In the eight years prior to the dream that I had where I met Jesus at age 43, I lost my parents, ended a relationship that I was much invested in and lost my cats of eighteen and nineteen years. It took me a while to grieve and to recover, especially since I did not have much of a support system.
I tried to start a new life. But I had to find the strength, especially since I was in it all by myself. Friends had moved away, or were busy with their own lives, with husbands and children. I did not relate to my siblings much.
I was wondering what I would do with my life when I had the dream that you read earlier. Of course, now I know what my new life involved. You will read about more the suffering that I experienced after I became a Catholic.
Six months after the dream, I suddenly decided to receive Baptism. I did not know the Bible. I did not know anything about Christianity. I did not know how to receive Baptism. Finally, I called around and was advised by a friend to call a parish to speak to a priest about my questions. I called the closest Catholic parish and spoke with the pastor. We agreed to meet the next day.
I was a little nervous. I had never met a religious figure in my life. I had no clue about the religion. I knocked on the door of the parish and an old man with a long white beard who seemed nice, but was wearing a long dress opened the door. I had never met with a man who was wearing a dress. I was a little taken. I figured it was something a Catholic pastor wore.
I am an artist. I am very visual. I pay attention to details that most people are amazed I can notice. I never sat in front of a religious figure before. I never sat in front of a man wearing a dress before either. So I was looking at his toe nails, hoping he was wearing something under his dress. I was anxious and thinking to myself, “I am sitting in front of a religious figure, an old man with a long white beard, wearing a dress.”
I had to make a conscious effort to keep my eyes on his face or to gaze at something around him as we talked. I am sure he realized he surprised me with his dress. The second time we met, he sat behind his desk so I would not see him in the dress! By the way, in case you do not know, what he had on was a “habit” that some pastors wear.
Anyway, I spoke with the Catholic pastor. We discussed the process of Baptism and Confirmation. He seemed like a very good person. He was very kind and helpful. I felt comfortable with him, so in our second meeting I suddenly decided to tell him about the dream you read earlier. I felt shy about it. I did not want to give him the impression that I was weird. But I felt telling him about the dream was important. Besides I had to tell someone.
The pastor heard my dream and made me realize what the dream was about. He was the first person who told me I saw the Lord in my dream. I realized God wanted me to receive Baptism in the Catholic Church. He wanted me to be a Catholic. I was sure of that. I just went along with God’s plan.
I started taking Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults classes for non-Catholics who seek Baptism and Confirmation in the Catholic Church. For nine months, we studied the Bible and Church’s traditions.
My pastor had just arrived to the parish a month prior to my arriving at the same parish. He seemed to be trying to find his way around to get to know the flock and all the workings of his new home. He assigned me a godmother. He told me he did not personally know her because he just arrived to the parish himself. It seemed he was trying to handle so much and it all was new to him. I understood his position. He did the best he could give the circumstances.
I did not know much at all about godmothers. I met her. I talked with her in person and on the phone. She talked much about the afterlife and how she believed she would not make it to heaven. She told me, “Maybe I met you to become a good Christian.” She was so afraid of going to hell. She felt she had to hold on to the bottom of the pastor’s garment to get to heaven, she told me. She was afraid of God. She did not believe God loved her.
According to my godmother, my mother, father and all the people I knew and all the people I did not know, who were not perfect Catholics were all in hell. According to her God was sitting there waiting for our lives to end and to send us to hell. It was devastating to me. I had just lost my parents. I did not want anyone to go to hell. I had met God in my dream. He was the God of Love. The whole thing was confusing me to death. Who was this God she was talking about?
My godmother’s God and mine were not the same. The God I met in my dream was not like her God. If I believed in her God, I had to imagine my loved ones who passed away being in hell. According to her faith’s teaching, I had to imagine the vast majority of humanity in hell. As I got to know the Church’s teachings and traditions, I realized that my godmother was not the only one who felt the way she felt. It was not her choice to feel the way she felt. She was born and raised with the man-made God. She herself was one of God’s children who was suffering and not knowing her loving God and parent.
I met with my pastor to discuss my concerns for my loved ones who died not Christian. I wanted to know where my parents and all those who died not Christian went. My pastor tried to comfort me. He was very compassionate. He did his best to calm me. He was doing his best under the guidelines and the teachings of the Church. I appreciated his compassion, empathy, understanding and attempts to be comforting. He really did all he could do for me in his power.
With Jesus’ help I tried to cope with what came my way, I kept reminding myself that he had sent me to the Catholic Church. I had to do his will. And he did faithfully try to help me through my preparation for Baptism. He stood by me.
We had no Bible classes in our parish. Our parish was too small. I had nobody to talk with about God and the Bible. I was wondering what the Christians on television were all about. I could not talk to my godmother. She told me how to fear God. Everyone talked about “fearing God.”
I listened to these “Christian” leaders on television who claimed they were going around the world to “save souls.” They said the harvest was near and they needed more and more money to “bring people to Jesus.” They said they had to make money to afford to “take the gospel to the world.” They said the salvation of all people’s souls depended upon becoming Christian.
In their fancy clothes, the television Evangelists were on a crusade for a God that needed them to save souls. According to them, if they did not get to save all souls, God would just throw all those who were not Christian in hell to burn for all eternity.
Christians seemed to believe that my parents and all those who died not knowing Christ and not being a Christian were going to hell. They said God only wanted and loved those who were Christian.
Listening to these fear fostering characters, I kept thinking to myself, “What is the difference between the God I grew up with in a Muslim country, and the God these characters on television are talking about?” These Christians and the Muslims both believe in a God that does not love humanity. He supposedly cares less about humanity than the preacher on television. In our own hemisphere, in Haiti, mothers feed their children with mud patties so the children can feel something in their stomachs. How can these mothers afford a television to listen to the “Evangelists”? Most people in the world cannot read and write. Why would God not keep billions of people like that in his consideration? What kind of God would turn his back on suffering humans? He came to Earth to free the oppressed and the poor.
The God the Evangelists talked about was a business man. A cruel God was sitting there feeding these television characters and their fancy life styles, and condemning the vast majority of humanity to hell. I could not believe it. That was not the God I met in my dream.
These preachers on television also had congregations. They preached to the people in their congregations about what to do in order to prosper and get to heaven. They had to send money to the head of the congregation, preacher, and pastor or whatever they called themselves, to guide the congregation to heaven. They talked and talked. They claimed to “love Jesus.”
Some of these leaders on television were going on the streets and delivering hell to people. They would stop people and try to make them feel guilty, and tell them that if the individual did not become a practicing Christian, they would “go to hell and burn for all eternity.”
It was mind blowing. I kept thinking, has God anything to do with this stuff? It seemed as if God was being translated by these leaders of men, on television, in churches or other religions. I was growing more and more confused. It all was inconsistent. It did not add up. It became overwhelmingly depressing.
Going to receive Baptism, I was told that I was going to be an “adopted child of God,” “one of God’s people.” I was told I would have “eternal life in Heaven.” I felt selfish. I felt compassion and sorrow for my dead parents and all those who died not Christian. I felt it was so unfair. I felt compassion and sorrow for those who are suffering around the world in third world countries who would not become Christians.
I kept trying to remember my Jesus, the Jesus I met in my dream. He was not like what they were drilling in my head on television or in the church. I had become a Christian for love. I did not try to buy a ticket to heaven leaving my sisters and brothers in creation behind. I became a Christian, a Catholic, because of love. I thought God loved us. I was not in it for me alone. To me it was about us.
I told my priest that I felt selfish. I told him that I became a Christian for love. I told him I did not want to buy a ticket to heaven by becoming a Christian. I told him about my concerns for humanity and that I could not get them out of my mind. I could not leave humanity behind. I could not believe in a God that did not love humanity as much as I did! It was mind blowing. It was depressing. It did not add up.
My priest was very compassionate. I could feel that he wanted to give me comfort. He did the best he could under his authority. He said that God will judge people based on actions, if they did not receive Baptism.
But it was not helping me feel better. I wanted to be with the God of Love. A God of Love would love humanity more than I do. A God of Love, as the one in my dream, would love his creatures unconditionally. He would understand how this world can make a “sinner,” and he would understand human conditions.
The God they drilled in my head did not add up. He was not the God I found in my dream.I chose to honor the God I met in my dream. I received Baptism. I wanted to have a relationship with Jesus. I was still listening to the television Evangelists, every now and then, fear fostering, telling people we had to hurry to save souls before Jesus came. Of course, they only need our money to do their mission.
The leaders were growing more conceited every day. They would say things like, “God wants me to be rich.” They claimed that their God somehow favored them. But the same God was cruel to over seventy five percent of humanity. A humanity that was starving, homeless and not Christian.
Listening to them was demoralizing and sickening. It was even more painful that they had humans believing and following them. The people made the preachers rich because they thought it would help get on the good side of God. I was fed up with the television Evangelists. Shortly after my Baptism, I stopped listening to them.
But I was listening to the Church I was with. The pastor did his job. He had to follow strict tradition and guidelines. It must be very difficult being a Catholic priest. His job description ranges from A to Z. It is rigidly practiced. Every Catholic priest has to practically be a robot. They say the same thing, do the same thing, preach the same thing, pray for the same thing, teach the same thing, practice the same thing and breathe the same air every day of the year, as it is predetermined by the Church in Rome.
Catholic priests seemed to be pulling a chain and iron ball. The man-made Church that is supposed to be “the Holy and Catholic and Apostolic Church,” functions like a giant machine. It is most bureaucratic, with a rigid hierarchy and chain of command. Christ lives, in “I AM,” and the Church lives in “I WAS.” The job of a Catholic priest is not about here and now, where the Holy Spirit, Christ, lives. If I mentioned to Catholics that something may get done fast in the Catholic Church, I would even hear the religious say, “good luck with that thought!”
I found everything they said and even the Bible both the Old and the New Testaments inconsistent and confusing. It seemed as if God was either playing a game or he had multiple personality disorder.
In child psychology, they say that if parents are not consistent, children will grow feeling fear, a lack of trust and will develop emotional disorders. Here I am with a God that was not consistent.
On one hand, a Christian was expected to be God fearing. On the other hand, we had to love the mean and scary God they tried to drill in my head.I grew up in fear. Love does not coexist with fear. I learned that in real life through much suffering. I seemed to have one God and they seemed to have another God.
I resisted the God they drilled in my head. If their God was the real God, the God I met in my dream did not exist. I knew I had to believe in God’s love. I kept trying to latch on to the God I met.
I was learning God’s expectations, the do’s and do not’s of living the life of a newly baptized Christian. It was a nightmare. It did not add up. As I learned more and more, what I was taught seemed inconsistent and confusing. Let me give you an example.
I was divorced for over seventeen years. Even before I received Baptism, I preferred to masturbate than to have a man humiliate me with mutual masturbation. I tried that. I was in relationships where I was being used for sex and I went along because it was the norm.
But it made me more and more sick of myself and the world in which I lived. The television and the sex industry had reduced me to a piece of meat that had to compete with plastic porn stars. Everywhere I looked I was told how I had to stay young looking. I had to use such and such make up to look a certain way that was sexually appealing. I had to reveal more and more of my body. I had to have the body of a porn-star. Men were more and more addicted to pornography. They hardly knew the difference between a real woman and a prostitute, who sold her body for money. It was considered normal to sleep with a guy if he bought you a dinner!
I finally stopped dating. I could not feel any pleasure in being treated like a piece of meat. It was a nightmare. It was dangerous. Finding love in this day and age seemed nearly impossible. More and more men became addicted to sex. Sex became more and more dehumanized.
I stopped dating and continued to masturbate. I was exhausted and I had had it with the dating world. I found no indication in the Bible forbidding masturbation. And it made sense to me why God did not forbid it.
But not long after I received Baptism, I was informed that Christianity forbids masturbation. I found that masturbation was a considered a Mortal Sin. So I started to wonder if I was displeasing the God I loved by masturbating. Of course, sleeping around was not an option. I did not want that. God forbids that too of course.
I also found out that Christians do not forbid gambling. How convenient for the rich, the house always wins. I kept thinking about the movie, Leaving Las Vegas. That movie reminded me of the part of the city where I was raised. In the “Why Me?” chapter, you read about how in the country I grew up in some women were practically forced in to prostitution and drugs. A section of the town I grew up in was like Las Vegas. It was designated for prostitution. Prostitutes lived there under the iron fist of pimps whose legal job it was to keep the industry running. Drugs, violent crimes and you name it happened there.
When Jesus was on Earth, he took a stand against the system that forced women into prostitution. The same society that fostered prostitution stoned them to death for it. Jesus says, “The same men who claim to be building my kingdom, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven,’ legitimize exploitation, prostitution, slavery, abuse, stealing, and organized crime. It is not consistent, is it?”
I talked with my priest about why masturbation was forbidden and gambling was allowed. I felt I was forced to have no control over my body. I could not have sex with myself. But I could be someone’s slave, as they made their own ten commandments, which says, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s slave.” It did not make any sense whatsoever.
I asked my priest why the Church considers my touching my own body, masturbating, a sin, while not considering Sin City a sin. He said the position of the Church was to allow gambling as a fun thing. I said to him that gambling was a man-made industry that conditions people’s minds to believe gambling is fun, while the house makes profits. It takes away an individual’s ability to control. I told him that the same system that made humans feel fun gambling runs organized crime, the sex industry, the cosmetic industry, prostitution, man-made fun drugs, and anything else for profits.
I told my priest that the same greedy men who convince us gambling is fun are running Sin City, a town where anything goes. Las Vegas is a city where it is normal to use humans like toilet paper and enslave them. I told him that people are exploited, addicted, robbed, killed, infected and abused while thinking they are having fun. The house always wins. The greedy make more and more profits. They even make us rob from one another. If you win, you are really taking your neighbor’s money. The greedy lose nothing. The greedy make more and more profit.
I told my priest, “I cannot touch my own body to release God created hormones that calm me and please me? I can have man-made pleasure that makes mega billionaires running gambling empires make billions more while children in Haiti eat mud patties? It was not making any sense at all. All these religious leaders claimed that they followed God’s orders. The God they followed was very inconsistent, confusing and did not add up at all.
I kept trying to follow the teaching of the Church. Like I said, it was like I was in a whirlpool. It was sucking me in deeper and deeper. I gave up masturbating. It meant after decades of having control over my body and body chemistry, I stopped having any control. I had orgasms for decades. It was not just fun. It was my body chemistry. Orgasms released chemicals that were hormonally induced. As a result, my body went into hormonal and chemical chaos.
Being premenopausal and in my mid-forties, I was literally in heat often. I never had children. My body was asking me more and more for the chemicals and hormones that naturally were produced to handle things. I disarmed my body and put it through a roller coaster. I refused to release the hormones my body was screaming for me to release to help me stay sane.
I was confused. I loved God. I wanted to please my love. I gave myself up for my love. I was going deeper and deeper in to the whirlpool. I did not feel God’s love for me. It seemed as if loving God was a one way street. I loved him anyway, even if I did not feel his love for me.
I felt I was going totally insane. I was trying to please my love, God. But I felt fear, shame and guilt. No matter how hard I tried, I could not feel God’s love for me.I grew ever more chemically chaotic. I became ever more confused, anxious, helpless, hopeless and depressed. I was sleepless. I would awake in the middle of the night in sweat with my heart beating out of my chest. I started to drink whisky every two hours all night to get some sleep. My body and my mind was screaming and struggling. I was pulled deeper and deeper in to the man-made whirlpool.
I love the Blessed Mother. I love and adore her. But the Rosary required me to pray the same prayer to her about fifty times a day. “Hail Mary full of grace, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” They were saying we had to even ask her “to save us from the fires of hell.”
I was telling Blessed Mother fifty times every day that I was born infected with a curse called “sin.” I had to beat myself up as cursed among women, every time I said, “Blessed are you among women.” I had to consider myself a worthless piece of meat that was “born a sinner.” If that does not make you afraid of God, what does? Why would a loving and good God do this to us? It did not make sense. It was inconsistent. It was confusing. My head was spinning faster and faster.
In the “ Why Me?” chapter, you read that I was not born wanted. I was an accident and unwanted even when I was in the womb. When I found God, I thought he loved and wanted me, like a parent, unconditionally. He was the one who went most obviously against my mother’s attempts to abort me. I was born alive and healthy against all odds. But I am finding myself telling my beloved, Blessed Mother, that “I was a mistake,” born in a curse called, “sin.”
I had to tell the Blessed Mother that I was born a flawed, cursed, and doomed woman in sin and death, abandoned by God. I was telling the Blessed Mother, I am not even worthy to pray to the God that most intently and intentionally went against my mother’s will to abort me to bring me in to this world. I had to ask the Blessed Mother to intercede for me.
I thought I was a reject, rejected by God and my biological mother from the moment I was conceived. That was supposed to be what I prayed to the Blessed Mother about every day until “the hour of my death.” So my life was terrible, and my eternity is at best, going to be with a God that cannot stand me.
On and off, I wondered if they lied to me. I tried to make sense of it all. According to religious leaders, the Blessed Mother’s son, Jesus, suffered and died in vain. Meanwhile, his mother listens to billions of humans, fifty times a day, say to her that the bloody and bruised son she held dead in her arms did not die in love and for the love he felt for all humanity. She has to listen to billions of humans every day telling her that they feel guilt and shame and fear the possibility of burning in the fires of hell for all eternity. In other words, we accused the Blessed Mother’s son and the son’s father of being sadistic and cruel.
Do not take me wrong. It was not only the Catholic Church, the other churches and television Evangelists milked the phrase, “Fear God.” They too continued to scare their congregation with Original Sin and milked it. They too told their congregation how to play a clever game with the God of Fear. They preached how to become prosperous by bribing God. They robbed their followers. They told their congregation that they were “anointed” and favored to intercede for the congregation to the scary God. Then they asked for money. They pretended to be living saints, while filling their pockets and living high.
They went around the world filling the ears of men and women, who in most parts did not even read and write, with a God they made in their own image, and made people believe they were feeding the poor. They told their congregations that God made the rich and the poor. They told their congregations that God wants them, the living saints, the preachers, to be rich!
I was born and raised in a Muslim country and I had to listen to how hard it was to please God. I was taught to Fear God because I was born a sinner. I was told to feel guilt, shame and fear. I refused to believe in the God they tried to teach me. But when I became a Christian I heard the same horrifying stories about God. I figured the people who believe in the God of Abraham are all about guilt, shame, fear and the fires of hell.
Jesus came to me in my dream after four decades. He was love. So I became a Christian. But I had just gone around in a circle, and found myself expected to believe in the same scary God I rejected for over four decades. There seemed to be two gods. It did not make sense any other way. I was getting sucked in to a world of fear, guilt and shame.
It reminded me how the country I was raised in went around in a big circle. I was left posttraumatic living in world of fear under a greedy and bloodsucking tyrant. Tens of thousands died and more were left permanently disabled and injured, in protests that finally forced the dictator to leave the country. But the nation did not go forward. Its people just took a big full circle and were back to being, oppressed again.
I had to watch our world suffering in wars that had become religious. It is like the religious crusades, and violence in the name of God never stopped since 2,000 years ago. The greedy are using the God card as usual, to steal. The vast majority of the human race is living at war, or starving in poverty. Children and women are traded in countries and across the borders. They are used as sex slaves. Everything has become ever more objectified.
I felt so demoralized, hopeless, doomed and afraid. Life on Earth seemed to be a living nightmare. I became increasingly anxious and depressed.I kept trying to connect with and to stay connected with Jesus in a love relationship. The God I met in my dream was loving, kind, helpful, caring, gentle, understanding and giving. I needed him. But I had lost connection with him. He seemed gone.
Something was wrong. There were two different Gods. But the man-made God was in my face and drilled in my head everywhere. I resisted it with all my might. But I was in a whirlpool, sucked deeper and deeper, in fear, as the God of Love faded away.
I tried to do what the Church preached. I was told it was possible to be perfect. I was told God wanted us to be perfect. Of course, nobody really knew what perfect was. I had tried that earlier in my life and failed. Remember, I became obsessive-compulsive as a child when I tried to be perfect to change the world and to find a way to cope with it. I surely failed. I did not find perfection. Instead I crashed.
I was told we had to overcome the effects of original sin because humans were born sinners. They also told me that I had to try to be so perfect I was as white as snow. I went at it. I restlessly tried. The more I tried, the more I realized I was as stained as mud.
I could not save myself. I realized that I made a pledge I could not keep. I had told Jesus I wanted all of us, all humanity, to go home to him, our Loving God and parent. I did not want to leave anyone behind. But according to all the religions, it was impossible to please God. And it was impossible for all humanity to be a loving family with God. It seemed as if God did not love.
As I told you before, what I learned about television Evangelists was scary. According to them, my dead parents were already in hell, since they were not saved Christians. And all those around me who were not Christians and the vast majority of the world that was not Christian were all doomed.
The Evangelists on television said, “We are building the Kingdom.” How could humans build “God’s Kingdom?” Are we not born sinners? Why would God have a bunch of infected and born sinners build his kingdom?!
It made me remember the self proclaimed “king,” the dictator that was most selfish and cruel, where I grew up. God was supposed to be a mean king. Was God a “Dictator”?! And why would a very picky God like that allow and let bunch of born sinners to build him a kingdom? I was like a chicken with its head cut off. I was dizzy and confused.
Listening to men saying that God was going to burn all those who were not Christian or good enough, in the fires of hell for all eternity, made me posttraumatic. It was devastating to me. I grew up under the claws of a brutal dictator. My life was already traumatic and tragic because of that. Having to hear that God is even more brutal than the dictator I grew up with blew my mind. I felt I was involved with a God that was cruel. He kept reminding me of the dictator, but worse.
All the Christians on television, in church and around claimed they were building the kingdom. Muslims claimed they were doing God’s plan. Jews claimed they had God’s authority. The world was bloody. The wars they waged were never going to end. This world was looking darker and darker. I felt ever more confused, afraid and demoralized.
I became more and more posttraumatic. I was confused. It seemed I had lost the God I met in my dream. I doubted that he existed. But I loved God. But they claimed he was mean, even meaner than the dictator I grew up with. It reminded me of the trauma and tragedies I lived with for eighteen years under the rule of the bloody tyrant. I was having nightmares. I could not sleep.
Not long after my Baptism, I began to work in an agency that was a nightmare by itself. I was in deep. I had to work a nightmare for a job while going through all that I just explained.I tried to do all that my employer told me to do at the job in order to please God. I was on a mission to be perfect the only way the God wanted me to be. I made myself believe it was possible. I wanted to believe that he loved me and that it was possible to be perfect. Otherwise, he did not love.
After about a month of working, my boss said to me, “You’re a very good and good hearted person. You must be taken ad