Welcome to the show! It’s…
Marv’s religious trauma.
I personally really connected with Marji’s relationship with God in this book. This is an interesting topic for me as a former Christian turned into whatever the heck I am now. Future Judaism convert? Agnostic little gremlin? At least the communist part remains consistent.
Marji and I, at least when I was Christian- spoke to God very similarly. I didn’t really pray, per se, but rather conversed with Them as I would a normal human being. I would go around, doing my silly little tasks, and just talk. I would do it for hours on end sometimes; I would rant and process and just fully project all my thoughts and feelings to God. Marji reminds me of myself in that regard as she depicts God as a physical human being in her book.
I never had a mental picture of what God looked like, but if I did, I hope this would be it.
I have deep, irrevocable religious trauma. It will never be undone. I will never fully be healed. This is not sad to me- not anymore, at least, which shows me that some healing has been done and is possible. But the scars will always be there.
That being said, I am grateful to Marji and the piece of herself she shared in the childhood era of Persepolis. I looked to her with so much love as she navigated her fucked up world with God by her side, and my love for her persisted when she pushed God away in anger. Somewhere deep down was healed slightly by this because I did the exact same thing. And if I can love Marji and not blame her for it, how can I logically hate myself for the same action? The answer is that I can’t. And yet the self-hatred is not logical, and it will persist.
I still, at least half the time, believe that God hates me- not only for turning away from Him in my fury-woven sorrow, but for being me. For hating the Christian institution. For being queer. For being mentally ill. For being strong-minded. For finally, for once in my life, starting to say what I think. For questioning. For having true hatred for other people. For wanting revenge. For wanting those who hurt others to suffer tenfold. For what I eat. For who I love. For being a leftist- a communist. For being angry. For writing the very criticism I am writing at this moment.
Marji reminded me, at least a little bit, that God is not this cruel, hypocritical, hateful person I think of Them as. Marji made her God a straight-haired version of Karl Marx. He was gentle, he was thoughtful, he was peaceful, he was accepting, he was loving. He was what I used to believe God was. He was what I desperately wish I could believe God is.
I would give anything to have the childlike innocence I had before. I blamed God for hating me, for being cruel, for leaving me. I know now that it was truly the fault of false, evil Christians that led me astray. But I will never forget what they said, or what they did, or how they made me feel. I will never love myself in full because there will always be a part of me that believes my own Creator hates me.
I wish I could love myself. I wish God could too.
So, how to respond to such an honest and forthright post? Let’s start with your literary analysis.
Marji does (and you did) what we all do: identifying God by what we know. I have known some women who confessed that they cringe at the idea of God as father because they could not get past what their own fathers had done. With these women I shared those biblical texts that reveal God’s maternal characteristics that we often overlook. The fact is that you can’t understand an abstract idea without relating it to something tangible (this is why metaphor is so important in language), and so the identities of Marx and God merge in Marji’s mind. You’ll note that God moves away from her when she becomes self-righteous, but he never condemns her. It is interesting that, in drawing those frames, Satrapi is so self-aware. She recognizes–quite apart from scripture or doctrine–what God is like, and she sees him as more hurt than angry at her. In Persepolis, the God who condemns belongs to the hypocritical Regime; his shadowy presence behind the Revolution reflects a decidedly human agenda.
As for your self-analysis, I find your prior chats with God to be a healthy and biblically sound practice. I think you should resume these chats! I don’t know the details of the trauma you describe, but why would you let bad people stand between you and God? The “godly” people in Persepolis are anything but, and it is the same today in all faiths, including mine. In my view, the only thing that is keeping you from a life of faith, should you want it again, is your wounded self-esteem. Why not let God define your worth, instead of other people?
Now, you do say that you harbor hatred towards others and desire revenge, but are these attitudes getting you anywhere? I struggle with this myself. We say with Frederick Douglass, will a righteous God not answer for these things? And yet, it seems to me, to bring fire down on the heads of our enemies makes us a bit too much like them. But, to let go of the hatred is to replace it with love. This is what separates true people of faith from everybody else, because God is love.
We really ought to chat more on these things if you ever want to, because I like conversations with intelligent people (there are so few lol) about important things!
You phrase your last sentence as a wish, but it looks like a prayer to me. See John 6:37 for an answer. (OK, I know, but you walked right into that one…)
I don’t know who this creator is who hates Marv. I think Marv is pretty darn awesome!
Thanks for sharing.