentalist. I sent out to the whole list today as a sample and also to offer this gift subscription option. If you know someone who’d like a letter like this in their Sunday morning, or to save it for a quiet moment with their tea or coffee, I hope you’ll pass it on.