Distortions of Faith
Once again, my access to meaning is through Buffy
Dear Writer,
I have a midly antagonistic relationship with the mysterious, the religious, the unexplained. I come from a tradition of preacher men; my maternal grandfather was one, and my father was one. Of course, by the time I was old enough to understand anything, my father had become an atheist. I often I wish he’d lived long enough for us to have a real conversation about that, because I’m dying to hear that story. And dying is pretty much what I’ll have to do before I hear it.
On the one hand, I feel deeply within myself that there is more about the essential truths of the universe that we don’t understand than we do. I know there’s something in ritual and faith that is one of the most authentically human experiences you can have. I also know that our natural existential dread provides a lot of opportunity for bad actors to manipulate that fear into a generator for money and power and private jets.
On the other end of the belief spectrum, New Age ideas don’t sit well with me, either. My mother was never officially diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, but I have all the markers of an adult child of a narcissist so… well, there’s that. The highly malleable nature of some New Age ways of thinking fed neatly into her delusions of grandeur.
“New Age” is itself a highly suspect classification of ideas and practices that were stolen by mid-century American culture—home of steal that shit, file off the serial number, bleach the meaning out, and make an Instagram post about it. As such, it becomes a capitalistic and essentially meaningless repackaging of ideas and practices; basically, it’s the Kraft Cheese of spirituality. That doesn’t mean that the original traditions are in themselves suspect. It’s just that my exposure to them through my mother in the 80s was not in any way genuine, in the same way that Kraft Cheese isn’t really cheese.
Now, my ambivalence about the ways in which specific people corrupt and manipulate sacred ritual and faith practices doesn’t mean that I believe there is nothing of value to be found in them. It just means that I have come to a place in my life where I feel particularly disingenuous when I engage with any of it.
Until earlier this week when I bought myself the Buffy Tarot Deck.
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This is not my first rodeo with Tarot decks. I have three decks that I’ve had for decades; two are gifts, and one was a deck I got in college. Growing up with my mother, and knowing instinctively if not consciously that the only way to connect with her was through her specialness, I learned about the Tarot and believed in the corrupted form of mysticism that my mother was promoting to support her delusions. I even based my 2007 novel The Fortune Quilt on the ideas behind the Tower1 card. The Tower was a card that came up for me a lot in those days, which made sense as I have had, throughout my life, a tendency to build tall, ornate, and rickety as fuck towers upon land that could not sustain them for long.
During the time when I was writing The Fortune Quilt, my first big tower was getting wobbly and just about ready to fall. That tower was built with warped steel made of my perception and understanding of my mother and my childhood, and the dark little fictions I had been fed about how everything that was wrong was my fault because I was inherently ugly and unlovable. Once that tower had fallen, I found myself turning away from the Tarot, which I had often turned toward for wisdom and understanding and divination while that Tower was still standing.
Over the years, I have still loved the Tarot conceptually. I respected the meaning in the cards and while I no longer believed in its ability to tell the future, I have always and without fail believed in its ability to provide insight and, more importantly, story twists.
I mean, hell, you do a reading for a character and out of nowhere the fucking 5 of Swords shows up? Damn.
But in a similar way to how I felt hollow and somewhat angry whenever I went into a church, I felt similarly when dealing with the Tarot. Even though I knew that there was wisdom in those cards, I felt hollow when I tried to use them, with only one exception; writing. Pulling a tarot card in the middle of drafting when you don’t know what to write is an amazing tool. What’s funny is that I didn’t really reject that tool so much as forget about it. It’s like the Tarot existed in a space I simply did not want to visit. I couldn’t bring myself to use them; nor could I bring myself to throw them away. So I’ve been carrying around these three decks everywhere I’ve lived, setting them on a shelf somewhere, and never, ever opening them.
Then I found out that a new Tarot deck was out; a Buffy tarot deck, and I wanted it, my precious. But I didn’t get it, not right away. Someone had told me about it, it looked amazing, I said I wanted to buy it and… I didn’t. I conveniently forgot about it, until I saw another mention of it and finally decided I should have it. I mean, I’m a Buffy scholar and so is my husband; we should have the Buffy deck.
At around the same time, Rachel Pollack died. I didn’t know a lot about Rachel, just that she was a friend of Alisa and Neil, and that she’d been ill for a while. But when she died, I discovered that this friend was the Rachel Pollack, a trail-blazing science fiction and comics writer… and a person who had written one of the most formative American texts on guess what?
The Tarot.
As I said, I am deeply ambivalent about assigning mystical meaning to anything in life but I took the opportunity to heed the significance of this particular timing and bought myself two things; the Buffy tarot deck, and a copy of Rachel’s 78 Degrees of Wisdom. Since that day, I have become mildly obsessed. I scanned each of the beautiful cards into my computer so that I still could have the amazing and pristine art even after I’d grunged it all up by shuffling and doing readings with my grubby little hands. I’m starting a Tarot journal figuring out the meaning for each of the cards as I see them. I’m doing readings for friends. I’m rusty as fuck, but it feels like finally having a drink of meaning after years of thirsting in the desert.
Some years ago, when my husband and I were still just friends, I remember him telling me that he didn’t need joy in his life because he had meaning, and I was like, “What the fuck kind of bullshit is that?” We often talk about that conversation and laugh. But as I work through all the shit I need to work through in order to be able to write again, I realize that I’ve been chasing joy and avoiding meaning. Not in my work, really; I’ve been podcasting for years finding little nuggets of meaning in stories and examining it, and that has been a great professional joy for me.
But meaning in the personal arena? I resist it. I resist the deep need within us all to connect with the things we cannot prove nor fully understand. I don’t have the strength to believe in anything that cannot be functionally proven as real, and that comes directly from having been gaslit by people who were supposed to love me for a good chunk of my life; first in my childhood, and then in an adult relationship that repeated those same reality-distorting patterns.
I like to keep my feet firmly on the ground, to know that what I know is real, and not to muck with forces that cannot be proven.
I do not fuck with faith.
Faith is an avenue for darkness to slide in and whisper in your ear, to change the shape of the world as you know it, and encourage you to build a tower on land that will not hold it. I have crashed and rebuilt two Towers based on faith in people who deeply betrayed me. I have been taught from birth not to believe myself and my own perceptions, but to trust in others who can confirm reality for me, and thus give them the power to distort my reality.
Now, I rely on what I know through my own experience. I trust no one with my sense of reality. But there are things unknown that are also known, and I miss them and crave them. And maybe now is the time when I’m safe to look at them, once again.
Maybe.
But you know what’s funny? My self card, the symbol that represents me, is the Moon. In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack says, “Remember that the Star and the Sun give off their own light, but the Moon reflects the hidden light of the Sun. The imagination distorts because it is reflecting inner experience to the outer mind.”2
In the first season of Big Strong Yes, when I was deep in the total destruction left by my second Tower falling, I quoted Brené Brown quoting the poet Mizuta Masahide: “Barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon.”
I even commissioned independent artist Christina Cooley to paint a series for me with symbols representing me and my kids, cracked but reglued with gold as in the Japanese art of kintsugi.
And you wanna see something funny?
The shadow of the Moon is a difficult place to be. It’s hard, when you’re in it, to see what is really real through the shadows in the reflected light around you. And yet, having to do that pretty much since birth, having to discern and examine and question what I think I see versus what people are telling me I see means that I can finally now exist in this space without being as susceptible to the reality distortion fields of others. It was a hard won victory, and most of my life has been spent deep within those shadows and not being able to tell what’s real and what’s just darkness. For a long time, I’ve been battling those shadows by keeping my feet firm on the ground and only believing in what I can prove to be real. The next stage is trusting myself enough to understand that there are things in the universe that can be known without requiring proof, and that engaging with those things can be a source of wonder and joy.
But that requires faith.
Not in others, not in religious practices, not in the Tarot.
It requires faith in me.
I’m working on it.
Everything,
L
For those unfamiliar with the Tarot, the Tower card depicts a tall tower in mid-crumble, often with people jumping out of it to their deaths rather than die inside. The Tower is actually a good card, because it shows you moving away from false ideas upon which you’ve built your life, but the process of recovering from that destruction is hard, and a lot of work.
Pollack, R. (2020). Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (Hardcover Gift Edition).
I want to say something smart or deep but I’m just going to say I love every word of this. Thank you.
Thank you for your wise words. I would really recommend this book: Tarot for Change by Jessica Dore. She applies psychology to the Tarot and I find the way she writes much more approachable than many other ways of looking at it.