Crisis of faith

There’s a rumbling at our feet. All around us, seismic shifts buckle the foundations that, for too long, have worked to facilitate our oppression. Many of us are excavating and examining the things that bring us purpose, pain, and pleasure in our daily lives. And all the while, a global health pandemic rages on. The floor has been falling out from underneath us. 

At the beginning of summer, my mama, a registered nurse at a long-term care facility, began picking up extra shifts while a Covid-19 outbreak ravaged the unit’s residents and staff. “You can always call in sick,” I often suggested, attempting to assuage my fears of her contracting the virus. “That’s just not right,” she’d reply, brushing away my angst like crumbs off a countertop. Naturally, extra work meant her increased exposure to the virus. But throughout June, mama remained steady, and assured me that things would be alright; she was covered. “I’m God’s gal,” she had proclaimed.

It should be noted that intimate familiarity with life’s precarity has made Black womanhood a masterclass of its own. Lesson one: ride the wave, and make it look easy; even when it’s not. 

That reality would set in early one Saturday morning when my Aunt Violet phoned. Upon answering I knew I would learn of something terrible. “Call your mom, she’s...just call her,” Violet insisted, audibly pained. Frantic, I hung up, and hit Mama on speed dial. As the phone rang, my mind turned to static, time blurring, then stopping altogether. To be quite honest, my stomach hasn’t stopped churning since. Mama had tested positive for Covid-19 and my unravelling begun. 

I read that at the outset of the pandemic, some of us felt noticeably calm, apparently unmoved by the shifting of life as we knew it. I suppose when you have trauma coursing in your blood and calcified in your bones, catastrophe seems almost mundane. Therein lies lesson two: tuck away the messy evidence of your fragility and tenderness. 

Many days and nights after those Saturday morning calls, I cried, rife with worry that mama, who was self-isolating with no one but her cat, would fall more ill. At this point, though it was clear that the pandemic was ravaging Black and Brown communities at disproportionate rates, to have it come so close to home—my first home—seemed unfathomable. 

I was born under a first-quarter moon, often referred to as a “crisis of faith” in astrology.

Panic now mocked the steadiness I had proudly boasted in previous months. In one episode of despair, I sat, ass-to-concrete on my apartment balcony as the Vancouver rain fell in front of me. Struggling to fill my lungs with air, I clutched my chest through tears. “Who the fuck is in control? Where is God?” I demanded answers from no one and everyone, all at once. But what I got instead felt futile, and as indiscriminate as the virus itself.

As a child, and well into young adulthood, the church shaped my world and governed the way I saw myself within it. I grew up attending and eventually teaching Sunday school, spent summers wrangling children at Vacation Bible School camps, and endured nearly 10 years of Christian education, youth group, worship teams and choirs. But despite over a decade of devout worship, at some point the church stopped feeling like home, like refuge. The amazing grace prophesized from the pulpit became a barbed hook, and I was the fish: caught up, frantic, fighting, flailing. I seldom felt saved or safe within the doctrines that left me believing I was irreparably unworthy, unclean, and hell-bound. As I continued to wrestle with deep inferiority, my faith eroded to the point where I could no longer cling onto the notion that God was at the helm of anything, good or bad—at least not the God I had come to know. 

Gratefully, and perhaps blasphemously, astrology has now become a powerful source of post-Jesus recovery, re-grounding and enlightenment for me

Gratefully, and perhaps blasphemously, astrology has now become a powerful source of post-Jesus recovery, re-grounding and enlightenment for me. It’s gifted me an awareness to turn inward and witness my humanity with newfound wonder and acceptance. Cue lesson three: there is god in me. 

I was born under a first-quarter moon, often referred to as a “crisis of faith” in astrology. I believe it’s one of the reasons I rise to the challenges ahead of me, address my fears head-on,  and reconfigure what is tangible and real. Like my foremothers, I make meaning from common catastrophe, and create joy through mundane chaos. 

So, as Covid-19 hurled crisis after crisis, and tested more than just my faith, it also revealed to me where my power lies. Months later, now that mama has recovered, and her health has restored, I admit that in my most vulnerable moments, I consider returning to old beliefs and familiar ways. But now I am in search of new lessons, ones untethered to the exploitation of my pain, fear, and loathing. Old ways no longer sustain me, no matter how desperate I am for an anchor or lifeline. Lesson four: Forget about control and press onward, one shaky-footed step at a time.