I don’t exactly know how I tripped into friendship with Jesus. Was there a catalyst? Probably a few. All I really know is that after I read the gospels, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus. He felt extremely disturbing, in a way that was attractive, beautiful, and somehow familiar. That sense haunted me until I fell to my knees praying, talking to Jesus. I gave in, and we quickly became best friends.

I let that friendship carry me into the church. I wanted to know people who loved him – who encountered this same love and power. Yet every time I stumbled into a new church, I found myself feeling out of place. It was more than not being white, or me not being used to evangelical culture (and later mainline/liberal Christian culture) – but it seemed like a different Jesus than the one I knew. I kept going, committed to the idea that God was meant to be communally known and experienced. I often felt alone, but I also felt the Spirit sojourning with me, also looking for a home.

I knew about the power of the Holy Spirit ever since I met Jesus. It felt like Jesus introduced me to the Spirit, and to the breadth of the Godhead. The Spirit woke up in me as soon as I reached for friendship with Jesus. Those early prayers were always intense. I felt the Spirit of God penetrate my heart, and my body vibrated and shook. The Spirit to me was always tender, full of mercy, but also deeply confrontational. She was always beckoning me into crises – into knowing her love deeper, and being changed by it. Being wooed into repentance, and dared into sacrifice.

Even before joining a charismatic fellowship, I began babbling like a baby in praise, speaking in new tongues, involuntarily shouting and twitching – all because God’s affection. When I got a pair of keys to my church, I’d come in late at night to run the aisles, and lay out on the altar, rolling and laughing in the Spirit. God’s love was gloriously, hilariously overwhelming. Eventually, I discovered that charismatics loved God like I loved God. They also loved serenading Jesus with cheesy songs, and giving him big, lofty, weird compliments. To them, Church was about worship, adoring God, and letting love move among us as she pleased. Church was about getting “wrecked,” as people put it. Devastated by God’s love.

But I couldn’t stay there. Though adorers of the Spirit, these churches were no exception to the patterns of institutional Christianity. They quenched the Spirit of the living God with their need for theological orthodoxy. Not only that, but they acted as if their work of oppressing others was the same ministry of Christ. They cast spirits of homosexuality out of me, and eventually that absurd notion made me crack. Like the rest of Christendom, the charismatics ultimately always choose the spirit and powers of the world over the Spirit of God.

Deconstructing notions of orthodoxy and evangelical piety wasn’t difficult for me. It never felt natural to me, or true. It always felt oppressive and satanic. Having left behind the Church for several years now, I can see more clearly why I had to leave. Being exorcised of these doctrines and even politics led me into a freer, truer, more faithful friendship with Jesus. I was done with the Church completely, even in its more progressive conceptions, when I realized their god too often ended up being Satan.

Nowadays, I don’t know if the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus really happened. In fact, the notion to me seems a bit antithetical to the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus. These things abolished the dominating, transcendent notion of god, and made god with us, in us, essential to life itself. But I know the resurrection of Jesus, daily. I know that he still lives, having accompanied many throughout history into the Spirit, and into a love that demands action. He is still a wise friend, walking with any seeking liberation. Is he god? I don’t care. I don’t care if that means I’m not a Christian. I care about my friendship with Jesus, though – so much that I have to wage war against the church.