i wasn't raised especially religious. i was never baptized, and can only remember attending christmas mass
as a sort of suburban formality. still, it's hard to imagine i've been completely unaffected by the french-catholicism
and irish-protestantism that underscored my parents' childhoods.


but my interest in christianity has never really been tied to guilt or fear or a particular work ethic. it has largely been a fascination with power: how it is exerted, maintained, abused. how the church continues to function as patriarchal authority and ultimate arbiter of morality. how it has never existed separately from the state throughout the entire history of its colonial rule. how war and subjugation and death are the unnatural but inevitable endpoints of such unfettered institutional domination.


that being said, i am equally interested in how power is surrendered willingly before the divine. in suffering as an act of devotion; spiritual enlightenment through self-mortification. in the way i have knelt before a lover in something that can only be described as reverence and in the way that being desired is the closest i've felt to godhood.