This arose out of a deep longing to finally describe what it's like leaving a religion. I hope you enjoy it, or if you've had a similar experience - resonate with it.
Take care!


Unholy Symphony
Arcua
 
You find yourself excised from a chorus you’ve been a member of since time-immemorial. You’ve chanted, celebrated, mourned, revered with them. Songs pitched in with all voices, now missing yours. Gatherings discussing the music close their doors to you. The chorus turns their voices away from you.
For the first time, you are left with no songs to sing, no other voices to be heard.
You consider the steps you took that placed you here. You’ve helped write the songs. You’ve helped support your chorus. You’ve made strides in your vocal ability. You’ve practiced your tunes.
Your crime was singing anharmonically with absent songs. In tandem with silence. Dissonant notes in the privacy of a shower. Asynchrony in your sleep.
Notes utterly unheard by others – yet – perplexingly disruptive to their melody.
You’re offered to repent for this harmless dissonance. To reject the propagation of any discordant notes.
But in your moments away from the chorus, you’ve found out about other musics. Ones away from perfect choral synchrony. Where wayward notes can meld together – back whole again. Notes that convey meaning other than blinding purity and holy righteousness. A moodier chord, a darker scale, a stranger pitch. In your travels away from the chorus, you’ve learned new voices. More vocabulary to weave into your music. Deeper chords to explore.
You reject repentance, for you’ve grown more in your time away from the chorus than you ever have trying to perfect the same holy tunes. Your chorus is shocked, but why should they be? They cast you out for blasphemous singing in your time away from the stage, and they reach a tainted hand to bring you back to sing the same strains that you’ve always sung.
They never thought you’d enjoy dissonance. Who would, when all you’ve known is harmony?
But you remember how much time it took to practice harmony. How much pain your throat felt after singing nothing but perfect pitched notes. How much anguish was felt at the slightest imperfect voice ruining the flow of the music. While you gained experience with this chorus, your voice now stands untethered to the traditional keys.
You walk away from your chorus. Their hands are forever outstretched to invite you back, yet the requisite of repentance never changes. They want a voice that doesn’t exist anymore.
You catch that nuance, and you cry. Most of them never wanted you. They only sought another voice to strengthen their choir. And in your deepest, cacophonic sorrow, you hear the faint calls of others. Unholy. Disparate. Amelodic. Warped.
Comforting. Understanding. Accepting. Empathetic.
In the mistakes of their songs is where they find common ground. In the immelody, there is an eagerness to see where it goes. In the cacophony, there is a power there that wasn’t before. More than the fullness of a chorus, but a circle of notes, of people, round-about each other to sing their own tunes, share their own findings, and grow together.
What you once saw as impurity in a voice… becomes character.
All the cast-out voices from choruses, all those that could never train harmony with others, all those deemed too unholy for holy verses, all those too shy to be judged for their singing, all those who’d make the same mistakes relentlessly, all those who’d prefer dancing, all those who could not sing, but could play instruments.
You gather with them. Your voice bends, not another chorister, but into something of itself. Once, you would call it unholy…
… but now, it’s yours.
And you cast yourself, along with so many others who’ve claimed their own voices and instruments and dances and arts, into a symphony grander than any chorus of its own could produce.