The Ecstasy of St. Brittany

and other joys of a Jesus year

Dearest Friends,

It was my 34th birthday yesterday. I have outlived Jesus.

Your Jesus year, your 33rd, is supposed to be the time of fulfillment, a crescendo of the work of your prime years, the apex of your being. It is a time of sacrifice, giving, to the point of ego death.

This past year I took ecstasy time to time, a drug first named and popularized by Christians in Texas in the 1980s. Early in the morning on mother’s day, I walked out of a dank club in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, my feet aching and hot, pupils wide, taking in the fresh sunlight and smartly dressed families on their way to church. 

I used to be one of those little children who was gussied up and dragged to church half asleep and kept awake by the punishingly hard pews and loud hymns. My parents met at a Christian youth group. My dad I know was getting his degree in theology at Central Missouri Baptist Bible College, while my mom was studying finance at a state school close by. He wanted to be an academic theologian; he told me he wanted to look like the pictures of the authors of his textbooks, with their long, gray under eye bags induced from studying the bible by lamplight into the night. My mother said she just wanted to be a preacher’s wife, with their homely duties. It took years of prying but they finally admitted that I had been conceived out of wedlock, and they married quickly (but still with some fanfare) to hide it–this primal sin would have precluded them from their aspirations. 

It is unbelievable that these two could have had any affection for each other, let alone fucked. You cannot imagine two more diametrically opposed people. My dad fell out with the church almost immediately after I was born, and they moved back to St. Louis where he worked as a delivery man for Dominos and my mom looked after me in our little shack on the side of the six lane road that didn’t even have a working refrigerator (the first winter of my life we kept our food in a cooler on the porch). My first memory is of my dad throwing a jar of coins at my mom, which missed her and landed in the door–a cheap, hollow door, so that the jar plowed through the first thin sheet of plywood, and then fell inside. My second memory is of trying to pull out the coins from the hole the next day, but they were already gone. Those are also my only memories of them together.

My dad got a certificate in copyediting and an entry level job at a medical textbook publishing company. He moved a dilapidated apartment next to an excellent public elementary school in the city. My mom remarried quickly to a client of my aunt’s at Great Clips. I think I only met him once before I was a flower girl at their wedding. We went to his apartment in a boxy complex, furnished with black marble tables and a waterbed, and ate corndogs dipped in his “special sauce” (ketchup and mustard). I was uncomfortable. My mom said we were to spend the night. She went into the bedroom and I shivered, confused, on the couch. He worked in IT. One of the first to do it I imagine. He had a cell phone, a plastic gray block that he kept in a hip holster. They moved in together a week after they got married, to a small house in the suburbs. 

Rich, my stepfather, nearly died four months later. He was driving his motorcycle when he was sideswiped by a truck running a red light. All of his ribs were broken. His arm was ripped off. They were able to reattach it, but it never worked the same way. He had been the drummer in his church’s band–but no more. With the settlement money, they bought a nicer house even further away from the city. On impulse, they got a dog from some medical students my mom knew–by this point she had gotten a job as an accountant at Washington University’s hospital–a sweet little border collie I named Raja. We would sneak out of their house at night when I couldn’t sleep (most nights), and pee together into the large lawn by moonlight. Rich told me he had a key to my room so I needn't bother locking it. He raged at my mom, who would retaliate by grabbing his tender healing arm, which made him crumple in pain.

It was at this house when I received my first and only message from God. We were watching The Prince of Egypt, the Dreamworks animated film about the life of Moses. I was ten. I swear, right when Moses’s staff hit the water to part the Red Sea, Rich’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, and his body flapped and flailed like a fish out of water. I calmly went to our phone–installed in the kitchen wall, with a long curly cord, the plastic smooth and beige as vanilla pudding–and called 911. When the paramedics arrived, my mom tried to guide him to them, but he kept wandering back to her, eyes wide and arms outstretched, like a lost and bewildered child. I knew then that he was the devil. 

Rich got addicted to painkillers. When his prescriptions ran out, he forged them. I don’t know how else he got them. He hated me. Raja was gone one day and never came back. I fantasized about killing him, slipping poison into his ear while he slept, even though the bible said that even thought of murder was a sin. I would sit in my closet with the door closed reading my bible held in a slipcase embroidered with kittens, a gift from Rich’s parents. They also gave me a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I found a little dull compared to the glamorous chaos of the bible (though later I would discover the glory of C.S. Lewis’s in Til We Have Faces, my favorite novel still). On Sundays we all went to church. I was intimidated by the youth group, and other children in general, so I stayed upstairs with the adults, dancing with them in a modern circular frenzy. It was then that I felt most connected to God. I asked my mom if I could be baptized. She said no, but I could get my ears pierced at the mall instead (so I did). My mom was 33. I still have no idea how much my dad knew. When things got violent, I called him to get me but I don’t remember us talking about it. He took me to a lecture by a Buddhist monk, and asked the monk what the point of living would be if we had no attachments. He was 34.

DJs don’t really do that much worth looking at. Yet, for the most part, everyone faces the booth. You usually can’t even see past the throng of bodies to see the DJ. So why do we turn to them? Eris Drew–a DJ hugely important to me over the past year–talks in this fantastic interview about rave and religion, and the concept of the Mother Beat. I won’t attempt to paraphrase–you should really just read it. But I will include what she says about this magnetic force:

I want all power emanating from a single source. So the speakers should be as close to the DJ as possible, like two monoliths flanking the medium. Ravers dance to the speakers, not just the DJ. The sound is critical. It is the carrier wave into the Other. Our conduit to rapture.

I saw a documentary about amish kids on rumspringa that has stuck in my mind for decades. The young girls go to a club for the first time. They’re frightened, as one might imagine, but the cause shocked me: one said that she could feel the beat in her body telling her to dance.

I believe that if God gave us anything special, it is our ability to think. I realized this year that my greatest joy, my reason for being, is to think. Everything I do is in service to this wild freedom. On the dance floor, I am a string puppet, a body controlled by a mysterious force so that my mind may dance on its own. It has an elegance that far surpasses what my body is capable of. It glides so smoothly from one thought to the next, slipping through associations, pirouetting, leaping. I like to close my eyes, unaware of the movements my body is making, as I watch my mind, this glorious, precious, inexplicable thing, intimate and unknowable to me as a friend, and feel its energy connected to every living being in the room like many beads of dew on a spider’s web. 

I could listen to music alone in my house. But it really isn’t the same. We listen to music in groups to lose ourselves. We do it to surrender, bodies collectively giving themselves to the music, the sound as surprising and recognizable as a heartbeat, and in doing so, melt into one selfless entity. 

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an anchoress, boxed up, solitary and devoted. When I was older, I learned that many medieval women became anchoresses to avoid marriage. I am stubborn, independent, and afraid of obligation to others. I struggle to disassociate loving sacrifice and devotion from a jail sentence, although I’m trying. Stability is a bit sickening, like the spinning nausea that comes from standing on dry land after a long time at sea. 

This past year, Boris, with whom I’ve been in a relationship for nearly six years, and I filed for domestic partnership with the city. It’s not marriage. It’s not a big deal. But still, the day wasn’t going as I imagined. We were running late to the courthouse. I was wearing my glasses and no make up. I had forgotten to make a dinner reservation. On the train, I was throwing one of my characteristic fits, whining and whatnot. Boris said, gently but firmly, do you want to cancel? Really, we can reschedule it so it can be the way you wanted. That shut me up. We filled out our paperwork, and had a great time. We took a few blurry pictures with my polaroid camera before it broke, and then talked about finally getting our finances together, over some outrageously overpriced cocktails. It was a wonderful day.

We haven’t told our families. I stopped talking to my mom this year, although our relationship already barely existed. Still, this mother’s day, through my hangover I felt guilty as a puppy as I pretended like she didn’t exist. The last time I saw her, in 2016, she was yelling about immigrant rapists and Benghazi on the way to church on Christmas Eve. I asked her what country Benghazi was in but she didn’t know. I asked her if she had finally left Rich to protect me and she said, without hesitation or shame, no, she did it for herself. She even repeated herself. A woman sang a hymn so painfully broken and off-key that I had to dig my nails into my thighs to keep from laughing. As we left, my aunts all agreed that it was a lovely service. 

For many, many years I didn’t want to live. No one said a thing. Each day I survived was only an act of cowardice–never taking the razor deep enough, stopping short on pills. But suicide felt intrinsically inevitable, even if it were to happen at an old age (to a child, 33 is old). 

Jesus knew that he would die because his father demanded it. He let it happen. He accepted Judas’s kiss, even if he later cried to his father, asking why, why, why have you forsaken me? as his mother Mary watched. His stepfather, Joseph, was absent. The last time Jesus had heard from Joseph was a bland card and a $20 bill congratulating him on graduating from high school. Jesus wrote a letter back, saying that he forgave Joseph. Mary told Jesus that Joseph read it and wept.

What if Jesus had said…no thank you? Get some other human woman pregnant, you pervert, and leave me alone to make furniture. Settle down with Mary, the other one. No children of our own but still much to do. I feel that I’ve only just begun. 

I’m sorry God, I love you, but I’d really rather live,

Brittany