Spiritual Autobiography 16

I was staying away from the church. they had traumatized me and therefore I could not feel safe there. I stayed part time with my father in a small town across the water and part time with various friends in Vancouver. It was still a spiritually very intense time for me. I had this ongoing sense that I was wandering lot through an underground labyrinth or maze and that Jesus was walking it beside me. I had undiagnosed PTSD. The situation eventually became untenable. My father vented a lot of his hate at me and I was exploited and mistreated by others. I ended up back in Vancouver, couch-surfing between various friends' homes till I got on welfare (I had been living off of sales of my paintings and housecleaning gigs, not a lot, but enough to feed myself, anyway), and found a room in a shared apartment for a year, then in a shared house for another two years, till finally I got on some wait lists with BC Housing and the place where I'm now living downtown opened up for me more than sixteen years ago. I spent four years seeing a psychiatrist, who wasn't bad, but loved the sound of his voice, was rather stuck in Freudian thinking and was an apparent atheist, so that he misdiagnosed me, based on some of my spiritual experiences I divulged to him, as having a schizotypal personality. He never told me this, and only in recent months were my medical records released to me. In the meantime I came into stable employment as a mental health peer support contractor, a position I have held these last fourteen years. The incredible low rent in my apartment has enabled me to save money and travel to destinations in Latin America, making it more possible to improve and polish my Spanish. Despite some of the frustrations of being stuck on a low wage with employers who do not value me, as well as some of the inconveniences of living downtown, I would say that my life is now in a better place than ever before. I did have some real difficulties with church. When the Anglican Church weighed in in favour of same-sex marriage I was okay with it but a certain priest would not leave me alone and I was so fed up with her paranoid assumptions about me that I left the church in disgust and spent the next three years in fundamentalist land, but their strident homophobia I found so offensive that I spent some months visiting a gay church, then returned to a particularly dysfunctional Anglican parish with a very militant gay presence and I got so sick and tired of being branded a homophobe for suggesting that marriage was the most legitimate way to express one's sexuality, I left, traumatized. I had trouble in another Anglican parish where I tried to hold on for two years, then finally left the church altogether for almost three years. I did visit the Quakers for a while, since like me they are pacifists and place a huge value on silent prayer, but their lack of a Christ-based theology I still find troubling, plus, I was bluntly insulted by a couple of their members so I decided to bail on them completely. I am now integrating into an Anglican parish church in the Kerrisdale area. This does feel like a good fit. I also believe that when I learned last year about the death in 2013 of the leader of Dilaram who put that curse on me in 1979, I have since been delivered from a very dark and ugly shadow of shame that was hanging over me for those last forty years. Jesus remains as real for me as ever. I am also strongly aware of the importance of communicating the Gospel in a way that people can receive it, and living a life that is grounded, responsible and exemplary plays a vital role. I have no idea what the future holds for me. We are living in very uncertain times, with climate change from global warming. The growing gap between rich and poor is also troubling. I focus more on activism these days, even if I really don't do a lot, but I strongly believe in the call of Christ to stand up for the most vulnerable, even and especially if I happen to be one of those most vulnerable myself. But really, aren't we all vulnerable? We all started out being born as helpless little children and one day we are all going to weaken and die, because we are mortals, made of dust, water and earth, but our destination is eternal, and we must never forget that we are by calling and appointment a holy and sacred people, whether or not we know this, whether or not we believe this.