While I was in Uganda, I wrote about the tattoo of the tarot card that I have on my shoulder. If you haven't read that, you should go back and read that first, because this is part II of that story.
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A couple of weeks ago, I got a wild hair and decided to obsessively clean.
This began, innocently enough, with the trunk of art supplies in my closet. But then it started spreading. First to the shelves in my closet, then to my desk, then to my bookshelf and before I knew it, half my stuff was in the hallway and I was rearranging the furniture. The bed was turned this way, the chair was on the bed, dust was flying and I thought......
Hey, this feels pretty good.
The closet was, by far the biggest challenge because that is the place I throw things when I try to forget about them. I unearthed all sorts of memories, crawling out from under things. It was very emotional.
And then I really found a chunk of something.
There were my tarot cards, hiding in a little bread pan, in the corner of the bottom of the trunk, curled up in a ball whispering to each other, "If you don't move, she can't see you."
Well I saw them, and I picked them up and I just looked at them for a minute. The thoughts began to dawn on me. Why do I still have these? Why haven't I destroyed them by now? I destroyed the eight of swords, why haven't I destroyed the rest of them?
Well, I didn't really know so I just set them down on my bedside table and kept cleaning, but now that they were out in the open, their presence was really bothering me. My eye kept being drawn back to the place where they sat, staring at me. I heard God whispering.
"You know, we still haven't talked about this."
The last year and a half has been a stormy affair between God and I. We've fought and we've struggled and fought some more and cried and there have been a few times when I've tried to kill him. It's been hard.
But God is faithful. He's more faithful than I am and he's kept his promises to me, even when I turned my back on him.
Somehow, in all of this Storm, the fact that I had engaged in the consulting of spirits and divination had slipped to the bottom of the closet, unaddressed. I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but as I continued to be drawn back to the cards, sitting on my bedside table, I knew there was a reckoning about to happen. I had been struggling with whether or not the tarot was actually evil, since I thought I had seen a lot of good come from tarot, but as I thought about this, the conversation between God and I surpassed the tarot and became much more serious.
We started talking about baptism.
When a person is baptized, they renounce evil and all of the spiritual forces that rebel against God and corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. They turn to Jesus Christ and promise to put their whole trust in his grace and love. They promise to obey him.
I made those promises eight years ago when I was baptized in the Methodist church, but a lot has happened since then.
I turned my back on God and not my face, and I went my own way. I counted the commandments of God hopeless, impossible, unrealistic and foolish, instead of counting them as pathways to blessing and peace. I began walking the hard road of rebellion and it led me to a place where I was alone and isolated. I thought that following my desires and my ideals would lead me to an open place of freedom and a renewed, true sense of intimacy with others, but my desires and my ideals betrayed me and left me alone, hollow, cut off from everyone and wondering what had happened.
I was lying in the ruins of my apostasy, tormented and undone.
I had clearly not kept my end of the bargain. Over the years, I had broken my promise to trust, my promise to rely on his grace, to renounce things that would corrupt and destroy me, to turn and accept Christ, to follow and obey Him. But as I look back now I see the ways that God was faithful to his promises, faithful to His grace.
"When Israel was a child, I loved him,
And out of Egypt I called my son.
As I called him, so he went from me;
They sacrificed to Baals,
And burned incense to carved images.
I taught Ephraim to walk,
Taking them by their arms;
But they did not know that I healed them.
I drew them with gentle cords,
With bands of love,
And I was to them as those
Who take the yoke from their neck.
I stooped and fed them…
How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?...
My heart churns within me;
My sympathy is stirred.
I will not execute the fierceness of my anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim.
For I am God and not man,
The holy One in your midst;
And I will not come with terror."
Hosea 11:1-4, 8ac-9
God was faithful. He led people into my life to shine their light in my darkness, he spoke to me as I sat alone, searching desperately for something in a deck of cards. He spoke to me in whispers as I sat crying on my back porch because I didn't like the person I was becoming. Even though I had forgotten my promise, he hadn't forgotten his and he wasn't giving up on me.
In all those times when I showed my unfaithfulness to my promise, Jesus was falling to his knees in the front yard, head in his hands, begging that the cup of suffering would pass me by.
But it didn't pass me by. I drank the bitter cup to its dregs and threw up in the street.
"Your ways and your doings have
Procured these things for you.
This is your wickedness,
Because it is bitter,
Because it reaches to your heart."
Jeremiah 4:18
I always thought the tarot was pretty innocent. I always made it clear that I wasn't practicing divination, that I wasn't a fortune teller, that what I was doing wasn't evil---but no matter what I said, or what I told myself to make myself feel better, that didn't change the fact that the tarot was evil, and what I was doing was consulting evil.
I didn't just decide one day that the occult sounded better than Jesus. It was a slow rot. It started with my own apostasy, and somewhere along the way, I found something that celebrated that, and that thing led me deeper into darkness.
So when God began to drop hints a couple of weeks ago that we had some things to talk about, it had less to do with tarot cards and more to do with apostasy.
I had rejected the God I had promised to trust and it had grieved us both, only I hadn't felt that until now.
So when it came time to repent, I wasn't just admitting I was maybe wrong about a few things. I wasn't groveling before an angry God. I was grieving before a gracious one.
"O Lord, are not your eyes on the truth?
You have stricken them,
But they have not grieved;
You have consumed them,
But they have refused to receive correction.
They have made their faces harder than rock;
They have refused to return."
Jeremiah 5:3
My face softened by the tears of my mourning, I turn around to face the Lord, only to find that he has been in hot pursuit since the chase first began.
"If you will return, O Israel,
Says the Lord,
'Return to me;
And if you will put your detestable objects out of my sight,
Then you shall not be moved.'
And if you shall swear,
'The Lord lives,' in truth, in judgement
And in righteousness;
The nations shall bless themselves in him,
And in him they shall glory."
Jeremiah 4:1-2
In my grief over the separation I had caused, and in the joy of God's grace and forgiveness and mercy, I knew that I had to put the cards away. I had to put the rebellion and the broken promises and the cards away once and for all and I had to renew my vow to the Lord.
Father John and Ashley and their littlest Wallace, all together with Sonya Cronin witnessed the burning of my tarot cards and the renewal of my baptismal vows on October 26, 2009 at St Peter's Anglican Church.
We celebrated God's grace and piled the cards in a little flower pot that the Wallaces had brought. We doused them with lighter fluid and as they burned, Ashley and Sonya presented me for the renewal of my baptismal vows. They promised to help me grow into the full stature of Christ by their prayers and witness, with God's help. I renounced again the spiritual forces of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. I renounced all sinful desires that draw me from the love of God. I turned to Jesus Christ to accept and put my whole trust in His grace and love. I promised to follow and obey Him.
It all happened at once, the burning and the blessing. As Father John stood in front of me, he anointed me with oil used at ordinations and baptisms. He made the sign of the cross with his hand on my forehead and reminded me again of God's faithfulness when he said,
"You were sealed at your baptism as Christ's own forever."
He anointed my hands and my mouth and my ears with oil and showed me how God was setting me apart to do His work with my hands, a new work to lead me into blessing, and not into bitter darkness.
I felt Ashley's hand on the tattoo on my left shoulder and Sonya's on my right shoulder. They surrounded me in a triangle, and I felt so surrounded by God's love and devotion to me, thankful for his grace in putting people like Ashley and Sonya and John in my life to show me His love. I could hear the baby talking a little bit and the fire popping behind Father John. Sometimes if he shifted, I could watch the cards burning and it all just felt so good in the autumn air, I could feel some things were dying. Just like the leaves falling away, there were parts of me that fell away then, and the promise of new life was more real than it ever had been.
As it was all happening there, out in the open, in the garden at the church, I saw what small and flimsy things, made of only paper, the cards really were and I was sobered by that reality. I thought,
Hey, this whole time, they were only paper.
But it wasn't just paper that led me into bitter darkness. And it's not just the paper in my Bible that leads me into the presence of the God of the universe. A Bible will burn just as easily as a pack of cards will, but there are things going on in the world other than just what we can see with our eyes.
"Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.
Then He who sat on the throne said,
"Behold, I make all things new."
Revelation 21:3-5
