Religion

I have tried to be religious for a lifetime.

So many things brought me back to it.

I longed for the community and the people that I thought existed there.

Time and time again, life showed me that they didn’t exist.

The church was a facade.

Religion, in church form, wasn’t at all what I was looking for.

It wasn’t until recently that I really started to deepen my understanding of this idea, and what came up was how similar my experience with church has been to my experience with control disguised as love.

One day, someone came to me needing a conversation about her relationship.

She shared with me how abusive and controlling her partner was-his manipulation tactics and how he was tearing apart every aspect of her life.

She didn’t know how to leave, though, and recently they had gone to their church. The response from their church absolutely shocked her to her core.

They prioritized her letting this man lead her, even though he wasn’t in any form a leader.

They lessened the experience of the abuse.

It didn’t shock me because this experience was not new for me.

The high society members of the church, the leaders, the pillars of the community, oftentimes were some of the worst people that I had ever met.

I saw them abuse their power and their people.

I saw them throw their anger and judgment while their word remained high and mighty.

They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.

The very thing that they preached against-they were.

I have never, to this day, seen a church that truly loved people individually and respected their own ideas and feelings on religion.

There was always a line.

A way you were expected to believe.

A way you were expected to behave.

Even the churches that preached love often struggled to make room for people who didn’t quite fit within those expectations.

That’s not to say that they don’t exist. It’s just not my experience.

I joked around for a long time about creating Breeligion because there are so many people like me that want the community that does it in a way that isn’t the normal standard.

To me, religion is soulful. It’s spiritual.

You can believe pieces of everything. You can call it what you want, but you are safe to ask questions, to find what makes sense-or what made sense at the time but needs to evolve for the present day.

The Bible itself is an interpretation from humans-a collection of stories understood through human experiences, perspectives, and understanding.

Things change.

Ideas evolve.

Information arises.

Holding an interpretation to this level of extremes has always been weird to me.

Using it to judge people, to hate people-that is the exact opposite of what religion is supposed to be.

There are so many people that hide behind religion, and honestly, I grew exhausted of it.

I got tired of trying to make this something that it wasn’t.

It wasn’t until I let the idea of finding the right church go that I was able to connect in my soul with what religion truly is.

That’s when my passion began to flow through me.

The messages were easy to hear.

My trust in my path became solid.

What I longed for was always within me.

It was never in an external source.

The more freely I allowed myself to flow, the more spiritual, the more religious, the more loving I became.

If church feels like a chore, like control, like you will never quite be enough-it’s not religion.

It’s control.

Watch the conversation that inspired the reflection here: