Like a butterfly out of hell

Sure, sure, I know all about bats out of hell. I’m just telling you I spent a fair amount of time in a metaphorical hell, and I found it to be a perfectly well-suited place for a transformation.

I grew up smelling the brimstone of hell. Hell never seemed like a cartoony idea to me. It was as tangible as the rocky creek down the road from our house and the church full of pews we visited three times each week. My understanding was that if I didn’t believe and do the right things, I’d be sent to burn for eternity in a literal pit full of an unquenchable fire. Not a creek in sight. Hell as a possible destination was part of my psychic scenery. 

When I realized well into my adulthood that my belief system didn't know a metaphor from a hole in the ground, it occurred to me that I’d been living already in the only version of hell that matters: the one we make for ourselves here on Earth. 

I felt like I was wandering around a metaphorical desert for a few years as I divested myself of my evangelical fundamentalist beliefs and then extricated myself from the underlying patterns too -- the need for certainty, the impulse to place blame, the either-or thinking, that kind of thing. I found my way out of religion. Or, as I sometimes say, I lost my religion but found my soul. 

That last part took a while, too, because letting some beliefs back in felt just as perilous as letting go of the original ones. I had to figure out what to believe and then, just as importantly, how to believe. In more ways than one. How to let the idea of belief back in. How to accept hope back into my life -- I felt sort of ashamed about how long I’d been a fundamentalist, and I didn’t want to replicate anything false from my former life, not even if it made me feel better. Then, how to hold those beliefs -- not tightly, not rigidly, not only in my head and heart but also in my body. 

That kind of change requires both wandering and resting. It requires the time and stillness of a chrysalis, so new patterns coalesce and a new way of being emerges. That's how I got my wings. I know butterfly imagery is so pervasive as to seem trite, but here’s why I love it anyway: A butterfly hasn’t converted from caterpillar-like to butterfly-like beliefs; she has become a butterfly. She doesn’t believe in wings; she has them. She doesn’t rue the day she roamed the earth as a caterpillar or rested in the chrysalis; that’s just how she got here.

Butterfly watercolor by Mike Capozzola. 

Anyway, then I flew away, oh glory, just like that gospel song says, but to a better version of my life right here on this planet. So I’m fluttering about now, doing my thing, flying around like a butterfly out of hell.

Want more? Here’s a map I made of the unconversion terrain.