You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

My name is Chris Alonso, and I'd like to talk about a tornado that touchdown in my neighborhood and clarified my relationship with God.

The house is shaking and we're hearing the noise.

The roof's about to fly off this thing.

I remember thinking, in this panicked moment, and in this moment of desperation, I remember thinking, you know, a very basic human nature instinct of take me, don't take my son, take me that very quickly turned into a prayer.

Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous account of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were forever altered after having almost died.

These are first hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.

Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.

Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

So I grew up Catholic.

I was raised Catholic in the large Mexican family in San Antonio.

Obviously all of us were Catholic, and just as a matter of course, we were going to church every Sunday.

We were going to church together, you know, my family taken up multiple pews in our church, you know, and then all of us going to eat lunch afterwards and then hang out with each other after we'd all go swimming or play basketball.

You know.

We just spent the entire Sunday together as a family, and that was our tradition that we did every weekend, week out.

We were very involved with that church.

My grandparents in particular, my grandfather was an engineer.

He helped design the annex that went on to that church.

He was very proud of that that he's able to use his talents to be able to improve his church community, his church family.

And then what happened for me was my grandmother died.

And you know, my grandmother, who had devoted her life to this church, and who devoted so much of her love and her energy to serving this church and serving this community and serving God first and foremost, had a Jimi eyes a very undignified end of her life.

And she suffered quite a bit, and you know, had dementia, probably Alzheimer's.

Well, you know, she just kind of lost She kind of lost her mind and deteriorated physically.

It was difficult to watch.

The whole time.

I was furious that I'd imagined someone who served God so diligently and so truly and with so much of their heart deserved better than this.

And that was my break.

That was when I said, God, you and me aren't friends anymore, and I became hostile.

At that point.

I was angry at God for how he had done my grandmother.

It didn't make any sense to me.

January is tornado season in Alabama, and that was something that was very new to me.

So for people who don't encounter something like a tornado season, it's like clockwork for us.

You know, they test the sirens daily at noon, so that you know what the sound of the sirens are.

So you get used to that, and you get used to tornado watches, and you get used to tornado warnings, and you get used to this feeling that they're right there.

And so this wasn't the first one that we'd been through.

There were plenty, and there were plenty that even I remember that year in particular, there were it was really active.

I think the week before there had been a tornado that touched down pretty close to us, and I mean like miles away, but it touched down close enough that you know, we were getting concerned messages from family in Texas.

And then the day before that was on a Saturday.

The day before we got a warning and that one again the touchdown pretty close to us, and I want to say it was like one or two miles away from us, so closer, but still not where I felt like we were in mortal danger.

We still did all of our prep Again, my son is very young at this point, he's seven years old or so, so it's calming him down, getting us prepared.

You're supposed to go into an interior room, but we don't have interior rooms in this house.

It's very small.

I should add that to the house where I live is.

It's in what's called a mill village, which is these very small houses that are constructed around, in this case, a cotton mill that's about one hundred years old.

And they built all of these little houses and that's where all the workers would live, and all the workers then would be able to walk to work at the cotton mill.

This whole neighborhood that I'm currently sitting in.

That's what it's for, that's what it was originally built for.

So all these little houses, they're all small, they're all identical.

They've over time been they've been alterations to a lot of them.

Some of them at this point are just straight up flipped people.

Just they're so old and they're so beat up that when these people come in and flip the houses, they literally strip them completely bare.

I mean, take the walls off, They keep the slab, they keep the roof, and that's it, because the rest of it is not worth keeping.

So, you know, I was very aware of that because we had done a little bit of work and we'd taken out some walls.

I knew how flimsy this house was.

We were able to take it down with sledgehammers.

So very conscious of that.

While we're being weather aware, that's what they call it round here.

They call it being weather aware.

When you're supposed to be looking out for tornadoes.

Saturday, we get this tornado warning.

We see that it's coming close to us, so we clear out the closet.

We put down pillows, we put down blankets, all the things you're supposed to get the water and the flashlights and the batteries and the radio, and I've got my phone open looking at all these radar maps and very nervously going out on the porch keeping my eye on the sky, that kind of thing.

And so we're ready, and I've got my son ready, and I want to make sure my son's comfortable in there.

And it misses us.

We see where it touches down.

We see that it's close, but it's not right on top of us.

We can relax, so that goes fine.

And usually when you get a storm that bad and it hits that close, that's kind of the end of it.

I hadn't been in one where it didn't.

Just you know, the next you wake up and the sky is clear and everything's fine.

That's what we were used to.

But after all that and all the nerves of that on Saturday, we wake up on Sunday and it's Groundhog Day.

It's the exact same thing.

We get the exact same kind of warnings, it's showing the exact same kind of pattern.

It looks like it's going to hit this exact same kind of place, and so we go right back in and we're doing the same thing, and you know, we are all I remember all of us in the neighborhood.

Again, these are all really tiny houses.

We're all packed right on top of each other.

And I remember all of us on our porches, all coming out looking and all of us kind of waving to each other.

We could all see that we were all doing the same thing.

We're all nervous, and we're all checking things out.

And then the moment that all of us kind of realized, Okay, it's time to get inside.

All the alerts are going off, the thing is starting.

We know that it's coming.

You know, my son was really scared and on the verge of tears.

We hadn't been directly in something like this before.

And I told him, don't worry because right now the rain is falling so heavy, and see how the rain is sideways, See how the wind is whipping the rain around like that.

That means that we're on the outside edge of it.

That means that the center of it, where you know the bad storm is, isn't here.

So it's a little scary, and it feels like there's a lot going on.

But when you need to worry is when that rain stops.

And then the rain stopped, and I looked out the window and I saw everything go completely calm, and the sky turned green, and my ears popped from the change in air pressure.

You know, all the things that you're told to look out for, and they all happened, just one after the other, and I realized what was happening.

And my son asked me, Daddy, is the tornado coming for us?

And I said yes.

Because I didn't want to lie to him, I rushed him into the closet.

And you know, the day before when we were doing this, it was like, all right, come on, my love, let's go.

Let's go get comfortable, let's sit down into you.

And this I just grabbed him.

I said, move, we gotta move, we gotta go, shoved him into the closet, wrapped ourselves in the pillows and cushions and everything inside of it, and pulled the door closed as much as I could.

But the closet is so small I could actually latch the door or anything, so I was just holding it closed.

And then it was honest, the house is shaking, and we're hearing the noise.

People always talk about the noise, and I didn't understand that until I heard it myself, but it's horrifying that the freight train sound.

That's just this relentless beast upon you.

I can feel the house shaking back and forth.

And I didn't dead bolt the front door.

I didn't think to.

I just had closed it and the wind kicked in the front door, and for some reason, that was the most terrifying part.

That's the thing that I still think back on and get.

You know, my heart jumps the feeling of that, of the door being kicked in by the wind.

And you know, all I could think about was if anything happens right now, there's nothing I can do.

I have no power here, and I'm clutching onto my son like I'm surrounding him.

I'm shielding over him.

In my head, I'm thinking, I don't know, a fence post is going to go flying through or something, and it'll get me and not him.

You know, I'm covering him.

But somewhere in my head, I'm thinking the roof's about to fly off this thing, and when that happens, I'm gonna get sucked up into the air.

And when that happens, there's nothing I can do.

And I'm reassuring my son and I'm telling him, I'm here, You're okay, everything's fine, I love you, everything's fine.

But in my head, I'm thinking like, there's no way, there's nothing I can do.

If it's just if the storm decides it's gonna take us, it's gonna take us.

And I'd never been so scared.

And I remember thinking, in this panicked moment, and in this moment of desperation, I remember thinking, you know, a very basic human nature instinct of take me, don't take my son, take me, And in thinking that, that very quickly turned into a prayer.

I don't know if it was because of the helplessness of that moment and the realization that there wasn't anything else there that was going to protect us.

I don't know if it was just the instinct inside of me that had never died through all of this, but yeah, man, I was a guy.

I in my lowest moment, I turned to God, at my most afraid, I turned back to God and I prayed and granted.

The thing that I prayed for was for God to take me, but really to spare my son.

I remember specifically that the prayer I was saying to God was if it comes down to it take me instead of him.

And it happened so quickly, you know, that was probably like three seconds, I don't know.

And then you know, the doors kicked in by the wind.

At this point, we're hearing everything in all the everything's rattling and flying around outside, and I hear my neighbor's tree snap in half, and the smell of it wafts into the house through the open door, like that smell of broken wood, you know, because it's a live tree, you know, it's still fresh inside.

So it snaps and that smell comes in.

And then everything's calm and the storm's done, and you know, we come out in a daze to see our neighborhood just wrecked.

And you know, again our neighbor's tree, thankfully, I mean a couple of feet over would have destroyed their house, but it landed in the street, just blocked off the street.

We saw a lot of that in the neighborhood, these huge trees, huge like pine trees that just fell over completely and were on their side.

And the roots.

I remember I took a couple of pictures of my son and I walking around the neighborhood and you can see the root systems or two three times taller than him, these big old trees that were just yanked out of the ground.

Somehow, nobody died, nobody was injured.

One house was totaled, and a couple of others were very severely damaged.

But that was it.

We were very lucky for a neighborhood is densely populated as it was, that we came out okay.

And I remember this feeling, everybody coming out of their houses and all of us in this dense little neighborhood all checking on one another and walking around and saying, are you people okay?

Are your people okay?

That's what everyone kept saying.

Everyone wanted to know that everyone else's people were okay.

And I joined a group of men in the neighborhood who were going around and clearing branches out of the streets so that emergency vehicles could come in.

And we were all just in a daze and all this adrenaline going.

I know I was and couldn't believe our luck.

You know, years later I grapple with how much of it is luck and how much of it is an appeal to God, which is kind of a sticky question and one that I never liked because it's like twenty something people were killed in tornadoes in this area, so what they didn't pray?

It's a sticky place to be.

But I know, at least for myself, I saw that we were untouched, and I mean untouched.

It knocked over our garbage can outside, does it?

Everything in our house?

Completely untouched, totally safe, And whether that was a coincidence or not, I definitely took it as a wake up call.

Not necessarily a sign, but something that reminded me.

Hey man, in your deepest, darkest, most frightened moment, you didn't appeal to science.

You appealed to God.

And that stuck with me.

I don't want to pretend that I immediately went to church or anything, but it definitely started a process that took years to totally unravel to where I am now.

It definitely brought me out of the depths.

It definitely brought me out of this feeling that God wasn't there or that God was powerless, and I definitely leaned heavier into this spiritual side.

I know that my father, he's very fond of and I've had a lot of scrapes, a lot of close calls, and my father is very fond of reminding me that my grandparents are protecting us.

We survived a really nasty car accident on the highway and my father said that was Grandma.

Grandma's watching out for you.

So for a long time that was the position I adopted.

That was where I was comfortable.

It wasn't necessarily comfortable with totally crediting God, totally crediting Jesus, but I could very comfortably say that my grandparents, as angels were watching over us.

That felt okay, which I realize now is kind of a as a pathway to get there, but something I did very much believe that.

I do very much believe that they're watching out for us, and in retrospect, do very much believe that.

You know, maybe maybe my grandmother traded some of her earthly dignity for some serious clout in the afterlife.

I don't know.

Maybe that's how it works, none of us know.

So I held that, but I still was very resistant to being in the church.

It really wasn't until I started dating a woman who religion was very important to her, and she made it very clear that it was going to be difficult for us to have a full relationship with each other if I didn't take care of this spiritual side of myself.

And I said, well, you know, I'm not unfamiliar with the church.

Of course I'll go to church with you.

And so we started going together.

But it didn't really totally hit, and she could tell that it didn't totally hit, and I think she found it very unsatisfying.

Well, ultimately, when we broke up, she told me that she wanted to be with someone who was going to grow with her in those pews, and she could tell that that was not going to be me, which I was offended by at the time because I thought, I'm, of course, I'm very spiritual, you know, I believe in all this and that, but I didn't believe in any of it particularly strongly.

I'm out here lighting my candles, I'm out here crediting my grandparents with blessing us.

But it didn't really go a lot further than that, and I think she knew that she could feel that, and so found it very unsatisfying.

I still have all the trappings, and I still like pulling out my Bible and very often read.

I'm real big on the Beatitudes.

I reread that all the time.

I think it's beautiful.

It's a beautiful way to live.

I feel like most Christians don't live by it, which is part of what had kept me out of the church, particularly the church around here South.

I just saw a lot of hypocrisy didn't feel like feeding into it, so that hung for a while.

Recently I have started going to church, and if I'm being honest, the thing that sparked that was that same woman.

A couple of years after we broke up, she came back around and I was in a deep, deep funk at that point and had been for a while.

I had just kind of reached this point in my journey in Alabama where I just gave up and felt like I've been here for ten years, things just weren't happening.

Things just weren't connecting.

I couldn't find love.

I couldn't find a relationship that was a big deal for me.

That was a big thing that that had never really happened for me in the decade i'd lived here, Like, I just hadn't had that kind of a connection.

So I just gave up, and I stopped using the apps, and I stopped trying to meet people, and I just kind of sat in this house all lonely and drank and dressed a great deal and pulled back from my friends, pulled back from my family.

And I just thought, I'm sitting in here.

I'm not doing any I ain't doing anybody no harm, you know, just sitting in here by myself.

It's not that big of a deal.

If I want to destroy my own body, it's my own business.

And then we went home for Christmas.

And while my son and I were there visiting our family for Christmas, my mother had a couple of heart attacks.

She had one in the house while we were there, and I, you know, it was directly across the hall from her.

She called me on her phone for me to come in and get her, and I thought she was having a really bad diabetic attack.

So we you know, I tested her blood and I could see that it was normal.

We realized that something else is going on.

So you called the ms and had them come out and get her.

It took her straight to ice you and ice you.

They said she was going to need a triple bypass, but that they were nervous about going in because of the diabetes, because she'd had it for thirty years and that can really do some serious damage to the body, but in particular to the circulatory system.

And you know, I should add at this point I kind of alighted over it.

But pretty recently before that, my mother had lost four of her siblings, one right after the other.

So that also wasn't helping too much with where I was at with my faith.

I was like, again, this is a family that has followed you and that has believed in you and given so much to you, and man without mercy was just slaughtering members of my family.

You know, this very large family suddenly became small in a very short amount of time.

And I thought all of us thought my mother was next.

And she then she had another heart attack in Icee you, and they rushed her off to surgery before they could be done with the tests that they were going to do.

Talk for sure, it was a death sentence, and she survived.

They did a procedure pre surgery.

They didn't even cut her open.

They'd been trying to put a stint and open up the artery.

They tried to do that when they first brought her in, but but they couldn't.

They couldn't get it to budge.

And when they tried it again pre surgery.

It worked completely, removed the blockage, no surgery needed at all, which meant, of course, then no recovery from surgery needed.

She was totally fine.

They sent her home like two days later.

That was in December.

It's now May.

She just finished her rehab.

She's totally healthy.

It's craziness.

So again I'm sitting in there in the ICU and I'm praying, and this time I'm not resistant to it, or this time I'm not.

I still feel kind of crappy about it.

We'll kind of feel like, all right, I know I haven't seen you in a while, and I know that last time I saw you in person, it was just I was there like holding this girl's hand, like trying to impress her, like, I know that you and me don't have a real great relationship, but if you could do me a solid here, that would be amazing.

And God did us a solid.

That didn't change things immediately for me, but it got me thinking a lot.

And I was still in my rut when this woman came back around into my life and was again telling me about how there was going to be a roadblock between us because of this lack of spirituality.

So she was very much heavily on my mind when I walked into a church for the first time in years, but she wasn't why I stayed.

And I just found a place.

And it's a little church that's in my neighborhood that coincidentally is like right down the block from the one house that was destroyed in that storm.

That's a little church of my neighborhood that I can walk to that was taken over by new leadership a year ago.

And I really like them, and I like the way that they preach the Gospel, and I like the way that they approach religion and the way that they meet the skepticism head on.

And every Sunday before at the beginning of the service, in welcoming us, our pastor's names Patrick Patrick welcomes us by saying, whether church has never been your thing, or used to be your thing, or has always been your thing, there's a place for you here.

And I love the way that he said that because that's exactly how I thought about it.

It welcomed me immediately.

I was like, I know where you're at, man, I know that we don't have to pretend that you're this super religious person who's been observing it your whole life.

It's not necessary for being in this room.

They're very welcoming that way, and it's in fact, just the entire doctrine of the undergirds all of this.

They're a Methodist are so they're among those that stayed Methodists when they began performing gay marriages.

There's the others that splintered off that left as a result of it.

Patrick, my pastor, was one of the people who argued locally to all of them in favor of staying and became a bit of a pariah in that community because of it.

But obviously for me, that makes me very proud of him.

I came in on ash Wednesday just because I felt like I missed the ceremony.

I missed the ceremony of my youth having the ashes put on your forehead.

And my neighbors had been talking this church up for a while, and so I decided to go just give it a try.

And I've been every Sunday since, and I still don't totally I know exactly where I'm at with all of my belief but they speak to that a lot in there, and they speak to the uncertainty of faith as being an important part of it, and how that's healthy and normal.

It's definitely a church that meets me where I'm at, and that allows me then to take these teachings and take these lessons, and take this mission of in my life being a force of good for the people around me and bringing peace and joy and grace, all these words that get thrown around a lot, but they suddenly meant something to me, and I suddenly saw the way that I was enacting them and that I wanted to be that, especially this idea of being an agent of peace.

I wanted when I walked into a room.

I wanted people to do when I walked into a room, to feel like, Okay, everything's going to get better now, which I always felt like.

I always had that feeling, but there's something about adding a structure to it and adding an ultimate purpose to it that really felt good.

And I recognize it's not everybody's thing, and it doesn't need to be everybody's thing, but I like this idea that I am unconditionally loved by God, I'm unconditionally loved by Jesus, and that my mission then is to take that unconditional love and pass it on to other people, whether or not they believe in in God or Jesus, or whether or not they you know where or not they pissed off at me.

That's the meaning of unconditional.

It's the thing that a lot of churches miss.

It's like, you just have to pass on that peace and that love and that happiness, expecting nothing in return.

You pass that unconditional love on to other people and it makes things better.

And I very much am living that way now, and I'm happier as a result of it, and I'm seeing the way that it's changed my life for the better.

And as strange as it is, it is hard for me to imagine me getting there without all of the steps that led up to it, that kind of butterfly effect, Like I don't know that I get here if our neighborhood isn't crutched by a tornado, and I'm not forced to confront this idea of where my heart's at and why my heart is there.

We as human beings, waste a lot of energy questioning the reasons behind the things that happen instead of just living in the present moment, recognizing that they did happen, and acting and moving from that, because once you do that, you start questioning all these things, questioning whether or not you deserve these things.

And I could probably go a thousand rounds on whether or not my son and I deserve to survive that tornado, and dissecting the word deserved, and dissecting what happens with people who do lose their homes and their lives and how all that stacks up spiritually.

You could do that, but I don't see any real purpose in it.

I see instead living in the present, saying it did happen for whatever reason it happened, and to be thankful and grateful that it did happen, and then to take that gift and do something good with it.

I think that's the greater purpose of it.

Welcome back.

This is a Live Again joining me for a conversation about today's story or my other Alive again story.

Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Dye, and I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Chris is somebody that I've known for a very long time now, well, you know, relatively, it's a little over a decade now.

Yeah, when I met him, he was not at peace with himself.

He moved to Atlanta from from Brooklyn, where he'd had this like idyllic, kind of like rock and roll lifestyle, and he hadn't yet moved to Alabama to be really close to his son.

He was living in Atlanta as a sort of like you know, as a sort of compromise where he could still be in a big city and within ninety minutes of his kid, but realized, you know, after a couple of years that that just wasn't close enough.

So it's really really interesting to hear this story, to hear him kind of come to this this place where he is, where he's found purpose, where he's found religion, where he's found like a real love of his life, and a real community after you know, a decade in the desert, I guess.

So it's just really interesting to suddenly see a person like snap into place and not know why, and then to find out this story.

It's really I think that it's a story that is probably very common that you come really close to death, and it's just like something what we've been talking about, something it triggers this need for a search, if nothing else, that's like the true, I think, a true gift of having come close to death, wanting to find some meaning instead of just existing.

Day to day.

It wakes your ass up, right, it.

Wakes your ass up.

And I mean, you know, when you listen to him talk about that moment comforting his kid.

With the wind kicking the wind.

Kicking the door open, what a metaphor to I know, with like literally having your door kicked in and letting the.

Spirit reminded me of poultry guyst when when you know, like countdown on the you know, the the seconds between the thunder, the lightning and the thunder.

But he's like, you don't have to worry until the rain stops.

Yeah, and then yeah, that's okay, now you gotta worry.

Yeah.

But I think it's also I think it's also telling the kind of relationship he has with his child to begin with that, Like he did not sugar coat it when the when the moment came, I was like, okay, now we got to do this.

Okay, now we're in trouble, let's get in the closet.

But what struck me?

What was it?

I was really intrigued by his So he's he's fallen out with God.

He's watched the way God treated his grandmother, yeah.

In his view, he's like, so, what's the point if it's if there's that much pain and suffering, and if this person who was so devout and did so much work in your name or what have you to be treated quote treated like this didn't sort of get any reward for that, you know, if anything got the opposite got punishment, right, and just pure suffering.

And then he goes on to see that throughout the world, and so he has this moment he's like, well, why you know, she spent her whole life being devout and working in the name of this, and look what happened to her.

So what's the point is sort of I think, you know, he's like, and he lost God, but then when push came to shove, there was God.

Yeah, And so after that I could see how that would send you into this reeling conversation, you know, including alcoholism and other things.

I think that for him this was more about reconciliation with God.

The church itself or the dog my itself is unimportant.

It's more about finding community, finding peace, and sort of reconciling with God after you know, the way his grandmother or the way her life ended.

I think that even I mean beyond that, just as a friend of his watching his mind, watching his sort of spirit become more peaceful than it ever was.

Chris led a frenetic life.

When I knew him in Atlanta, he was all over the map, just watching from the outside the sort of peace, reconciling not just with God, but like with where his life has gone.

He did not love Alabama when he moved there.

It was the opposite of where he wanted to be in the world.

He'd come from Brooklyn.

He was like keyed into everything.

He had a large community of musicians and friends and people that he loved.

He had a passionate life that got disrupted by you know, his divorce and his ex wife wanting to move back home where she came from.

And I think that part of the reconciliation with God was also a recon with where his life had brought him, and in that he was able to find peace that he'd never known.

He was able to really act with love toward the people that are in his family, the people that he cares about.

And I think that there was a sort of like every like, I mean, this is a recurring thing.

There's a sort of letting go of your preconceived notion of yourself, of your community, of your church, of your God, you know.

And I think that was a big theme here as well.

He grew up in the Catholic Church and then left it and then kind of made his way back to the church, if not Catholicism.

Well, I think it.

First of all, I love how honest he was about his walk and his faith.

But second of.

All, it seems like he moved from a real, transactional understanding of God, where my grandmother did this for you, So why are you treating her like that?

Which has always been a theological problem for me when people look at as at their spirituality is some kind of good luck charm or protector, you know, he seems to I don't know if I could really hear that he quantitatively made that change in his mind, but everything he sort of said about his faith in the second half of his story, the transaction is gone.

You know.

It was like, I feel that my son and I were protected, but the twenty people who die in hurricanes or tornadoes they may have been praying as well.

Like, I think that that's a real, real Well, I'm sure understanding that God isn't necessarily a little fairy that's going to, you know, tap you on the head and pull you out of something.

I mean, I think that a lot of that, though, can be laid on the Church.

Yeah, I mean, the Catholic Church is an excellent example of transactional, a transactional relationship with God.

You go and sit in confession booth, you say, like, I coveted my neighbor's dog.

You know, I want to steal my neighbor's dog.

I love this dog so much.

I think that it should be mine.

I coveted it.

And the priest says, well, that's wrong.

And the guy's like, I know it's wrong.

It's my neighbor's dog.

It's his family.

Not going to steal the dog.

And so the priest says, well, like, if you just say these prayers to God, if you just recite this stuff, he'll forgive you.

It's transactional.

It's like I'm going to give up this much of my time.

I'm going to give up this much of myself and in return, God will forgive me and I'll move on.

And frequently the church, and you know, and frequently the church has two answers to why does you know?

Why do bad things happen to good people, and one is they didn't pray hard enough.

They weren't they didn't believe in their faith enough.

Or two, God has a magical plan and we aren't right enough to see it.

And those frequently sound a little bit like bullshit.

And I'm not casting aspersions on the entirety of the church.

I'm casting aspersions on certain aspects of the church's dogma.

Yeah, I don't know if like theological theologically, there's many preachers that would preach that.

I just think people might go into it with that understanding, you know that that you know what I mean.

Well, I think it's kind of built in.

You know, if you believe in this hard enough, then you will be taken care of and that, yes, And I think but that's what everybody is kind of raised with, now, you know.

Granted, I think it's it's definitely on the preacher and on the church to say like how you'll be taken care of.

And I think that the better churches are basically like live a good life, you know, have faith and you will have peace.

Yeah, And I think some of the some of the less savory churches are like you do this and everything will go your way, like the Gospel of prosperity.

You do this and you'll get like cars.

If you give to us, you'll get cars.

It is the most transactional version, absolutely, and.

That points to a desire like that's points to a lack.

So basically, if there's some reward for your prayers or you know, you petitioned the Lord with prayer.

Or right, but I think some of that comes from, you know, a real place where you know, he says, you know, Chris, I've known was as a pretty logical, scientifically minded guy, and he says, in this moment of the tornado, I'm not praying for science.

I'm praying to God.

And I think probably every one of us in this room, to whatever degree of atheism or faith that we have, probably would turn to a higher power almost out of instinct.

And so in the Foxhall there are no atheists.

And I think that that So I think that that's where maybe the base of this transactional relationship comes from.

You're thinking, God, get me out of here, but a lot of our survivors aren't necessarily saying get me out of this situation.

You know.

I think it's but I think that that's where out of that instinct comes this transactional idea.

And it's not necessarily the theological purpose of having a relationship with God.

I wonder when at what point any given church or religion organized you know sort of faith stress to lean into a fear based kind of rationality.

That's that's when I.

Was saying to Lack, it's like power strung.

I mean, that's that's about a power grab.

I mean, that's what it comes down to.

It's like it's like, you know it the pointing at the lack is the fear base, Like if you want this, if you want to have an afterlife, if you want to be you know, go through the pearly gates.

That's just it's this fear based sort of logic bearing down upon people who are needing some sort of you know, transcendent you know meaning.

And it's I mean I think also that you know, Catholicism is also you know, big on punishment of you know, punishment of hell fire and stuff like that.

I mean, there's so much theology built around like getting punished, and I think that that in particular is frequently utilized.

And that's it.

That also is transactional.

It's like come to the church, live by our tenants, tithe, give us money, and you will be saved from hell fire.

And that's what Anne Bayford was saying.

No, it's compassion, it's it's absolutely and.

That's where Chris got to and that, yes, that's where Chris's story went to, because the message of the Crucifixion is not you have to do all these things.

The message of the Crucifixion is I put myself on the cross for you.

You don't have to do anything.

You don't have to do anything transactional for me to love you and for God to be looking out for your soul.

Jesus was a cool guy.

I think that, like I think that a lot of his followers were, you know, twist utilizing that power for their own purpose.

Absolutely no denial.

But what a lot of this brings me back to, and actually, what this exchange between you two brings me back to is his talking about instead of coming back to what a lot of these folks have said about sort of the particularities being what gets in the way, you know, we start debating these things, and he said and that this just really struck me because I find it always find it to be really interesting when you have a person of faith who's clearly very stalwart in their faith, but they're also sort of allowing for an uncertainty at the same time.

I find that to be fascinating because he says at one point, YEA, whether it's the divine or the human hand that's opening all these doors for me, now, ah, that doesn't really matter, Like he keeps coming back to, it doesn't really matter.

And that ability to just sort of let go of that need for control and that need for absolute knowing is what brings him that sense of peace, or at least I get that sense.

And yeah, that's that's one.

Thing that I found really compelling here.

I've heard I've heard say that faith is not true.

Faith is not the absence of doubt at all.

In fact, you can't have the faith without the doubt.

It's because of doubt.

It's in spite of doubt.

It's you know, it's it's a choice, as it were.

I don't know well, and kind of what you're saying with him coming to the place, it's almost like you've he's come to a place where he doesn't have to thank anybody for the gift.

You know, when you give somebody something.

Sometimes it's nice to get a thank you, but often you give somebody something because you want them to have the gift, you don't need to thank you.

And so he's to the point where it's like, I don't need to attribute this blessing to anybody.

I'm just grateful, whether it's coming from God or wherever I'm loved, and I'm you know.

Don't ask so many questions, kid, we got you, So can.

I ask a question?

Actually, as a listener, somebody here who knows his Bible can can illustrate this for me.

He talks about how you know still he for a long time, he always you know, read his Bible, and he said, you know, I've always been big on the beatitudes?

What are the beatitudes?

Stephen Colbert loves the beatitudes?

Yeah?

Yeah, solved him from massive depression.

Help me out here for our listener who doesn't know.

I think it's the Sermon on the the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the poor blessed?

Or the meek?

Yeah?

He sounds like he's he's in a really good church.

Like the church that he's part of is the one that gives women a place of leadership.

You know, they perform marriages between same sex couples.

You know that they're just passing the love through.

And I loved his quote.

I'm unconditionally love by God, and my mission is to take that unconditional love and pass it on to other people.

You pass it on unconditional love on to other people, and it makes things better.

And I think that kind of gets into the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven could be here on earth if we would just practice the tenets of our faiths, whatever the faith is.

Yeah, I keep coming back to, like, if the ego and the fear bases he go, you know, the need to belong to this religious sect or to have this political sort of identity, or to have these things that you know, another person said segregate us.

And in light of these incidences or whenever we're challenged or whenever there's trauma, it's this opportunity to understand the opposite of that, which is that we're all in connected and there's a community that and it's the compassion in the community that that's really what it's about, and that's really what perhaps Jesus was, you know, saying specifically, it's not about where you it's not about going into the church and praying to God and having some transactional relationship with God.

It's about you know, compassion and community and which is the opposite.

So if anything can destroy that fear based, ego based, identity based sort of logic and get you over the hump to just caring for one another.

It sounds like is that bridge was just his time away from the church, you know, and then he found this other church that maybe has and it doesn't and the way he comes and it doesn't sound like, Yeah, it doesn't sound like there's a click in his mind between the transactional and he had his own.

Yeah, it was like somebody gently waking him up with a tornado.

Yeah he fell.

Well, like you come back to the flock, come back to the fault.

I feel like the biggest suspects for you know, the biggest assholes in the world, even if it's like an organized asshole, like an organized group of assholes is fear.

It's like, you know, the most insecure amongst us.

Are the ones who are the most terrified, and there's plenty of things to be afraid of.

It's a very real emotion and it's a very real thing to want to protect yourself and want to have an answer.

You know, so you can't fault people for feeling that way, but but for systems to take advantage of that is sad, especially when it's something as beautiful as potentially beautiful for spirituality.

Next time on a Live Again, we meet Dana Swanson, a voiceover artist and musician whoever came a brain tumor.

Documenting her own healing journey brought her new purpose and community.

My career is taking off.

I was married and just happy.

Everything's coming up.

Dana, it just felt on point, and then my saturn return hit.

Dana Swanson is a creative force, an award winning writer and producer at Adult Swim, a voice actor, a musical performer, and a self proclaimed comedy nerd.

But in twenty twelve, her world unraveled when she began to lose control of her speech.

What started as a stuttered sentence became a devastating diagnosis.

Reminds me to always keep that door open to like, there's something else to this person, there's something else in their life.

But it also gives me a lot of empathy for everybody's gone through something we don't know about.

We're humans.

We all have battle scars, like we all have things that we had to do their hard.

In this episode of Alive Again, Dana recounts the surreal journey from slurred words to a high risk, eight hour brain surgery that would change her life forever.

With humor, vulnerability, and crystal clarity, she explores the collapse of identity, the death of an old self, and the painful but profound process of learning to live again.

Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die, Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.

Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.

Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.

Our studio engineers are Rima El Kali and Nomes Griffin.

Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka, Brent Die, and Alexander Rodriguez.

Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.

I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Special thanks to Chris Alonso for sharing his story.

Alive Again is a production of IRT Radio and Psychopia Pictures.

If you have a transformative near death experience to share.

We'd love to hear your story.

Please email us at a Live Again Project at gmail dot com.

That's a l I v e A g A I N P R O j E C T at gmail dot com