How God’s Opinion of My Pussy Unravelled Me

Like so many other young women, I wanted God to be the one person who did not value me or devalue me based on my sexuality or purity. Instead, like Elizabeth Smart and so many other young women, I was taught that God was more interested in what was in my panties than what was in my heart or mind.

That has been my ultimate undoing, my unraveling – the idea that the Divine could reject me based on what I did with my pussy. It broke in me a basic sense of trust, in myself, in God and in my fellow humans who were ever tempting or ever judging.

I find myself often thinking, “I miss God” and by that I mean that I miss the image I had once had of a god who was beyond gender, who did not love me in spite of being a girl or in spite of who I fucked. I miss a god who never paid it attention because it was never real.

My love was real,
my pain was real,
my intelligence was real,
and my devotion to goodness was real.

Everything else – the trappings of gender, counting how many lovers you have had, which sexual lines you have and have not crossed – none of that was real to that god. He saw the real me, in all of my love and pain and passion for making the world a better and safer place. He saw me, and he approved.

I miss him like I miss the naïveté of first love. I remember the wonder of both with a piercing beautiful pain – they are both things that never existed and so can never be lost and yet they can be greatly missed.

My years of religious education taught me that my idea is of a god that has never been and never can be. Because if there is one thing all gods must do, it is micromanage women’s vaginas. And I want a god who cares more about how I have loved than whom I have fucked. And so I must go on missing him, this god who never was but for whom I will always long.