How Did I Get Here?

This is a record of my return to something that had been present and persistent in my life long before I could name it.

Naturally, I’m glossing over quite a bit in this recount. I will likely revisit parts of this in depth in later writings. But, for now……

I was not raised in Christianity. My earliest understanding of the divine came through a Bavarian panentheistic spirituality; the world felt alive with Presence; everything breathed. I did not yet know the Holy Spirit, yet I recognized Him in wind, in silence, in the strange clarity that sometimes came before sleep, a bird overhead, or a sheep’s laugh. My first experiences of God were wordless and elemental.

From childhood, I dreamed dreams that did not feel like dreams. Some of these dreams were gentle, some terrifying, some offering me mercy, and some ending in sleep paralysis. These experiences silhouetted my interior life.

When I was about six or seven, I dreamed of Jesus wrapping me in white, then placing a crown of flowers on my head. He put his hand on my forehead, then disappeared. In that dream, I knew he would return once I was older. I spoke of this dream to some abusive elders and I was laughed at, mocked. I was told that I was already bruised, already preyed upon, already marked, so I could not also belong to God. Why would Jesus have a rape victim as his own? A nun? Where was God when I was being abused?

In adolescence and early adulthood, the visions did not stop, only intensifying. As I grew older, I encountered religion in ways that only strayed me further from Christ. The mormon neighbors heard of my dreams and began inviting me to their temple in Münich, protestants to their Tennesseean churches. I saw their cheap practices, their lack of reverence and spiritual dishonesty only deepened my distrust. Their behavior repelled me. Their God seemed thin. Their God seemed dark and untrue. The fruits of their faith were spoiled, rotten, and what they preached directly contradicted their actions. I wanted nothing to do with it, though this longing remained a weeping wound needing attention.

At an early age, I was taught how to remote view. After enduring even more trauma, I began to pursue it more deliberately, instead of accidentally “viewing” through a learned reflex, and considered it for work. It was a door I opened without understanding what stood behind it. The more I practiced, the more I felt something was wrong, yet I did not attribute it to the remote viewing.

Eventually, something I was observing turned and looked back at me. It is difficult to describe the horror of being seen by what has no face nor definitive form. It followed me. I could feel its presence in any room, watching me, as if someone was standing right before me. My sleep became sparse. Food tasted like ash. Meat became especially grotesque and human. I felt lost, hollow.

Yet, even in that darkness, there were beautiful dreams I could not explain: visions of Mary Magdalene in a cave, then of Mother Mary stepping on a snake, even before I knew who they were.

Becoming increasingly more afraid of this “thing” following me, I met palm-reader who looked at the scars on my hands and told me to go to a Catholic Church. When I finally went to Mass, I did not arrive healed. I did not arrive certain. I arrived followed, hunted, exhausted, cracked open, and still convinced I was beyond repair.

Catholics left a sour taste in my mouth. I had seen and heard of many scandals within the Church, and was concerned that I was entering a house of senseless hate, people who sympathized with abusers, and people who silenced victims.

Still, I recognized His Presence immediately, the same man from my dreams. Intuitively, I knew I was seeing His flesh. It is was not symbolic. The “thing” following me fretted and feared, I was sweating and crying, yet He did not recoil. I could not continue living the way I was.

I shaved my head soon after, guided by a quiet, interior certainty. I am not “symbolically” bald as the Eucharist is not symbolically Christ, and cutting my hair was not penitence. Shaving my head was a blind trusting of these peaceful visions I was being given.

They say psychic abilities are stored in hair, and while the spiritual pressure did not vanish instantly, the watching presence loosened. The dreams shifted entirely. Light began to break in. Slowly, a different way of living began to show itself to me. Minute by minute, then hour by hour, now day by day.

This is the story I am still in the middle of. It is not tidy nor linear, and far from finished, but turned unmistakably toward God.