Whispering Wyrd

This is a hard thing to write about. I’ve had at least two attempts at writing this, trashing some drafts because I felt I came across too angry for it to get my point across. It’s personal, and I know it might stir some strong reactions, so I’m being careful here. But I can’t just stay silent about it anymore.

I spent over 50 years living in a place where there was almost a church on nearly every corner. Not just as a figure of speech, but really so. It was a deeply conservative area both politically and religiously right in the heart of the Bible belt. Almost everyone identified with and claimed those values.

In that time I saw things that never sat right with me. I saw Christianity and “conservative values” used not as a source of compassion, but as a tool to judge, exclude, and sometimes even punish/harm. Especially toward people struggling with addiction, mental health, or poverty.

These aren’t things I saw  from a distance. I lived it. I struggled with alcohol and drugs. I went through severe depression so bad it was classified as “clinical depression with psychotic features” in my medical record. I had a doctor who genuinely tried to help me and I’ll always be grateful for her. But I also went through a system that didn’t understand, or want to understand, suffering and in some cases made it much worse.

I saw people come out of state-run mental health programs utterly broken in ways that they weren’t before. I saw fear used instead of care and compassion. I was even directly told by a doctor that my suffering wouldn’t improve unless I accepted his religious beliefs. He literally wrote me a “prescription” for his favorite Christian book.

Think about that for a moment. When someone is in pain, real, clinical, and overwhelming pain, and the response is, “This is your fault because you don’t believe. It won’t get better until you accept Jesus as your personal savior” something has gone very wrong.

And it’s not just about one town or one system. We live in a world where addiction is recognized medically by the federal government as a disease. Chronic, treatable, and real. And yet, people are still punished for it in ways we would never accept for other illnesses. People don’t go to prison for having diabetes or cancer. But addiction? That’s different somehow.

I understand that some crimes happen around addiction and prison is appropriate for those. But not all cases are like that. Some people are punished just for possession, nothing violent, nothing harmful to others. Just possession. There have been people sentenced to 20 years just for possession of marijuana.

That should at least make us pause and ask some questions about those prison sentences. What bothers me most, though, is the utter disconnect I’ve seen between what is claimed and what is lived.

I’ve known so many people who speak so passionately about “Christian values” but show absolutely no compassion toward the poor, the addicted, or the mentally ill. They show contempt for those people. I’ve seen utter outrage over little things like someone using curse words while actually harmful things are completely ignored or even cheered on.

And I don’t say this to attack Christianity. I know Christians who truly live their faith, who embody things like compassion, humility, and kindness in a way that’s undeniable. Those are some of the people I respect the most in this world. I’m proud to know them and count them among my friends. I don’t think Jesus would go around cheering on the “tough guys” or carry a gun to dinner.

When “faith” is used to justify cruelty, exclusion, or indifference it doesn’t just hurt people, it misrepresents and twists the very teachings it claims to follow. If someone believes in helping others, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, then those values should show up in how they treat the most vulnerable among us.

And if we can’t help others then we certainly shouldn’t hurt them. This is about recognizing and acknowledging suffering and responding to it with humanity instead of judgment. It’s about asking ourselves honestly whether our actions and words actually line up with the values we claim to hold. Because at the end of the day, that’s what matters most. Not what anyone might label themselves as. This isn’t meant to be offensive, but if it is and you are someone who claims to be Christian but if Jesus’ own teachings about compassion and helping the disadvantaged offends you, what does that say about your relationship with him?

Amituofo
~Buck