If you do an internet search for the phrase “in an open relationship with Jesus,” you’ll likely get scores of returns debating whether or not Christians can practice polyamory. Yet I recently did such a search, trying, to no avail, to find the source of the cleverest phrase I’ve ever heard to describe spiritual seekers like myself: I am in an open relationship with Jesus.
As I reflect on my spiritual identity and how I describe it today, being in an open relationship with Jesus feels like the perfect description. I remain grounded in my Christian identity and cultural Catholicism, yet cannot deny how other spiritual practices and world religions have shaped and continue to nourish me.
As a queer, outspoken, budding feminist child harmed by two very different Christian denominations during my formative years, one might think I would never want anything to do with Christianity ever again. Yet I’ve never been able to quit Jesus altogether. The recovery process from spiritual abuse and religious trauma consistently invites me to redefine what it means to be a child of God.
Bifurcated Spirituality
To explain where I’ve landed, here’s how I got here:
In 1979, my parents were both Roman Catholics when they married and had me, their first child. When I was a toddler and my father was laid off from work, he started listening to televangelists and ultimately converted to Evangelical Christianity.
By the time I was five, he no longer attended Catholic Church with us and was a full-fledged Pentecostal Evangelical, complete with the Christian nationalist ideology that accompanied it. This new devotion included a belief that my mother and all of our other family members, as Catholics, were not really “saved” Christians and were thus going to hell.
My mother held firm in her Catholic beliefs, which included not divorcing my father, even though his new beliefs created constant tension in our house. My father started taking me to church with him, too, coercing me into praying the sinner’s prayer from his new tradition long before I understood what I was doing.
I went to both churches on Sunday morning for most of my childhood, attending Catholic Mass at 9:00 a.m. Catholic Mass with my mother. I then popped out the side door of the church, where my father waited to take me to the Assemblies of God Sunday morning program.
If mixed messages are the stuff of crazymaking, as people in certain recovery programs declare, then this religious upbringing set me up for a life of crazy!
Not only was one parent’s church telling me that the other parent and their beliefs were evil. In both churches, I heard clear messages about the inferiority of women, that queer people were an abomination, and that struggles like addiction and many mental illnesses were manifestations of sin.
I initially tried to be the truest believer in both churches, first diving into the deep end of Evangelicalism during my senior year of high school, when my mom excused me from going to church with her. When I started my undergraduate studies and lived in a dorm with kids of various faiths and studied with professors of various beliefs and backgrounds, the holes in my father’s arguments became clear.
People and beliefs he once denounced as evil were not so bad. Indeed, they seemed to be more loving than anything I encountered at his church. When I developed a drinking and drug problem that became full-fledged alcoholism, ignited by an untreated, trauma-related dissociative disorder, one of the conclusions I reached was that I had fallen too far away from church.
Choosing Rome
So I thought I’d give church another try and this time I chose the Catholic side of me. I even ended up spending close to three years in Bosnia-Hercegovina, near my family’s ancestral homeland of Croatia, working at a pilgrimage shrine, doing humanitarian aid work, and various other projects. I met various Catholics from around the world.
Then I enrolled at Franciscan University of Steubenville, one of the most traditionally conservative Catholic institutions in the U.S. There, I completed my graduate degree in counseling.
Although I learned many things and made several wonderful friends in the program, the overall fanaticism there showed me who I wasn’t as a believer. And I was then able to step more fully into learning about who I am, especially embracing my queerness and championing the rights of outspoken women long stifled by the church.
Through all these struggles, I never once stopped believing in God. But how I see God has changed.
G(g)od Now
God has shifted from an all-powerful, mostly angry big white man sitting on a cloud, belting thunderbolts of judgment or showers of blessing upon us, to a genderfluid spiritual presence who lives in my heart and who can show up however God needs to show up in this world, not just in churches. The full extent of who or what God is, or how God operates, is truly a mystery. I just know that God is there.
I’ve had the privilege of meeting people of other faith traditions and learning about how they interact with the Divine. My first husband is a Jewish man and our relationship gave me a great deal of respect for Judaism, even though some of the trappings of Christianity as being “the right way” still held me back from fully appreciating it at the time.
My travels to the Middle East and India, my invited visits to Native American and Indigenous spaces, and my studies in a yoga ashram taught me an even greater respect for the numinousness of God.
In yogic traditions, I learned spiritual practices that remain a part of my life. Such practices also proved to be a very important part of my healing because Christianity was so riddled with triggers for many years. It still can be. Practicing in other traditions, where I’ve been permitted by those teaching me, has allowed me to separate the wonders of God from the horrible things people do in God’s/gods’ name.
Yes, these exposures to life and faith beyond the Christian bubble deepened my appreciation for God as an entity that is capable of showing up in so many shapes and forms. Perhaps because I grew up with two forms of Christianity, it long made sense to me that people can interpret spiritual truths differently. Or perhaps because I was doubly injured, especially as a sensitive child long tuned into spiritual energy, I needed to explore all possible remedies for encountering God as a healing presence.
Jesus, Emmanuel
My explorations also helped me hold on to my respect for Jesus and lean into my love for what is, to me, the real miracle of Christianity—the incarnation. The notion that, because God could show up however God wanted or needed to, God decided to take on the form of a human.
In my belief system, revealed through lived experience, God knows our human frailties and struggles and loves humanity so much because God became one of us.
I no longer fully believe in Jesus’s death and resurrection as the thing that ensured my eternal salvation. Furthermore, I have called it out as a teaching that gets used abusively by Christians (e.g., “Jesus died for you! You have to accept him as Lord and do what his Church says—even if the Church is hurting you!”).
I embraced Jesus as a social radical who challenged systems of power to show us that the world could be different. That is what he died for.
Some Christians would see my unique Christian identity and practice as the horrible fruits of what happens when someone goes exploring too much; when one treats their spiritual journey as a “cafeteria,” picking and choosing only what is appealing. Because of how I define my Christianity, centered on the humanity of Christ, a lot of folks would no longer see me as a “real Christian.”
That really doesn’t bother me. Indeed, I feel rather sorry for folks who see Christ and all things Divine as something so boxed in by an institutional church.
God didn’t create me to fit into a singular box, either in how I love or how I connect spiritually. I’ve long desired not just to live outside of it, but to smash it altogether.
My heart is a polyamorous one. So why wouldn’t my faith be as well?
People will, of course, judge it. As I’ve learned, it’s easy for people to judge what they cannot or will not understand.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Dr. Marich is the founder of the Institute for Creative Mindfulness. A clinical trauma specialist and educator, she is the author of over a dozen books and manuals on trauma and addiction recovery. She is the author of, You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir,