God, By Committee

The House That Never Held Me

“Jesus loves the little children,
all the little children of the world.
Red and yellow, Black and white,
they are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world…”

I can still hear that song echoing off the walls of my childhood. Tiny voices rising like bubbles, bouncing through the sanctuary, bright and unchecked. Some Sundays we’d switch into “Jesus’ love is a-bubbling over, Jesus’ love is a-bubbling over…” and our hands would make silly little bubbling motions in the air. Back then, joy felt fizzy—like something carbonated was lifting us off the floor. We’d clap on beat (or close enough), smiling wide, palms stinging just a little from the joy of it.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…
Those words lived in my throat like sunlight. When we sang them, the room glowed. Elders nodded along, eyes soft. Aunties fanned themselves with bulletins. Uncle in the front row tapped his foot like the beat was saving him. Faith felt open then—less about rules, more about rhythm.

On certain mornings, just when the choir hit that impossible high note, the grandmothers would start speaking in tongues—words spilling out like water turned to electricity. Their bodies would sway, hands trembling, faces lit from the inside. It was like watching magic take root in real time. As children, we stared wide-eyed, breathless, believing the Holy Ghost had chosen them like lightning choosing trees. The room would shudder with a heat that felt alive.

And there was the candy lady—my grandmother—posted up like the church’s own Mary Poppins, purse bottomless and blessed. Her purse was a treasure chest that never seemed to run out: peppermint swirls, gummy worms, Hershey’s Kisses wrapped like tiny promises. The excitement simmered all service long, but I wasn’t allowed to have any until church was over. Even when I spent the night at her house, I had to wait. That anticipation tasted sugary in my mouth before the wrapper ever touched my hands. Like joy hanging just above reach, sweeter once earned.

Back then, it was exhilarating—mystery made visible.

The smell of overbrewed coffee and potluck warmth floated through the air, anchored by the faint musk of old hymnals—pages worn down by decades of hands. The choir lifted their voices, voices stacked like scaffolding around our hearts. As a child, community tasted like macaroni that only church mothers knew how to make, and the air felt thick with invisible hands braiding us together.

As I grew older, though, that same heat pressed against my ribs differently—less like revelation and more like a slow hand tightening around my throat. The kind of tightening that steals breath one inch at a time. Not sudden—just steady. You try to swallow, but the air grows heavier. Your voice sits low in your chest, trapped behind a cage that’s closing in. The tongue dries. Shoulders inch upward. You can feel the outline of words you’ll never speak pressing against the back of your teeth, desperate and silent. The room doesn’t need to shout to quiet you; it just needs to keep squeezing until you can’t tell the difference between holding your breath and holding your tongue.

The songs stayed simple while the sermons got complicated. The same walls that once held laughter now felt like they were listening too closely. The pew’s edge dug into the backs of my knees, sharp enough to remind me I wasn’t just absorbing sound anymore—I was being evaluated. Eyes lingered longer. Comments got quieter, but heavier. The space that once felt warm now tracked how well I followed invisible choreography: sit like this, smile like that, don’t ask too many questions.

Communion still dissolved into nothing on my tongue, but now there was a bitterness underneath—an aftertaste of expectation I couldn’t swallow.

The stained glass spilled its colors across the floor in fractured rainbows, beautiful but obedient. They didn’t mix, didn’t blur, didn’t dare cross into each other’s light. I felt the same pressure—shine, but not too widely. Sing, but not too loudly. Believe, but not too differently.

Whispers snapped behind cupped hands:

“Why she always got something to say?”
“Mm-hmm, watch her.”
“I’ll pray for her.”

Not insults—just those tight-lipped evaluations that land heavy and linger.

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be welcomed. But when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” — Audre Lorde

But silence was the dress code here. Questions were contraband. Curiosity was a side-eye waiting to happen.

The pastor thundered about obedience while the choir harmonized on freedom. The contradiction twisted in my chest like God with a clenched fist. And the God he described sounded unfamiliar—smaller, angrier, more concerned with control than compassion.

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.” — James Baldwin

But the walls felt like they were inching closer every week. My shoulders curled forward, instinctively protecting the parts of me the room couldn’t see.

There was no dramatic exit.
Just a slow, quiet unlearning of rules that didn’t resonate.

A gradual exhale of someone else’s expectations.

If holiness truly makes us whole, why did I feel like I was leaving pieces of myself at the door?

When I finally walked out, I wasn’t angry. Just unfinished. Outside, the air tasted like possibility—cleaner, sharper, honest.

That was the day I understood:

If God is infinite, any room that requires me to shrink isn’t worship—it’s warfare.

━━━━

Argument Nested in Argument

I used to think faith was a straight line—one path, one book, one God who stamped approval on the lucky few. But as I got older, I realized belief wasn’t a highway. It was a hallway with a thousand locked doors, and everyone swore theirs was the only one that opened.

Every empire in history was built with two tools: a sword, and a scripture. Colonialism didn’t just take land—it took God, offered Him back in translation, and demanded devotion to the edited version. We inherited those edits like family heirlooms, convinced redacted holiness was the whole story.

Pick any religion, and you’ll find entire branches arguing with each other like cousins fighting over who got the bigger serving at Sunday dinner. Christians split into denominations; denominations split into doctrines; doctrines split into sub-doctrines. Same God, same Bible, same bloodlines—but somehow, endless fracture. Everybody corrects everybody else. Everybody needs to be right.

The Bible didn’t arrive with chapters, verses, punctuation, or pastors in polyester suits. Humans built those structures to control the airflow of divinity, to decide who gets to inhale the Infinite. Entire gospels disappeared because a council of men decided they didn’t align with the empire’s annual budget. Faith was politicized long before we learned to pray.

Scroll a little deeper into humanity’s belief systems, and it gets worse. Within Islam, schools debate over interpretation. Within Judaism, sects parse centuries of law. Within Hinduism, lineages wrestle over purity and caste. Within Buddhism, arguments bloom around whose enlightenment counts. It’s like every time humans gather around the sacred, we sharpen our teeth.

And we call this devotion.

Even atheists argue like theologians with a different vocabulary—still fighting for the right to be the final voice in the room.

We’ve created a theology of supremacy:
White supremacy.
Patriarchy supremacy.
Scriptural supremacy.
Sexual supremacy.
Academic supremacy.
Gender supremacy.

Supremacy is just insecurity with a megaphone.

But maybe religion isn’t the only place we do this.

Within the same race: Light skin vs. dark skin Pro-Black vs. not-Black-enough Diaspora vs. native land Africans vs. African-Americans vs. Caribbean.

Inside the same gender: Who is “feminine enough” Who is “masculine enough” Who deserves softness Who earned power.

Inside the LGBTQ+ community: Who’s valid Who’s allowed Who’s performing identity wrong Who’s too much Who’s not enough.

We divide and divide and divide like we’re afraid to be whole. Like wholeness would require mercy we haven’t learned yet.

And it’s never just disagreement. It’s righteousness. A hunger to dominate. A need to be the final voice in the room.

Meanwhile, grief leaks through everything:
The grief of being exiled by the structure you were taught would save you.
The grief of watching family pray against dimensions of you God whispered into your DNA.
The grief of knowing you cannot explain your spirituality to someone who only sees God through bullet points.

The irony? The closer we stand together, the faster we invent new reasons to pull apart.

Identity politics is not new. Kings built altars to themselves. Pharisees wielded doctrine like daggers. Colonizers printed Bibles with obedience verses bolded.

We carve micro-identities like idols and kneel before them as if God needs help sorting the crowd. You’d think shared struggle would braid us together, but instead we build new fences in familiar shapes. We debate translations of translations of translations—as if history didn’t already lose half the story in the margins.

We argue about words while missing the Word.

And then there’s Omnism—the belief that every faith might hold a shard of the same mirror. The idea that truth is a constellation, not a spotlight. That God could be bigger than the fences we build around our fear.

The first time I learned the word, it felt like oxygen hitting a lung that hadn’t expanded in years. Omnism doesn’t ask me to choose a corner. It doesn’t crown one narrative king. It doesn’t require me to amputate my intuition to enter the room. It says: maybe everyone is looking at the same ocean from different shores.

But the moment you step into that thought, you become a threat. Because if God is everywhere, you can’t be sold salvation. You can’t be told you’re broken. You can’t be governed through guilt.

If God is everywhere, then nobody owns the door. Nobody’s key is more golden than anyone else’s. Nobody gets to police the threshold.

Academics hate that. Pastors fear it. Politicians profit when we don’t see it.

And humans hate losing the velvet rope. We cling to our factions like life rafts, because belonging without superiority still feels unfamiliar—too tender, too equal, too ungoverned.

But what terrifies people most is this: if all paths lead to God, then no one gets to stand at the end and hand out gold stars. And without the prize, what do we worship? God? Or hierarchy dressed up as holiness?

Some days, religion feels like an agreement to argue forever—like we’re addicted to tension, like we need someone to be beneath us to feel lifted at all.

There’s a reason sacred spaces feel cramped to someone who sees the Divine everywhere. When your altar is the earth itself, pews feel like cages. When your prayers are questions, dogma feels like duct tape. When your God is infinite, walls make you claustrophobic.

Omnism isn’t confusion. It’s refusal. Refusal to shrink divinity down to what one language can carry. Refusal to pretend the Universe spoke only once. Refusal to believe the most powerful force in existence needs an usher to check IDs.

A world where we don’t ask a middleman to validate our connection to the Divine terrifies institutions built on dependence. Loyalty collapses when liberation is self-authored.

Argue if you want. Debate if you must. Hostility is just the last defense of a crumbling system.

I’m tired of arguments nested in arguments—debates stacked like Russian dolls, each smaller, pettier, more obsessed with control than communion. Maybe faith was never meant to be a courtroom. Maybe truth isn’t something you win. Maybe God doesn’t need us to police each other. Maybe holiness was never supposed to feel like war.

Not the end of the world—the end of permission.

And if all of this offends you, maybe ask yourself who taught you that God was small enough to fit inside your comfort. Because if divinity is real—if God breathes through every tongue, every ritual, every color—then the arguments we fight to defend Him might be the very ones that keep us from hearing Him.

But know this: when belief turns into bureaucracy, God leaves the building first.

━━━━

Where I Put My Body Instead

When I finally stepped out of those doors, I didn’t stop believing. I stopped belonging. There’s a difference. Belief is a pulse. Belonging is paperwork—paperwork that demands signatures in ink made from your tongue, your desire, your submission. And once they file you, someone quietly tears a page from your story, and the plot never reads the same.

For years afterward, I wandered like a child walking through a house with the lights off—hand out, searching for something familiar to grab. I visited mosques and temples, altars and meditation circles, listened to priests and shamans and people with crystals in their pockets as if the stone itself could remind me who I was. Everyone had their version of God. Everyone had their version of fear.

When I told people I saw things—visions, dreams, names of children not yet conceived, warnings that arrived before tragedy did—they nodded like they cared and then asked me to prove it. They wanted receipts for revelations. Evidence for intuition. They wanted me to perform the Divine like a circus act, like a fortune teller at a flea market flipping cards for tips. As if God must audition.

And I learned quickly: the world only loves spirituality when it stays housebroken—when it sits quietly inside frameworks that feel familiar, when it can be cited, certified, and made polite. People are comfortable with the Divine as long as It behaves like a seminar: predictable, digestible, annotated. The moment God refuses to be domesticated—when revelation arrives sweating, trembling, ripping through the membrane of logic—people reach for rules like a fire extinguisher. Institutions want mystery without the mess, ecstasy without the context, holiness without the heat. Institutions don’t preserve the sacred; they privatize access to it. They prefer God curated, not encountered.

Queerness arrived the same way—quietly, like smoke under a locked door. It didn’t announce itself; it revealed itself. And suddenly the same people who taught me God was love had a list of exclusions taped to the back of their hymnal. They said queerness was a spirit to rebuke. But if it was a spirit, why did it feel like recognition? Why did it feel like a childhood friend saying, “There you are”?

Nothing tests a belief system like embodiment. It’s easy to preach unconditional until the condition is your child. The moment I realized my desire wasn’t a mistake, I saw the truth: many people don’t worship God—they worship the thrill of having someone beneath them.

Being queer in religious spaces is like sitting in a burning room while everyone praises the warmth. And when your skin blisters, they lecture you about gratitude. When you scream, they hand you a hymnal. When you point at the fire, they call you divisive. Because control would rather scorch you than admit there’s smoke.

And every time someone tried to shame me into invisibility, the Divine within me didn’t whisper—it thundered. Not something buried. Something immortal.

Because how can the Divine hate what the Divine made?

“The moment we choose to love we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” — bell hooks

My spirituality expanded in directions rules couldn’t contain. I found God in old women braiding hair on porches, blessing each strand with gossip and grace. I found God in drag artists painting their faces into truth, refusing erasure with pigment and defiance. I found God in construction workers laughing loud enough to quake the air on lunch break, hands stained with steel and grit. I found God in rivers, in street dances, in chosen family laying hands on each other in living rooms. I found God in people who didn’t know how holy they looked when they laughed.

I built my altar in motion—on airplanes, in journals, in whispered prayers at 3 a.m. over strangers who would never know my name. I held space for the dying, for the grieving, for the grieving-without-knowing-they’re-grieving. I watched people crack open and bloom in front of me. I watched healing do what sermons never could.

Slowly, I realized my sanctuary was never meant to fit inside their architecture. I am not drywall for their rules to nail into place. I am cathedral and forest and subway breath.

When you speak to God in forms no one taught them to trust, they tilt their heads like you’ve disrupted the choreography they thought was holy. They mistake unfamiliar for incorrect. They call your fluency a threat. But the ones who understand? Their eyes widen like doors finally unlatched. Their hands tremble with relief. Recognition travels deeper than shame ever could.

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies of me and eaten alive.” — Audre Lorde

Being an oracle doesn’t mean I inherited a map. It means I became one—scar by scar, instinct by instinct, dream by dream. I didn’t find lineage outside of history; I found the thread. I learned that ancestry breathes through us, not behind us. I stopped treating memory like a museum and started treating it like marrow.

Healing taught me that temples aren’t built from bricks or pages. They’re built from conversations that blister and cleanse, from truths spoken with shaking voices, from the courage it takes to tell someone, “You are still sacred.”

I author connection.
I carry the Divine.
I expand the room by entering it.
My soul takes up its full dimension.

Now, I place my body where the sacred is happening:
at gravesides where closure becomes ceremony,
in living rooms where someone learns to say “I love you” without bracing,
in hospitals where breath and miracles wrestle in real time,
on street corners where somebody still sings even when no one is listening.

I place my voice where silence once lived.
I place my breath where shame once sat.
I place my purpose where permission used to be.

This is reclamation.
This is remembrance.
This is return.

And if holiness lives anywhere at all, it lives exactly where they told me to leave.

━━━━

God by Committee

The older I get, the more obvious it becomes: humanity doesn’t just build religions. We build committees—rooms full of rules and rosters, velvet ropes and seating charts, where the Divine is expected to swipe a badge just to enter.

Everywhere I look, there are councils debating what God meant, theologians weaponizing footnotes, influencers canonizing aesthetics, strangers on the internet fighting to be first to translate a mystery they’ve never personally met. Arguments nested inside arguments until the truth is buried like a seed beneath bureaucratic concrete.

And the wildest part? The people swinging the biggest Bibles are often the ones most terrified of meeting God without supervision.

We panic at the idea of a God who doesn’t need a middleman, because if the Divine speaks to you directly, then no institution can claim a finder’s fee on your salvation.

So we invent committees—doctrinal boards, denominational councils, cultural gatekeepers, spiritual brand managers—to convince ourselves that God is too complicated for the commoner, too sacred to speak without a translator.

We don’t question whether the text is sacred.
We question whether we were ever authorized to read it.

Whenever God breaks the format, humans scramble to build a new rubric.
We domesticate the Infinite into bullet points.
We add bylaws to mystery.
We put choreography on revelation, as if the Divine needs to be on eight-count.

Meanwhile, we argue about candle colors, clothing lengths, genitals, pronouns, hair, hymns, who’s allowed to love, who’s allowed to lead, who’s allowed to live.

We carve fences inside fences until the meeting room is small enough for our fear to masquerade as conviction.

I’ve seen believers speak of love while starving their own children of acceptance.
I’ve watched pastors preach grace with fists curled behind pulpits.
I’ve watched sacred spaces shrink until only the compliant can breathe inside them.

And through it all, we insist this is devotion.

If your God requires someone else to be less, what you worship isn’t Divinity. It’s dominance.

“Toni Morrison reminded us, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.””

Omnism cracked something open in me.
Not because it told me every path was flawless, but because it revealed that Truth is too vast to be monopolized by one tribe’s trembling.

It taught me to listen for God in unexpected places—in the prayer whispered between lovers, in the rhythm of a drum soaked in ancestral memory, in the hush that falls when a room touches truth at the exact same time.

It taught me that all of us are trying to name the same ocean from different shores.
And maybe that’s why committees form: because the horizon terrifies people who can’t swim.

God doesn’t require a dress code.
God is fluent in contradiction.
God won’t shrink to fit your doctrine.
God doesn’t stop speaking when a meeting adjourns.

There are languages of the Sacred that never learned to bow to protocols.
Because what’s Divine will always choose the wild over the sanctioned.

These days, when someone asks me what I believe, I don’t offer a denomination.
I offer a memory:

The memory of God showing up in all the places I was told They wouldn’t.

In queer love.
In Black laughter.
In immigrant kitchens.
In protest chants.
In bodies healing without permission.
In the old man preaching justice on a cracked sidewalk.
In the eyes of the people the committee forgot to invite.

Faith is not a franchise.
God is not a brand.
Salvation is not a club membership.
And liberation was never meant to be gatekept by a man with a microphone and a list of sins he cherry-picked from a translation panel that never met your grandmother.

This is not the God they voted on, but the One who slipped past the velvet rope, walked into the room barefoot, and sat next to the ones they refused to see.

There is a table where your name arrived before you were born.
There is a language your DNA remembers.
There is a God who never once required a witness to validate your experience.

Maybe ask who taught you that God was only present where someone can profit from your fear.

Because what’s Divine refuses to be privatized.

You can argue policies and bylaws all night,
but when the sun rises,
God will still be found
in the unsanctioned places—
in laughter too loud,
in love too bold,
in souls too ungoverned.

If you’re looking for the Sacred, start where the committee stopped looking.

That’s where God speaks the loudest.

One love,
ESS xo