Yesterday’s Mask

Imposter. Fake. Phony. Hypocrite.

Last night we watched the movie Yesterday. So good! It’s about a musician who wakes up and realizes he’s the only one who remembers the Beatles. So he starts going around playing all their songs as his own and becomes a mega star, only to descend into an inward hell of isolation and inauthenticity.

As we watched I felt an uncomfortable feeling arise and as I stayed curious about it, I could see that it was brining me back to a feeling I lived inside of for years. Roughly between 2010-2013.

If you don’t know, in my previous life (aka 2004-2019) I was a pastor. Michelle and I and a few friends started a church from scratch in 2004 which grew very quickly and became what they call a mega church.

There were many wonderful things about the experience and so many incredible people. But starting in about 2010, I began what ended up being a slow exit from Christianity. I didn’t know that at the time and tried everything to rescue and shore up the crumbling faith I had been raised with and which I had built the church on. The problem was, that faith, as helpful as it had been to me, it wasn’t actually MINE. I learned it. I agreed to it. It didn’t emerge from my own heart and experience with Spirit. I learned it the way I learned arithmetic.

When I was in 5th grade, my dad bought me a guitar and I learned by playing other people’s songs. In fact, mostly Beatles stuff. I’m just realizing that now. Funny. By 7th grade it was all Nirvana and Soundgarden. By high school, I was writing songs for my band, but you could still hear the echoes of Ozzy Osborne and Silverchair.

In so many ways, that’s the story of the church we started in our 20s. I was playing the programs and structures and strategies —and even sermons of my father and my many other wonderful, generous mentors. I managed my staff like them, ran the church like them, saw the world like them and taught the Bible the way they did. But as I hit 30 years old (and my first Saturn return) my soul’s thirst to individuate -that yearning to become fully myself- couldn’t be held back.

This is where i really felt compassion for the character in the movie. I knew that feeling of being trapped. I remember feeling like there was no way out. I was losing my faith, which was painful enough, but the fear of potentially losing my wife and kids and my job and community -everything- if I dared speak my truth was too scary. So I didn’t.

For a few years I retreated deeply into myself and just played the program. I stopped writing my own stuff because I couldn’t risk being honest. I went back and reworked old sermons of my dad and other mentors that I had taught years earlier to just keep things looking stable. There were some weeks where I just copied the sermons Rick Warren had gifted me pretty much word for word. Sure, I told better jokes, but in my paralysis of fear I had become the juke-box-minister. I was like the robotic Chuck-E-Cheese band up there. Stiffly playing the same song over and over while inside I was descending into a personal hell of isolation, loneliness and hypocrisy.

Eventually the pain of my own misalignment was stronger than the fear of loss and so I began bringing my inner truth outward. I started teaching what was in my heart and soul. I was expressing from my own life experience and in relationship with the “god” of my own understanding.

I won’t say life got easier as a result. In fact, externally it got much, much worse. That’s a whole other story that I’m actually sort of bored of telling. But what’s interesting is that as my external world dropped into chaos, my internal world snapped into a healing alignment and I felt more free and heart-centered and in my own body than ever.

As much as that era of my life was painful, it was undoubtedly the necessary catalyst for me to emerge as fully myself. So I raise a glass to that disintegrated hypocrite back then. He was an important stage of my journey and I’ll always be who I am because of the suffering I did during that part of the journey.

You did good, kiddo. I see you, I love you and it gets easier to be yourself. Trust me. ❤️