Being Schooled and Groomed by My Church Nearly Doomed Me
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| Not the Lamb in This Story |
It's time.
I've known for years now that the reason I fail to maintain regular posting here every time I set out to revive my blog is that I've been shielding too much of my whole true self. There are too many topics I've made taboo. Yet they are the topics that I spend most of my time thinking about, writing about, reading about and watching or listening to media about. If I were to lift the taboos off myself I've got enough material in my daily life to post something meaningful to me nearly every day. But I just can't stay motivated to prep the safe posts that used to be enough for me.
Safe is shallow.
Safe is boring.
Safe is irrelevant to both myself and what's left of my audience.
But I have a story to tell that is relevant to current events. So in spite of still feeling constrained by the taboos (some self inflicted and some specters of childhood) I'm also feeling called to contribute to the conversation that is attempting to ensure our rights to continue having conversations on any topic we please. Because if I stay silent and that right is lost I will have been complicit in that loss.
Yesterday I watched a YouTube vid by Rev Ed Trevors of the Parish of St Margaret of Scotland in Nova Scotia commenting on some statement made by Kirk Cameron suggesting that every Christian parent should be homeschooling. Watch it here: Kirk Cameron v Public Schools. I was moved to tears by his story of how he and his wife had considered the possibility of homeschooling but in the end opted to keep them in public school because the obligation to equip them to be adults in the world was equal to the obligation to keep them safe from exposure to unsavory topics.
I was crying not because there was anything emotional about his presentation but because the topic itself had triggered an ocean of inchoate feelings from the trauma inflicted by my own sheltered funde (Darby offshoot) childhood. Being schooled and groomed by my church nearly doomed me. The homeschool craze hadn't started before I graduated but the five or six meeting hall events each week added to the many culture participation taboos added to the taboo against fellowshipping with Christians outside our sect and then encouraging us to choose unchurched kids to 'befriend' so we could 'lead them to Jesus' by quoting bible verses, inviting them to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School, all added up to social isolation. That along with the indoctrination that ensured that I never learned to think for myself about any topic meant I was ill prepared for adulthood--even the trad wife role which was the only thing I was groomed for.
It also left me with no mental or emotional or social resources to turn to when a traumatic series of events imploded our sect with a fusillade of excommunications that split up families. Since my father and my mother's twin sister's husband were on opposite sides my uncle limited their contact to about once a year for the last ten years of my aunt's life. A cruelty I could not fathom. That plus all the other married sisters and all the cousins and all the close friends among children that were cut off just broke my heart. Staying neutral was considered worse than choosing a side. All wives and unmarried daughters were expected to follow their head of household's lead.
My husband favored neither side and had no interest in imposing a choice on me. He had been one of those unchurched friends I had in high school and only started attending various church functions with some Marine Corp buddies a couple years before we were married. He was completely blindsided by what he had married into. It wasn't until I'd confessed to him several years after the events that imploded our Assemblies that my studies had led me to identify 'the meetings' I'd been raised in as a cult and I no longer felt any affinity with their teachings that he confessed to me that he had withdrawn his heart from them within the first year or so of our marriage--essentially the first time someone behind the pulpit had relegated all members of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God to hell on the basis that their salvation was unreal because their doctrines were heresy. His Grandmother had been a Sunday School teacher in an Assembly of God church. That was the moment he was done with it. He kept his feelings and his thoughts to himself for decades out of deference to me.
Thus I was left to try to figure it out on my own. I was leaning toward the side that seemed to me less mean spirited and a tad more permissive. It also helped that it was the side my Dad favored. But then I witnessed someone I loved and respected from that side discipling his infant son for 'inappropriate use of his voice' justifying it to me later with verses and the 'original sin' doctrine insisting it was a father's duty to break his child's will as early as possible. He added that he was concerned that 'my heart for babies' was clouding my reason and leading me astray.
His definition of 'loving father' made that phrase an oxymoron and when I tried to apply his concept of it to my Heavenly Father my brain and my heart broke and so did my faith. I was suicidal for half a year before I began to try to reconcile the shreds of my soul. It took me ten years to sort it out. I read widely across the Dewey decimal system and learned to think for myself. Something I gave myself permission to do after realizing all the Elders had forfeited their authority over me in light of the mess they had made. I swore then to never submit my mind or my heart to any human authority over my relationship to God.
The one thing I never lost was the Jesus in my heart. I can thank my Dad for that as he was the one who introduced me. It is one of my earliest memories. I was still in the crib and possibly not walking yet because I still had to hang on to the rail with at least one hand to not plop on my butt. He was singing little Sunday School songs and quoting verses and pantomiming the meaning with gestures and my stuffed lamb. (not the lamb in the picture) The message was that Jesus was a good shepherd that loved his little lambs and I was Jesus's little lamb and he'd always hold me in his arms and he knew my name and my name was written on his hand and he wanted to live in my heart. I think I got some of it confused for a time because at least for as long as I remained in the crib I thought my little lamb's name was Jesus. But those concepts were written on my heart as deep as a computer's operating system. To erase them would have erased me.
When I laid my new foundation it was with Jesus' own words, the declaration that God is Love coupled with the definition that Love casts out all fear, and the list of the Fruits of the Spirt in Galations along with the admonition that 'By their fruits you shall know them.. I added to it later but only things that were fully compatible with those things.
My goal when I started studying outside the Bible and the approved doctrines was to find a new faith family but of the hundreds of sects I encountered in my studies of church history none met my fundamental criteria that dogma and doctrine MUST bow to the Fruits of the Spirit. I cannot tolerate even being complicit in a group practicing bullying. There is very very little in organized, hierarchical religious communities that does not favor power, authority, control and the use of fear over the fruits of the Spirit.
I have teetered on the edge of giving up identification with Christianity for awhile now because I do not see (especially here in America) any churches that reflect the Jesus in my heart. All I see is bullies and insistence on certainty as the definition of faith. But every time I'm about to slip over that edge I encounter someone like Rev Ed Trevors who reflects back to me the Jesus in my heart.
After well over a year of reading and contemplating I came to understand that faith had little to do with believing a set of doctrines or adhering to a set of taboos. This was the first key solving the paradox that almost broke me. Faith is about confidence in the loving-kindness and mercy of my Creator and then living from that. If I am not letting my light shine from that place then all the bible verses I might quote are worthless hypocrisy.
'By their fruits you shall know them' became my motto. And then the philosophy at the root of my Fruits of the Spirit storyworld. I suspect my reluctance to break those self-imposed taboos is also what is keeping my stories and poems trapped on my hard drives.
This key--that faith is not related to certainty--broke me free from the fear that the loving gentle Jesus in my heart might just be an illusion, an imaginary friend or even a manifestation of Satan impersonating Jesus to keep me on the path of disobedience. All among the explanations given me by those offering counsel during those years.
I have found only a small handful of Christian pastors, teachers or writers in my decades of exploration that I can tolerate listening to. Rev Ed Trevors is one of them. Encountering him over this past year has given me hope that I may yet find someone on my side of the continent that I can tolerate listening to or fellowshipping with without loosing myself.
I get the sense that even tho he might not agree with some of the new understandings I've developed he would still accept me where I'm at without insisting I either conform or keep my thoughts to myself. I can never again do either in any sustained relationship like church fellowship requires. In fact I've come to understand I don't need a big faith family.. Just one or two of like mind would be enough and fulfills Jesus' promise to be present if two or three are gathered in His name.
I rarely comment on social media but after I got the emotions triggered by dark memories under control I was filled with gratitude just to know there are Christian fathers out there that encourage their children to learn to think for themselves. It gives me hope.
I decided that warranted reaching out to thank the one who had given me many occasions over the past year to be grateful for encounters with someone who models Christianity in a way I can still identify with. Then I found myself sharing my story in more detail and more candidly than I ever had here and when I found myself barely hesitating to post that comment, I realized it was time.
It has been 30 years this November since the incident that nearly broke me. That baby now has two babies of his own and is 7 years younger than I was then. Until 2015 I'd maintained fairly good and semi-open relationships with my siblings and most of my extended family in spite of my refusing to attend church. Then in 2016 it became obvious that I'd have to cloak over 80% of my true self while in their presence to preserve harmony (and at that time a roof over my head) which is a lonely place to be. Even lonelier than living alone as a widow.
That brings me to the relevance of my story to current events. It was when I learned that the Evangelicals were endorsing Trump in 2016 that I first began to feel alienated from my identity as Christian. It was getting harder and harder to feel at home in that identity because the Jesus in my heart did not feel at home in that identity as it was being modeled all over the media. NONE of the fruits of the Spirit were being exhibited. Instead of Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Mercy, Kindness, Compassion, Moderation and Hope I saw instead a passion for Power, Control, Riches, Hate and Vengeance.
One of the things I was grateful for as I studied the history of the Church and it's relation to the state from the time of Constantine to the framing of our Constitution was that the Elders in my sect had not had weapons to use on each other and their flock or the power of the state to back their use of beatings, imprisonment or execution. Nor did they have the right to invade our homes to confiscate forbidden media or to deny those they deemed heretic the necessities of life--jobs, food, homes, dignity, healthcare. But that is the aim of those behind Project 2025. Which I began reading about a month ago. I am unlikely to finish it's 900 pages before the election so any review I might produce at that time would not be useful in preventing it's implementation. So I intend to start sharing my journey through it in other ways.
That is just one book of many with relevance to this topic that are in my currently reading or recently finished lists. I think I'm going to start treating all of them more like I treat the books I read during the readathon (see My Brain on Books posts). By that I suppose I mean less formality, more reflection than review and spiced with elements of my personal story whenever it sheds light on the relevance of subject or story to me. Also sharing more than one book in a single post when they seem to be in conversation with each other. I will do the same with other media. Read more...
