Member-only story
Leaving My Religion
Haiku comics as a diary of my search for the divine
Before I decided the church I had been born into wasn’t true, I came to understand that it wasn’t good. I left my faith and community behind because I woke up to how cruel and controlling it was and how much damage it was doing to people I loved.
Fellow ex-Mormon David Archuleta’s song Hell Together best articulates these feelings. I felt that if God existed, and he was as capricious and cruel as my church was telling me, he was not a god worthy of my devotion.
This gave me the mental and emotional distance I needed to see for myself that the church I had given so much time and energy to was not only not the only true and living church on the face of the Earth, but it was a stranger to the truth.
While the REM song from my youth, Losing My Religion would often pop into my head, I never felt like I had lost my religion. I understood that I had fully left it of my own free will.
However, I still yearned for the holy magic that I had often sensed in moments of quiet meditation. I began to search for different manifestations of the divine. At the same time, in what I thought was an unrelated development, I also began to create haiku comics.
