Nine of Swords

A Nightmare and Interpretation

Photo by Artur Adilkhanian on Unsplash

There was a pervasive sense of fear, the knowledge that there was something or someone, perhaps along the lines of a pantheon of gods or an alien race, that was able and eager to strike anyone dead at any moment for the slightest offense. Everyone around me had long ago accepted this fact, and the details of daily life had molded themselves around it, the rules which must not be broken becoming increasingly specific and minute.

Was my faith really ever this paranoid, this focused on rule-following, this unconvinced of the breadth and length and height and depth of love?

Yes. It was in the closet, where I felt varying degrees of certainty that God was looking for any reason to toss me into hell and watch me burn. But even in the years afterward, in the long convalescence that was my deepening of faith, it was in the background. I still feel it some days: a dark apprehension, waiting for the other (divine) shoe to drop and crush me beneath its weight.

I was walking outside, breathing in the winter chill, with a knit hat in my hand. People walking past looked up and their eyes widened; they stumbled and rushed over to me. With terror in their eyes, they urged me to put my hat on before something terrible happened. I knew somehow that to keep my head uncovered would be to risk punishment from the sky-dwelling things, and quickly put it on, feeling thankful I was reminded.

This kind of ceaseless anxiety flickering in the back of my mind was stoked by plenty of people who were either just as anxious as I was or who did not fully understand the stress we were under (and these two kinds of people often overlapped). It was not any one person; it was a whole system that reinforced that undercurrent of fear. Without this fear, where would my faith be?

I recognize that much of this uneasiness derived its power from the trials and tribulations of adolescence, all those normal and natural worries about discovering who I was, standing out, and fitting in. But it is striking to me now to think about the over-sized role of hell in it all. Why did my feeling of being different, or worrying about being misunderstood, lead so quickly to the sense that God was angry with me or apathetic? Why was it so easy for me to dismiss the assurance I heard constantly, that God loves me?

I approached a series of freestanding arches and became paralyzed with indecision, struggling to remember which I could walk through—or if I could walk through any of them at all—without breaking one of the rules. Someone walking past approached to offer guidance, and pointed to the top of the large central arch, crowned with a cup full of needles as long as knives, like a bundle of small swords. Somehow, I knew that this meant it was safe; these tiny weapons pointed at me provided my protection.

When I finally came out for the first time as a teenager, I did not think of it as a joyous revelation of something precious, or even an ordinary description of a simple fact of my inner life, but as the confession of sin, the recognition of an ugly flaw. I chose my youth pastor for my first confidant I chose, not one of my peers—I wanted an adult, an authority figure. Although I did think of him as especially safe, what I was actually looking for was not just safety, but expertise: I wanted to learn how to be fixed, how to be changed.

That is to say, I did not want to be myself.

Coming out in that moment, and for several years afterward, felt like handing someone a weapon. I wanted something to be cut out of me, and I thought that by directing the sharpest point toward myself that I would prove my sincerity. If I could convince them that I was adequately ashamed of what I shared, I would be permitted at last to enter into belonging.

But the dream always ended before I could do so.