Hello everyone.
I hope that some of you can bear with me and take the time to read this, as I try to get all the details straight and include everything relevant.
I’m struggling to come to Christ fully. And I am wondering if anyone here can offer insight, or if anyone has had similar experiences to me.
My life has been a strange journey that I am trying to make sense of. Right now I am at a place of finding myself drawn to Christianity, but still having a lot of resistance, for multiple reasons which I’ll go into. But mostly just that I don’t know if I can ever fully believe in Jesus or the Bible, even though part of me wants to, and I’ve always believed that God is there.
Warning - some of this might be a bit intense to read.
------
So let’s try to summarise how I got here.
I was born into a Presbyterian family in Northern Ireland. If you know anything about my country, you will know about its history of religious and political conflict.
My mother was atheist/non-religious but my grandparents took me to church in my early years. When I was 7, I decided I didn’t want to go anymore. My reasoning was because I disliked Sunday School – it just felt like another day of school, and I didn’t much care for being taught to memorise answers in the catechism word for word, to get a reward of a gold star…
I guess even at that age I knew there was not much spiritual about that.
I also have a vivid memory of, around the same age or maybe even younger, being alone in the bathroom of my grandparent’s house.
I was angry at God and cursing him, telling him I hated him. I don’t remember what made me so angry.
I had a somewhat conflictual childhood… I witnessed and was subjected to sectarian violence, and heard my grandparents arguing a LOT.
I never knew my father and felt unwanted a lot of the time. Lots of other little things added up and led to me suffering from depression, anxiety and self-harm as I got older.
I grew up seeing this conflict and violence in my household and country, and decided both religion and politics were useless, so had no interest in either. But, my mother had a few books on the occult, and tarot cards. She never seemed massively into them and didn’t practise anything as far as I know.. but as I became a teenager I thought they looked cool and kept them in my room, even if I didn’t really read them properly..
My mum was always into alternative music, so that became my thing and in my teens I built my identity around being part of various subcultures… skater, goth, hippie, punk – I transfomed myself between them all, shifting between identities like a chameoleon… never sticking with one. I still struggle with maintaining a stable social identity to this day. I’ll get interested in one, obsess over it, then lose interest.
I don’t want that to happen if I come to Christ….
So...
I started to smoke Cannabis every single day from the age of 14. I started to experiment with more drugs and psychedelics and started to read online about spirituality and different theories about the nature of existence.
I was interested in a lot of things but never really knew what was true. I called myself an agnostic because I thought there must be some kind of supernatural explanation for the experiences some people were having, and saw flaws in hard-line materialism and atheism. I started searching for those spiritual experiences myself, using psychedelics to try and achieve them, although really I was using them in a hedonistic, careless way.
The subculture I later became part of was the Psytrance music scene. I learned to DJ and played music at festivals to lots of drugged up hippies, believing I was sharing with them a part of myself and my soul by choosing songs which had given me a spiritual experience. I formed my new identity around this, creating an alternative pseudonym for myself as all the other DJs did.
But my depression and anxiety never went away. I went through a long string of chaotic intimate and sexual relationships, most of which ended terribly. I was emotionally destroyed, and I kept trying to fix it with more drugs. Eventually, this all led to me having an extremely bad trip on acid, where I had a full-blown panic attack and couldn’t sleep for over 24 hours. I know that during this trip I saw the devil, and went to Hell, but I don’t remember what it looked like. I just know that it happened. Maybe I blocked it from my memory.
You would think an experience like this would cause me to want to stop... But I kept trying to smoke weed even though it made me feel like I was going back into that mental state.
About 9 months later, I was at a festival, on the dance floor at 7am, with all these people dancing around me. They had been awake all night dancing, and looked so happy. I remember watching them and thinking it was so beautiful and how spiritual it felt knowing the DJ had, like me, chosen every track especially to impart some kind of beautiful experience on to everyone else there, chosen from his own heart. His DJ name was ‘Alien Angel’.
Then, I took a smoke of a pipe and everything changed. I looked on the ground and saw a flyer for another festival, with a DJ inside a pyramid. A thought popped into my head which said “that looks evil”, and I went on a path of thinking that maybe everything around me that I thought seemed so beautiful was actually evil, and a trick dressed up by Satan as being spiritual, but which was actually demonic. I had this overwhelming sense that he was trying to lift our souls up onto a pedestal, a place where he would more easily be able to catch them.
I didn’t know where these thoughts were coming from. I had never really had much thoughts about Satan and never really read much about him. So I basically just decided that I had given myself a semi-psychotic episode from the bad acid trip, and the weed was triggering it again. The whole time I was having these thoughts about Satan, I also had this ability to observe them and think “these are not normal thoughts to be having. I must be losing my mind”. But.. now I think, if I was really losing my mind, wouldn’t I have just believed the thoughts at the time without questioning them?
After that, the thoughts about Satan stayed with me for a months. I started watching videos online about how the New Age movement was demonic, and saw so many things within the psytrance/hippie scene which seemed to be linked to that. I started to fear that maybe the whole thing was evil and that trance music was just a way to hypnotise people to steal their souls.
Eventually… the thoughts went away a little. But.. I ended up getting involved in the occult. I stopped doing drugs – but I still had a yearning for spiritual experience. I started to believe that maybe all consciousness was one, and the experience of that was what God is.
I joined a Thelemic occult order and believed that their initiation program was one of spiritual and personal development, a system to garner full control over the self (even though as I later found out, many of the people who are drawn to these groups are most certainly not in full control of themselves).
I believed their community was where I belonged, so now this was my identity - a Thelemite/Pagan/occultist. I became obsessed, I started reading as much as I could, bought so many books, magical tools etc… tried various practices - everything from Shamanism, Wicca, Qabbalah, to chaos magick…. and then finally ended up at Satanism and the left-hand path. I still had my fears about Satan, but I believed that if I could let all of that go and embrace Satanism I would be cured from my ‘psychosis’, which I told myself came from my religious upbringing and indoctrination (even though I was never really indoctrinated and freely chose to stop attending church at age 7!!).
I joined a Satanic sect online. Began their process of initiation. I didn’t believe Satan was real, that he was only an archetype, he only stood for illumination, individualism, anti-nomianism and self-deification. Yet I still prayed to Cernunnos who I believed was the Celtic equivalent, a harmless deer headed god, my adopted “father”, whose symbols I saw synchronised everywhere and believed he was guiding, leading and protecting me.
Everything I read by left-hand path authors seemed to resonate with me more strongly than anything ever had read before. I realised – I thought – that I had been a Satanist all my life. That little girl who told God she hated him was enacting a purely Satanic act! I remembered that I had written a fictional story all about Satan when I was only 10 – of course! I had always been in the Satanic consciousness and just didn’t know it! It all seemed to make so much sense. I was a natural born Luciferian and I needed to accept it, I told myself. I needed to embrace the dark one (an archetype, I told myself) so that I could be free, finally.
So now, that was my new identity – a left-hand path occultist/Satanist/Luciferian.
I thought I had finally found out what my identity was. For a while.
My anxiety and depression got worse and worse. I changed my living circumstances and became socially isolated, which I told myself was part of my LHP initiation, as it is supposed to throw negative things at you in order to make you stronger. I was self harming worse than I ever had in my life. I became horribly paranoid that my boyfriend was interested in someone else, and said crazy nasty things to him that I later regretted. I would get episodes where I felt like something else took over me and caused me to do things which triggered my anxiety. I eventually had to be put on antidepressant medication for a year, (which has seemingly, now two years later, permanently killed half of the nerve endings in my genitalia).
On and on it went. Until finally… I changed my living situation to something a bit better, and stopped practising the occult. I did the odd ritual, but it gradually dissipated. I still had a little altar, and met with other pagans a few times, trying to keep my belief in it alive. But I think maybe I scared myself too much and didn’t want to do anything further in case it made me feel worse.
Where I’m at now…. I feel lost and confused. I want God.
Philosophically, rationally even, I don’t think this universe is empty and meaningless. I don’t think morality is subjective and relative. I don’t think we are meat machines.
I want to be spiritually connected. The small amount of positive experiences I did have in my practises at least showed me what can be possible.
This past year, I met my new boyfriend online, and he is of the Eastern Orthodox faith. Talking with him has made me think about it more and more. Now I am watching a lot of testimonies on Youtube of people who were into the New Age and similarly to me, found it to be demonic. Is there a pattern here?
But…. I still have a lot of resistance to having a literal belief in Jesus Christ and the Bible. I can’t reconcile it with my knowledge of science and evolution which seems to explain so much. I have so many questions about things which don’t make sense in the Bible, and things like knowing which denomination of Christianity is the true one. I am at the moment drawn to Celtic Christianity, because I feel that is part of my heritage. So maybe I should start there.
I’m scared that I’ve been brainwashed for too long with moral relativism and postmodern ideas about the maleability of reality to actually believe in something objective, and that if it is all true, I will never be saved. That maybe I sold my soul to Satan even though I thought I didn’t really believe in him.
It’s terrifying.
But at the same time, I don’t want to believe just to get rid of my fear, like I did with the occult. I don’t want it to just be another temporary identity that I will get bored of and throw away eventually, ending up even more lost and empty inside.
If I come to Christ, I want to really, truly and fully come to him, not in some superficial way.
But it will mean throwing away so much of my life… I still have pagan friends that are very close to me, and I still have books about other religions. I am an artist and I draw art which often deals with dark, ungodly themes…. And I’m trying to make a career out of it because I have nothing else to fall back on. I come from a poor working class family, so I am scared that if I don’t make something from my talent, I will die poor. But if I keep drawing dark things, will God punish me?
I have prayed, and asked Jesus and God to come into my life, and to help me see the truth…. To help me to believe. I am just waiting, and I will try to be patient. I am just afraid that I have damned myself already, and can never have a true relationship with God, that relationship I have always searched for.
