That Your Days May Be Long by Megan Hustad - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics:
On occasion the subject would come up. My evangelical background. Wow, flushed faces at parties leaned in to ask, what was it like growing up with adults so hooked on fairy tales?
My ability to quickly change the subject eventually outstripped my
embarrassment, but not before I had internalized every critique of what
faith in God now signified in America: intolerance, sanctimony,
tut-tutting over Hollywood and the welfare office, a yawning void where
curiosity and compassion could be.
But when I felt led to a conversational place wherein I was expected
to confirm that everyone who takes part in the rituals of organized
religion drags their knuckles on their way to stoning the town slut, I
would stop. I couldn’t. That I would have to drop the word “soul” from
my vocabulary I hadn’t expected. Sometimes a day delivered snatches of
the Sermon on the Mount and I pictured the sermon as my father might,
with Jesus sounding suspiciously like Alan Rickman. Jesus is up on a
hill, surrounded by supporters, sweat pooling in the smalls of their
backs, sun glinting off distant low-slung roofs.