An Enneagram Nine goes looking for God

I pulled up and parked my car in front of that familiar old white church building. It’s a week day so it’s empty and quiet. This is the house of God. Literally, the name of this aging building is Bethel. Bethel is loosely translated house of God. It’s the place Scripture records the ancient Hebrew Jacob met with God. The place that God dwells; where he is present.  

This is the first time I am back here since I stopped attending this church over 13 years ago. In a way, I was born into this church. My dad became a pastor here when I was 2 and was still the pastor when I left it around the age of 20. He and my mom would leave soon after my departure.

It still looks the same. The fading white siding, the chipped and aged grey foundation, a grave yard with grave stones that lay flatly on the ground, needing the observer to walk near to see them. I get out of my car and I walk slowly around this place of worship.  I’m flooded with memories. Some of them are beautiful and some of them are terrible.

I lean against the side of the building and close my eyes for a better visualization of what my body is feeling. The first memories are freeze frame kinds of sensations of sounds and sights, like looking through an old photo album. Bowed heads in the moment of silence that followed after the service ended, the hushed voices praying as people sit in circles praying in the Wednesday evening prayer service, the deep bass voices of several of the older men who sat a few rows in front of me every Sunday, running around in the dark behind the church with friends after an evening service scaring each other in the grave yard; Sunday School picnics, church potlucks and ball games. These are the kind of nostalgic memories that fill me with a kind of longing for simpler times, a world coloured in easily distinguishable black and white.

But these memories are juxtaposed against other memories. These memories are darker, tinged with religious abuse and controlling narratives that will leave lasting impressions on an impressionable little boy. It’s the sweating yelling evangelist using every possible graphic image to describe hell, a place of complete rejection, all alone in a pit of raging fire, lit on fire forever and forever never to see anyone you love again just because you refused to come out of your seat at an altar call. This image comes with sounds and sensations. It’s the sound of the hymn, “Just as I am with out one plea, oh lamb of God, I come…I come”. And yet I don’t. I’m frozen to my seat with dread and terror coursing through my veins. I want to come but this God seems absolutely terrifying and full of rage at me. So on the way home, I anxiously scan the sky praying it doesn’t break open and all things good and beautiful are over for me forever. I also remember the looks on my parents faces when the meetings after church started to get more frequent and congregates would stop dad after service and we’d wait in the car for hours while he talked. It’s the feeling of confusion when friends left the church, new ones came and then leave again. I have the distinct flashback to having to hear “biblical discipline” being carried out on children that was neither biblical or discipline but straight up physical abuse, violence in the name of God.

I open my eyes and exhale slowly. These are heavy thoughts and feelings for a place where God is said to dwell. I walk slowly back to my car, get in and simply stare at the building once more.

I have another memory. I used to think I saw an angel standing behind the pastor when he preached because after awhile I would see a slight glow or halo around his head. I later learned that I have a slight astigmatism and that was probably my eyes just having a hard time refracting light.

Was God in this place? Is God in this place?

I can’t give a clear theological construction to my spiritual formation as a child. What I know to be true is that I have always had a keen awareness of God or of a transcendent reality.

I’ve wandered far and wide since my wide eyed boyhood days at Bethel. I’ve tried a couple different theological tribes, became a devoted follower of several big name pastors who have since made tragic and disastrous decisions, tried church planting and interning, seminary, and in the midst of it all, almost lost my faith entirely.

But today, I’ve come back home to this little white church where it all started to understand me a bit better and in turn maybe God.

There were distortions of God here for sure. God was mostly angry and dangerous. God loved lots and lots of rules. There was us and there was them, those on the path to hell. Often those on the path to hell even believed in the same God, they just thought differently about Paul and women, or Jesus and divorce. Women were kept subjugated and out of decision making. children suffered physical violence and trauma because adults distorted a few verses in Proverbs to fit a kind of child rearing left over from Puritan days. 

Us Enneagram nines can hold tension between two ideas pretty well. After all, we just want peace even more then clarity perhaps.

I think that’s why even amidst all the trauma, I see the beauty here at this place. I never really believed God hated me, it made me anxious as hell that I might go to hell, but when I stood by my window and looked up at the stars at night, I felt loved and held.

I love the hymns, the liturgy of ancient times that we sung every time we gathered. The same song that was used as weapon to have people come forward at altar calls also has a verse that will return to my soul in thoughts and emotions at times;

Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt
Fighting and fears within without
Oh, Lamb of God, I come, I come

Many conflicts, doubts, fears, within and without feels like an accurate description of my search to find God.

The God who seems to come to me now as I start my car and prepare to drive away from the house of God.

Lately, I’ve been returning to the God who I found at my childhood bedroom window rather than the one I feared in his supposed house.

There was a large willow tree at my window and I would watch it’s branches slowly sway in the breeze, the morning awaking me to dozens of birds singing and I would feel peace and contentment.

When I go looking for God now, I imagine him also looking for me. Like the father in the story of the Prodigal son in Luke’s gospel; waiting to show me that he is a kind of God who looks for me; desperate for me to come home; so he can throw a big party and show me just how much love he truly can lavish on me.

I’ve left the parking lot of Bethel, but I don’t think I’ve left the house of God. God has been with me in some pretty dark spaces. I’ve pulled at the threads of spiritual trauma from the institution that disconnected me from the God that was with me at my bedroom window.

And so like always, I wander and wonder, “God can I come home?”

And when I listen close enough, I think he laughs gently at the absurdity of my question and welcomes me home.

You are always loved,

Matt