u/first_last_last_firs

This is long, it is basically my testimony or witness as it were. I have shared this occasionally but not often. This is the first time in awhile I've really tried to revisit and rewrite it.

I can't verify it, and I don't expect anyone else to accept it as evidence. It was entirely a personal spiritual experience.

I was raised Catholic. My mom and grandmother were very Catholic, attending church multiple times a week, being very warm, giving, and loving, both fiercely intelligent, creative, curious, funny, loyal, strong when they had to be, compassionate, empathetic. Never perfect, but they truly believed and walked the path following Jesus. They influenced me a great deal. At one point I was planning to become a priest. I still have immense respect for Pope Francis and Pope Leo, and for the best priests and nuns I've known. They taught me something important: no human institution is spiritually perfect.

Then life got very dark.

I (barely) survived in despair and then found Jesus through community and relationship. Life is hard. Without love we would die. Jesus teaches us this, and I have encountered it.

It happened slowly through opening up with someone I felt safe with and developing a relationship with someone who genuinely followed the way of Jesus. They made me feel accepted and welcome and taught me gently and patiently about the character and nature of Jesus.

I opened up slowly over months, and essentially they told me about the undivided attention and unconditional love God shows all of us, giving all of us individual undivided attention each individually at all times, he called it the astrophysics of God's love. Agape by another name, divine love. He told me all I had to do was open up to Jesus and the love would be there for me, that if I was afraid and needed help and didn't know what to do my heart wouldn't fail me if I was open to God's love. And I kind of just, did. I opened up, asked to receive this love, in my mind, in my heart, I didn't ask if I was worthy or deserving of this love, I just knew I wanted it, needed it, or that I wouldn't have anything to live for, I kind of in a way told God leading up to this that if nothing was shown to me, if I received no hope I'd just lie down and starve to death.

I opened and was gently filled with a perfect sense of peace and warmth, I felt so content, so OKAY for the first time in my life, it was like my heart was being cradled by a contained controlled supernova, I don't know how else to explain it, it felt endless, like there was no limit to this love, this warm gentle power.

I experienced perfect clarity and warmth. Perfect safety. Perfect love.

Not just happiness or serenity. I was filled and enveloped by a gentle but incredibly powerful warmth that was completely unadulterated unconditional love and acceptance.

People around me noticed, one getting startled looking at me and even said I looked like I was glowing.

I knew, really knew, that I wasn't defined by this world. I was defined by something deeper, by that anchoring agape, the divine spark inside all of us.

It wasn't ego death.

It was more like ego irrelevance.

That experience lasted maybe fifteen minutes, but I've thought about it almost every day for more than a decade. I even foolishly tried to recreate it for years.

That experience permanently changed how I understand God.

My belief in the eternal unconditional love and mercy of Jesus is a spiritual reality, not an intellectual or theological decision. When Christians tell me they do or don't believe some aspect of Christianity because they "don't see it in the text," I honestly don't even share the same starting premise that constructs their worldview.

For me, religions are mortal systems of beliefs, institutions, rituals, and doctrines. Spirituality is the direct experience of the divine reality those systems attempt to describe.

The Bible is a profoundly beautiful human witness. It also contains pain, violence, contradiction, and horror. It was written, preserved, and curated by human beings living inside particular cultures and power structures.

So we're left holding all of that: the beauty, the horror, the wisdom, the contradictions.

The task isn't achieving perfect doctrinal certainty.

The task is figuring out how to live with all of it and still choose love.

That's why the obsession with heaven and hell has never resonated with me. I don't try to do the right thing because I'm afraid of punishment. I try to do the right thing because I feel called to. Conscience. Compassion. Intuition.

When I read Jesus, I don't primarily see someone giving a metaphysical system.

I see someone constantly talking about relationships, healing, forgiveness, mercy, and community.

Relationships and community are the answer.

Healing is the answer.

The work is here.

People find God when they truly feel loved, safe, and welcome. You cannot make people feel those things if your love is conditional or if you have ulterior motives. Learn to hold space for people. Lead by example. Show grace, mercy, and love through your actions. When people eventually trust you enough to ask questions, answer honestly.

And if someone tells you Christianity seems weird, harmful, or hypocritical, smile and nod. Historically, people have very good reasons to be skeptical. The answer isn't better marketing. It's Christians slowly rebuilding trust through humility, integrity, compassion, and justice.

I don't really have a denomination anymore. Maybe Unitarian Universalist fits, maybe it doesn't. Labels are descriptive, not prescriptive. Within the limits of language and human understanding, I simply do my best to tell the truth.

I wouldn't believe in God at all were it not for profound personal spiritual experience.

Empires rise and fall. The powerful exploit the weak. New ideologies replace old ones, but domination keeps finding new justifications. Every generation seems to have to relearn the same moral lessons, and every generation produces people willing to ignore them.

Is that simply the human condition?

Should Christians expect this struggle to continue until the consummation of history? Or is there a theological basis for believing humanity can genuinely become more just over time?

In other words:

Is God gradually healing human history itself?

Or is history always going to remain a mixture of grace and domination until its ultimate fulfillment?

Empires rise and fall. The powerful exploit the weak. New ideologies replace old ones, but domination keeps finding new justifications. Every generation seems to have to relearn the same moral lessons, and every generation produces people willing to ignore them.

Is that simply the human condition?

Should Christians expect this struggle to continue until the consummation of history? Or is there a theological basis for believing humanity can genuinely become more just over time?

In other words:

Is God gradually healing human history itself?

Or is history always going to remain a mixture of grace and domination until its ultimate fulfillment?

Empires rise and fall. The powerful exploit the weak. New ideologies replace old ones, but domination keeps finding new justifications. Every generation seems to have to relearn the same moral lessons, and every generation produces people willing to ignore them.

Is that simply the human condition?

Should Christians expect this struggle to continue until the consummation of history? Or is there a theological basis for believing humanity can genuinely become more just over time?

In other words:

Is God gradually healing human history itself?

Or is history always going to remain a mixture of grace and domination until its ultimate fulfillment?

Empires rise and fall. The powerful exploit the weak. New ideologies replace old ones, but domination keeps finding new justifications. Every generation seems to have to relearn the same moral lessons, and every generation produces people willing to ignore them.

Is that simply the human condition?

Should Christians expect this struggle to continue until the consummation of history? Or is there a theological basis for believing humanity can genuinely become more just over time?

In other words:

Is God gradually healing human history itself?

Or is history always going to remain a mixture of grace and domination until its ultimate fulfillment?

Before, I had wished for war and vengeance. I have much to lose and try to repent, but it is a sin to lie, I will not allow myself or my queer spouse or my friends to be harmed by facists. I know "Just War" is outdated. But I am scared and still filled with resentment and rage. I have experienced the divine, I try to heal and move forward, but I am only human, and I am weak, I will choose my life and the lives of my loved ones over facists. I am sorry.

I am married. It has been a poly marriage from the very beginning. But my wife is falling in love with someone else and I think it may be breaking me in a way I did not anticipate. I partly blame my inexperience, I have only had one previous long term relationship (it was monogamous) before meeting my now wife.

she's dated other people the entire time we've been together and she has never felt this way about anyone else except this new person Joey.

She loves him more intensely than she has ever loved me. She says she genuinely loves me deeply, and I believe her, but she has also been honest that she has never been “in love” with me the way she has been with a few other people in her life. We both thought those kinds of feelings were relics of youth and extreme past experiences and that she would never feel them again about anyone, it had been years, well over a decade. Then she met Joey about a month ago and suddenly all of it came back.

And now I am realizing I maybe intellectually understood that she did not love me with the same passion, longing, yearning, and intensity she once felt for Bill and Jake (her first memorable intense loves), but I never emotionally understood it until now. Watching her experience these extreme emotional highs and lows with Joey has made it impossible not to fully grasp how different her feelings for me are.

I am okay with polyamory. I am okay with loving multiple people. I believe people can have multiple loves of their life. What I don’t think I can survive is being the stable domestic partner while someone else gets the intense yearning and longing and hunger and passion.

I don’t think I can be in a marriage where my partner fundamentally does not and maybe never will feel comparable desire for me.

And the thing is, she is not careless or naive or impulsive. She has been in many long term relationships. She desperately wanted stability. She spent years trying to find a relationship that would last and a man who would not abandon her or use her or neglect her or fail her. I thought I could be that man. I desperately wanted to be.

We have been together over 4 years. We have been in couples counseling since the first 3 months of dating because we wanted to be proactive and preventative. we didn't go to counseling because we had problems, we wanted a chance to have the best relationship possible because most people don't go to couples counseling until the problems are unsolvable. We have more or less never stopped couples counseling or individual therapy since. I have been in Irvin Yalom style group therapy for almost a decade.

We talk about everything. We are best friends. We have survived so much together. We used to literally record our conversations because we processed so much together there were dozens and dozens of hours of recordings so we stopped recording and gave up keeping track or keeping up.

I have not been at my best for a long time because of trauma and depression. She has carried so much weight caring for me and supporting me and waiting for me to recover and I can never fully repay that. A week ago she told me she maybe had about 6 months left in her before she was done if I did not get healthier. She said it has been almost a year since she was truly "in love" with me after the constant depression and caretaking. I understand why she is exhausted. I understand caretaker burnout because I have it too.

After Trump’s second reelection she went through months of what was essentially psychosis. She could barely function, could barely cook for herself, could not work, was borderline catatonic and suicidal, and I was going to work every day terrified I would come home and find her dead. She barely remembers that period. I lived in constant dread the entire time while also trying to hold our lives together.

So this is not a simple situation where one person gave everything and the other gave nothing. We have both carried each other through hell.

But I cannot stop fixating on the fact that even at my absolute best, even before burnout and exhaustion and fear and depression and the state of the world wore us down, she still did not feel for me what she feels for Joey, or what she once felt for Bill and Jake.

And Joey blindsided both of us. We genuinely thought she was no longer capable of these feelings. We talked many times over the years about how the intensity she once experienced was probably tied to youth and chaos and would never happen again. Then suddenly it did.

Even if the relationship with Joey collapses, which honestly seems very possible, I still feel ruptured by the realization itself.

I don’t know how to emotionally survive being loved deeply but not being the person someone burns for.

I don’t know if polyamory is actually compatible with me if I need mutual intensity and mutual yearning to feel safe and wanted in a romantic relationship.

We're still both in shock, scheduling an emergency couples counseling session and trying to figure this out.

Has anyone else here dealt with a similar dynamic? Not jealousy about another partner, but the realization that your partner’s emotional intensity for you may simply never have been equal to what they felt/feel for someone else?

I'm a Christian, born and raised Catholic, currently non-practising. I genuinely believe there is something spiritually real and transformative in Jesus and in experiences of human connection, vulnerability, accountability, safety, and unconditional love. I've had experiences that I interpret as encounters with the divine.

What I do not understand is why so many Christians—especially American conservative Christians—seem incapable of understanding why Christianity is feared, distrusted, mocked, or hated by a lot of people. The Anglo-American white Christian imperial project has centuries of atrocity, domination, colonialism, patriarchy, racism, violence, and cultural destruction attached to it. Christians have an ethical responsibility to know that history and reckon with it honestly. Refusing to do so is moral cowardice and intellectual dishonesty.

What also frustrates me is the complete lack of self-awareness and constant persecution complex. Christians in America are still one of the most culturally dominant groups in the country, yet many act like criticism or social discomfort makes them oppressed martyrs. A lot of them seem deeply invested in seeing themselves as persecuted because it lets them feel spiritually special or closer to Jesus.

And socially, many Christians communicate in ways that are deeply alienating without understanding why. If someone walks up to you saying they believe in miracles, demons, divine revelation, healing power, eternal judgment, and supernatural beings, skepticism is warranted. Christians should understand why people are cautious or uncomfortable instead of reacting with wounded confusion every time they're criticized.

But frankly, leftists often have the same problem in a different form. A lot of leftists have terrible social intelligence and seem genuinely confused why people shut down when you immediately open with ‘America is a white supremacist evil empire built on genocide, stolen land, slavery, imperialism, and exploitation.’ Even if that analysis is structurally true, human beings are not computers. People do not become vulnerable, reflective, or open through humiliation, contempt, social exile, or ideological assault.

Trust, intimacy, safety, accountability, and honesty have to be cultivated over time through actual relationship. That takes patience, care, attention, humility, and presence. People change through human connection, not just through being screamed at with morally correct analysis. True transformation basically does not happen alone or in isolation. It requires community, relationship, and mutual recognition.

(NKJV) Matthew 18:20:

‘For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.’

That verse matters to me because I think the divine is encountered most clearly in real human relationship grounded in truth, accountability, vulnerability, and in service to one another with no thoughts for return on investment but instead the unmitigated desire to nurture and cultivate a loving relationship.

My anger is not toward Christianity itself. It's toward Christians who weaponize the faith, refuse self-examination, ignore history, cling to victimhood, and then act shocked when people distrust them. And more broadly, toward anyone (Christian or leftist) who thinks contempt is a substitute for relationship.

Speaking just for myself I have a lot of trouble chilling out and being "normal" sometimes, and I don't get all the time want to rest and reset my nervous system. But a lot of problems would be easier to solve if I was just easier to talk to and less on edge. I'm trying to be more chill, but it is a struggle I admit. I've had success growing and adapting and will have more god willing.