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So I finished the Heaven's Gate doc series on HBO and honestly, it was hard to watch even though I couldn't look away. Not because I was raised in a cult (although I was; The Way International) but because of my time in Roman Catholicism.
I feel the need to stress right now that I am not drawing a 1-1 comparison between HG and the Catholic Church, although the parallels are...certainly there, nor am I condemning or intending to insult believers. But there's a level where that disclaimer is part of the problem.
I was talking a little bit last night about this with my wife: I feel like I'm both in and out of the Church simultaneously, that I simultaneously both believe and don't believe. It's a strange place to be, not knowing which world I live in.
Which also means that I think I can understand how Heaven's Gate happened. It's been a joke for twenty-three years, but thirty-nine people died in there.
I'm really struggling to collect my thoughts.
So much of the internal dynamics of Heaven's Gate reminded me of my time in the Church. Not just the bad stuff; the community. The love. The singing. The purpose in life. The commitment to something totally unseen.
I've always been interested in hoo-ha, bullshit, and malarkey: whether it was reading obsessively about UFOs and ghosts as a kid, my teenage fascination with magic and religion, or my present-day flirtation with tarot and witchcraft. I am not a rational being, clearly.
I think UFOs and religion fed into one another in my mind; my uber-religious dad got me into science fiction and lives in a world inhabited by malicious devil-spirits, and I spent a lot of time as a kid reading about "contactees" like George Adamski, or Whitley Streiber.
Adamski, like Ti and Do, came preaching salvation by alien. The Urantia book offers more of the same. And then came the 1970s, and it seemed *everyone* was looking for The Answer. It's no surprise the religious impulse took alien form, nor that it found adherants.
I converted to Catholicism when I was sixteen. Why? Well, at the time, I told myself I had had a mystical experience of God; that was true up to a point. But more honestly, I was *nobody* when I was a teenager, and I wanted to be...something, I guess.
"when I encountered Christ, I discovered my humanity." I found my identity in Christ, by committing myself to something infinitely larger than myself that gave my life purpose and direction and dare I say moral force. Countless others of my friends found the same.
I was a terrified, angry, lonely, sad, isolated, aspie trans girl who desperately wanted direction in my life. I *liked* that Catholicism had rules. I *liked* that it made hard claims. It was systematic, structured, and rooted in certainty.
And just a few years later, I flirted with converting to Judaism because it offered even *more* of that: deliberate practice, the law itself as the point (in my understanding). But anyway, I digress.
It just all felt very familiar, how Heaven's Gate spiraled down a logical drain of devotional one-upsmanship and isolation. Toward they end, when they first re-emerged and went out preaching again, they were met by incredulity, by people who thought them fools.
And yes, some of them left at that point. Many left and came back and left and came back over the years. But for the rest? it hardened them. They weren't wrong; it was that the *world was against them*
They committed suicide because, in large part, Do was finished with living in the world and wanted to join his partner Ti, who had died some years back, on the spaceship.
It just all felt very familiar, the cycle of escalation, the competitiveness. I mean, some of the men castrated themselves *to prove they were enlightened enough to do it*
God I am spending so much time not saying the thing on my mind. The thing I wanted to talk about. Because it hurts to say.
An ex-HG guy named Sawyer was one of the primary voices in the doc. Sawyer was a longtime member who left very shortly before the suicides, and to this day, believes himself to have failed the test.
He left the group, but he never stopped believing in the message of his prophets. He sees his survival of those grim events in 1997 as his biggest failure.
That's how I feel, too, sometimes. That I walked away from the greatest truth in the universe, the greatest love to exist, the partaking in the divinity of Christ through the Eucharist -- what else could you ever want??? -- and surrendered to my weaker nature.
I *know* that isn't a rational thought. I know I made the right call, because when I was Catholic, I wanted to kill myself every single day. Life never felt worth living. I lived in fear of my own body. I hated myself.
I don't anymore.
I don't anymore.
But it creeps in, creeps up. When I find myself wishing harm on Donald Trump, which is often, I feel this pang of failure; Christ told us to love all. I preached forgiveness for Tsarnaev. I chided my brother seminarians for celebrating Bin Laden's death.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I considered joining the Legion of Christ, a religious order founded by a man later revealed to be a serial abuser of his members that systematically covered up that sorry fact, and hated myself for being unable to commit to its rigors.
When I finally did leave seminary, and then later the Church as a whole, I carried shame at my surrender with me. What a farce! Here I was, faced with making a sacrifice for Christ, with auto-martyrdom in the witness of his love, and I balked. I left.
Much like Sawyer, I am ashamed I lacked the courage of my convictions.
I was sitting there, last night, talking to my wife about the priesthood and how it's understood and all I could think was how stupid it all sounded, to say that priests have these special powers that set them apart and over everyone else.
And I think there's a very real level at which my Catholicism was just...me wanting to be a superhero. To be Neo. To be someone extraordinary.
And here I am. Just a regular schnook.
And here I am. Just a regular schnook.
Heaven's Gate was full of people like me. Full of people who joined because they felt "instant recognition," as one of them put it, when they encountered Ti and Do's message.
I've had that exact feeling about Christ.
I've had that exact feeling about Christ.
I guess what I want to say more than anything is that I felt a degree of kinship with these people that disturbed me even as it made me feel for them. That I am no smarter, no wiser, no better than they. That I too have asserted blind my certainty in unseen things.
And what's more, I *still* do, more than I'm comfortable admitting. I don't pray often, but I still pray. I don't believe in God, except that I also totally believe in him. I keep images of Christ in my apartment still.
And I still live in an unconcsious and unwilling hope that, like Sawyer, the figurative UFO might yet come for me, too.
I'm not looking for help or for advice; neither is particularly welcome. It's just that there's a lot of holy ghosts still here with me, haunting my subconscious.
