Being Schooled and Groomed by My Church Nearly Doomed Me

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.

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Book Review: A Gift Upon the Shore by M K Wren

 

A Gift Upon the Shore
by M K Wren

M K Wren's A Gift Upon the Shore was a gift to readers everywhere and everywhen back in the day before smartphones and internet.  It's a post-apocalyptic story about saving the books for future generations.  

I read it first time decades ago when it first came out in the early 90s and felt the need for a reread in this day when the book burners and banners are at it again.  

What might happen if they gained the upper hand?

The premise:

Civilization is gone.  Nuclear winter just set in.  Two women alone in a house on a bluff above the surf on the Oregon coast not yet knowing if there are any survivors in the local rural community and if so are they the friendly kind?  

The runup to the nuclear End had seen a  plague that killed millions in America alone, roving gangs of nihilists terrorizing those still civil, half of California fell into the sea taking 2 million more souls, the president had been assassinated by a bomb and those taking the power canceled the constitution and set up a Federal Information Broadcasting System.  

You saw that right: FIBS.

But even that was gone on the day the bombs fell as the EMP took out all electronics including car ignitions and digital clocks, home appliances and power tools  And then nuclear winter set in within days.

Is there hope?  And if so will they choose it?  

The only clue is in the author's choice of names for her protagonists: Mary Hope and Rachel Morrow.

This book came back into my life like a miracle.  I'd thought about it often over the years as memories of scenes haunted me as did the mission the women took upon themselves after the initial shock wore off and they had assured their basic survival needs by looting the abandoned buildings and vehicles within a day's travel on horseback.

Instinctively, part of their looting had included every book they encountered until the volumes they found together with those they'd already owned topped 10K not counting duplicates.  It was nearly a full year after the End when they had the time to contemplate a future for themselves and for humanity.  And that is when they devised the mission to preserve the books for the future.  

I had vivid memories of images of them wrapping the books in aluminum foil and then applying a waterproof sealer which I could not remember.  I remembered they had built a vault by digging a cave into the side of the bluff above the surf and lining it with stone and cedar planks.  I remembered that later in the story someone had tried to dynamite the vault.  And that that someone was related to the Christian cult they had encountered years after the End.  The first and only survivors they did encounter within the decades the story covers.

I had remembered that much but even that more vaguely than that summary implies.

I had lost my reading records in a move and could no longer remember either author or title.  But I did remember we had once owned a trilogy written by the same author and that it had been a sci/fant story involving another fundie cult and that the title of book one had the word Lamb in it.  That wasn't enough to find a viable search term for online resources.

But then one day while searching something else altogether (which I no longer remember what it was or the search terms) there in the results was one of the books from the trilogy and there was the author's name and from there it was just a click to find her list of titles and there it was.  A Gift Upon the Shore.

That happened no more than a month before Dewey's thon and I thought what a perfect read for Dewey's legacy.  So I made myself wait for the morning of the thon to start the book.

Reading this book was a slow slog due to eye issues (legally blind with RP) combined with emotional issues related to the events in my life in the late 90s that caused me to excommunicate myself from the cult I was raised in.  I wonder now what role this book played back then in helping me identify my own faith community as similarly toxic to the one featured in Wren's book.  

It must have had some impact if even unconscious as I read it when it was still a new hardback at the library in the early 90s and the first inkling I had of the doctrinal disputes that were about to implode our faith family was in 92.  Then in 94 I witnessed the disciplining of an infant for "inappropriate use of his voice" as the men in the room calmly discussed scripture and the women calmly handed out dessert plates and the small children calmly played their little games on the floor.

That scene became a tornado that devastated my soul. That picked me up out of my world and set me down in what might as well have been another planet. That turned me from a True Believer into a skeptic and set me on a mission to learn to think for myself.

There is a scene in this book where a 13 year old is whipped with a belt for blasphemy for asking in church why the begets for Jesus in the gospel don't agree with each other and both lead to Joseph and not Mary who was supposed to be a virgin.  Reading that scene again after spending the month of April writing my memoir of the events that catapulted me out of my faith community was so surrealistic I can't even...

It was like pouring salt on the wounds I just ripped the scabs off of.

See Friday's post, Of Flux and Fuss and Frustrations, for a more in depth explanation of the roots of the emotions this novel is stirring up.

The read-a-thon was supposed to end at 5AM Sunday for me but I read on until 7:30 trying to finish this story. I was still just over 10% out when I had to give up. Then I woke up after only four hours of sleep and after coffee picked up the book again--and fell asleep over it waking at 9pm after another 4 hours of sleep.  I finally finished it after 10PM. 

This story is going to haunt me for the rest of my days.

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Book Review: In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult by Rebecca Stott

I read this via BARD (nls..loc.gov) audio for the print disabled. It was the recording released commercially--read by Rebecca Stott herself. That contributes to the experience. I suspect some of the history might be difficult to wade through for anyone not personally vested in learning it if not for the author's own voice infusing emotion and personality.

I read this book three times in two weeks. I seldom reread a book inside of a year. So that should say something about its quality even if personal motives played a role.  Which they did.

Before I proceed I must correct the record of my three readings in my Goodreads review. I'd registered the book as 'reading' the day I started the second read and forgot so tried to fit the three reads between April 17 and 28 tho a closer look would have revealed that was less than ten days when I knew it had been two weeks on the 27th the day before the thon.  The correct dates are:

• First read: April 13-16  listening at normal speed for the full effect of Rebecca's voice. 5hrs Friday.  3hrs Saturday.  1.5hrs Monday
• Second read: April 17-24  listening with Mom at lunch 40 to 120 minutes at a time with a couple skipped days
• Third read: April 28  for the read-a-thon listening at 225% speed, start to finish in 4.5hr focusing on facts, keeping the emotional maelstrom at bay

I can't share my reaction to this book without sharing my own story as the two are entwined. I was raised in a splinter off a splinter of the original Brethren sect which imploded in my late 30s. I kept telling myself that one year and then five, one decade and now two should be plenty of time to get past the trauma and move on but I keep stepping in mental and emotional mine fields. Following Rebecca's story as she lived through similar experiences resonates so with me its as tho a church bell rings inside me vibrating my bones.

Bibliography, citations and notes were not part of the recording. If they exist I need to find a copy so I can follow her sources. I'd be grateful for leads to any material shedding light on the history of the Brethren sects (Exclusive, Plymouth etc) and their spread across N. America and the globe (It was news to me it went global) and John Darby, C. I. Schofield, or our founder, Nels Thompson. I'm also interested in anything regarding fundamentalism of any religion including scholarly studies, diaries and biographies of members and memoirs of escapees. And anything relating to the psychology of fundamentalism and the aftermath for escapees, including any online support groups for escapees.

This book fits three genre. It is biography when telling her father's story, memoir when telling her own story and history when she follows the family trees back to the founding of the Brethren. The history sections sound like a professor wrote it--which is so after all. The professor often seems in control of the father's story. But when her story and his story converge it becomes memoir and that's where her writing shines. The history sections can be pedantic but when it's personal her story is moving, at times poetic; wrenching and dark but with moments of laugh-out-loud humor and often glowing with the dawn of hope.

I craved the history as I knew little from before our founder split from a Texas Plymouth Brethren Assembly in the early 1900s. My mom was a toddler when her family joined in California in the 30s.  My dad was in high school when his mom joined in Idaho in the early 50s. They met while the Longview, WA Meeting Hall was being built in the mid 50s.  The Hall I attended Meetings and other functions in several times a week until age 21.

With Rebecca's relating of the early history I now have a good sense of what happened between the 1830 founding and when John Darby split the Plymouth Brethren off and left Britain to found dozens of Assemblies across Canada and America using the traveling tent revival meetings to seed them.  I know only that much about the North America beginnings and wish to know more.  Stott had little to say about it other than their leader J.T. Jr. actually lived in New York. If she explained how it came about their British Assembly was controlled by an American I missed it. Three times!

It was heartbreaking to hear of families fractured by Withdrawal from any who did not join, believe without doubt or obey the rules without fail, and the many suicides as a result.  I witnessed similar splitting up of families. We called it Removal from Fellowship. After three generations families were so intermarried few escaped the trauma of separations. In the final implosion my Mom's twin sister's husband and my dad were on opposing sides and my Uncle kept their contacts rare and brief for the last decade of her sister's life.  I forgive most offences easily but that one...

I never heard of suicides due to Removals but I was suicidal for over a year as a result of the events leading to my own repudiation of the Doctrine between 1992-4, involving witnessing the abuse of children and recognizing it for what it was--a direct result of belief in the doctrine of Original Sin.  Watching an infant disciplined for crying, I said NO to any god who requires breaking a baby's will or use of corporeal discipline on a preverbal child.

My own father, who was the gentlest of men, spanked my buttocks and thighs black and blue one July 4th night when I stood in my crib screaming 'Boom. Boom. Mama' between wails for hours. I was 19mo. He 26yr. I have no memory of it. It's just a family story and Daddy's remorse was part of the story. I never experienced conscious trauma associated with it. But hearing of the time Rebecca's father beat her black and blue at age three because she would not stop crying on command triggered a series of flashbacks so intense it must mean the PTSD, quiescent so long I thought it conquered, has not released its grip. Maybe because I've self-isolated such that I get little exposure to the triggers. Or maybe unconscious memories still fester.

Rebecca relates incidences of physical abuse by the men against their children and wives. And mother's against their children. One of her grandmothers threw her daughter across the room, breaking her arm. The same grandmother who, epileptic and 'willfull' was committed to an asylum in Australia for over two decades.  A practice not uncommon with men who couldn't control their wives. That was not done in our Assemblies. Thank God for that!

Imagine growing up without holiday or birthday celebrations, TV, radio, music other than hymns or classical, movies, parties, card games, county fairs, amusement parks, proms, carnivals, parades, make-up, dancing, comic books...that was my mom's upbringing and to some extent mine. Tho many strictures were relaxing as I entered school we knew not to flaunt it in front of those who still held to them. Enforcement for us was via mild to moderate shaming. For Rebecca's family it was all of that and more with enforcement akin to the Inquisition (including coerced confessions of imaginary sins) with emotional torment instead of the rack and shunning instead of immolation.

The strictures Rebecca lived with until age 7 were much more confining than ours. The list of don'ts was long for us but at least they didn't forbid the library. I can't imagine my childhood without the library. Rebecca lucked out when a teacher who didn't know her parents forbade it gave her a pass to the library when she finished worksheets well inside the allotted time. There she found hope and windows into other worlds than her own.

I highly recommend this book. Especially to anyone who escaped, knows someone who escaped, or knows someone in a fundamentalist sect/cult. Or anyone wishing to know what life without freedom looks and feels like--when every thought is dictated and every act is witnessed with judging eyes; when the judge lives inside you monitoring everything and finding it wanting. So what if it destroys self-worth. You are not supposed to have a self.

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