Confessions of a Book Junkie

(the following is a series of posts on my Facebook Wall today.  Oh, the truth in humor! And how the truth hurts.)

The Heretic:  Today's finds at the used bookstore.

The Heretic:  What am I thinking, buying more books? I haven't yet read all of the last several book hauls, or listened to the podcasts and iTunesU courses. So many ideas, so little time.

The Heretic:  Especially with these black holes in my brain that eat my thoughts, memories, connections, and executive function. And apparently my impulse control.

My cogent and comedic friend:  Hello, my name is John and I'm a bookaholic.

1. We admitted we were powerless over books—that our lives, bookshelves, and end tables had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision to turn our Kindles, iPods, and Nooks over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. We made a searching and fearless inventory of our homes looking for that one book we hid away for a rainy day.

5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to our blog readers the exact nature of the books we had already read.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these titles and sell them on eBay.

7. We humbly asked Him to remove our books, both hardcover and paperback.

8. We made a list of all persons we had ignored while reading, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would require putting a book down in the middle of a chapter.

10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we bought new books promptly read them.

11. We sought through bargain hunting and coupon clipping to improve our relationship with Barnes and Noble and Amazon as we understood them, asking only for knowledge of new releases and the time to read them all.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to bookaholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Knowledge of Good and Evil

I dreamed of holocaust and genocide last night.  Recently, I’ve been staring again into my own personal Abyss.  I guess now I’ve moved to staring into the communal Abyss of all humanity.  Whence comes man’s inhumanity to man? That very phrase implies that the evil perpetrated person to person is something intrinsically not human. It seems, however, that the perpetration of evil is specifically a human quality.  

Animals, to my knowledge, to do not engineer genocide, although they may murder, bully, and rape in maintaining social order or in a battle for territory. Animals, according to current research, commit personal atrocities as a means to an end but only people commit large-scale, tribal atrocities as ends to themselves.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, while animals may act with individual altruism in order to benefit the group, only people show any willingness to martyr themselves for ideology (a fact exploited by those engineering atrocity). 

Both poles of the human dichotomy, atrocity and martyrdom, can result only from the same aspect of humanity that I think is the defining separation of man and animal: self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a sense of separateness from the rest of the world. 

There is no conclusive research on whether animals are self-conscious; certainly, they are aware of themselves—that my dog can be embarrassed when I talk about him is proof enough for me—but even animals that have been taught to sign do not refer to themselves in the first person.  They use the third person or call themselves by name. Human children commonly develop this sense around the third birthday, maybe a few months later.  They will start to use the word I to reference the self. 

Similarly, there seems to be no indication that animals have any sense of existentialism, that is, awareness that one day they will die (this is different than an end-of-life awareness of impending death).  Human children come to this awareness around age nine.  My elder daughter was 8½.  We were listening to the soundtrack to Ella Enchanted, and she was singing along.  She sang the first line of a song “every day, you die a little”, when abruptly she stopped singing, and ever so seriously informed me, “That’s true, you know.  Every day you live is one day sooner that you will die.”

I suspect that it is this existential self-consciousness that allows for both atrocity and ideological altruism.  To know that we are dying is terrifying, deeply and viscerally frightening to the human psyche. Life is a fragile and uncertain proposition.  Whether studied from the perspective of biology, chemistry, poetry, psychology, agriculture, philosophy, economics or religion, the deeper the subject is mined, the more clear the fragility and uncertainties.  It's all a crapshoot and then you die. That very knowledge demands that life become meaningful.  Why do we live, if only to die? We have a will to meaning—a drive innate within us to derive meaning from our lives (c.f. Viktor Frankl and the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy). If we cannot extract meaning and purpose from our lives, we will go insane.  

When the only certainty in life is death, uncertainty becomes the defining characteristic of Life.  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is Pascal’s “God-shaped Vacuum” into which is sucked every possible kind of meaning: tribalism, hedonism, greed, hierarchy, lust, imperialism, socialism, altruism, theism—and all are present and active in every religion in the world.

So few of us have the courage to acknowledge death, to create meaning, to accept uncertainty. We would prefer instead to expend our enormous psychic energies on denying the one certainty we have by inventing elaborate theories and formulae to simulate certainty.  Even simpler is to accept the theories and formulae of people we deem more willing than we to have looked into the Abyss (though we rarely check this sort of credential in deciding the credibility of our experts). And even more common than anything else is the tendency to abuse substances, behaviors, religions or other people to deny even the fear we feel at the uncertainty of Life.

Anyone who has looked into the Abyss and come away (too often people venture willingly or unwillingly into the Abyss and, in their terror, they get stuck there—our modern religious, medical, and psychiatric professions are more likely to ensure the stuckness rather than facilitating a return) has one other certainty in Life.  That Love exists.  That Love matters. Whether called Love, God, Allah, Light, OM, Brahman, or All/Nothing, whether found through science, religion, mysticism, or poetry, this succoring, sublime, transcendent Ineffability suffuses the Universe, both physical and psychic.  And that Love trumps existentialism in aeternum.

Fear and God III: Fear, Addiction, and Abuse

I’ve been giving Fear a great deal of thought since I started this series.  For years, I’ve wondered why I was so tortured by fear as a child.  From as early as I can remember until as late as my mid-twenties (coincidentally, or not, around the same time as I began leaving behind my fundamentalist explanations of spiritual reality), I was daily or almost daily wracked with terror, a nameless dread: mind-numbing, heart-pounding, palm-sweating, tooth-clenching fear. The too-scared-to-cry, too-terrified-to-scream kind of fear. Being alone, in crowds, in bed at night, waking in the dark, speaking to people, the rare movies we saw, stories I heard from teachers in school or at church, all set off this incapacitating fear, both in the moment and in the memory.  Only escaping into books, cartoons, or music allowed any solace, any surcease albeit very limited.

When I studied for my degree in psychology, I saw in myself the symptoms of the abuse victim but I couldn’t identify anything that constituted abuse—of course, we only considered physical and sexual abuse that were fully remembered; the idea of repressed memory of abuse never came up in class and I’d never heard of spiritual abuse until quite recently. I have so many recurring hang-ups about sex that my husband has more than once questioned whether there was any incident in my history that precluded my ability to relax (a significant inquiry since he does have such incidents in his history).  A few years ago, a friend who is psychic and a hypnotist saw in me the energies of abuse and, under partial hypnosis, I even created for her a recovered memory.  The “remembered” account never happened but the psychological conditions that set the stage for the “memory” are devastatingly real.

A friend of mine in college participated in an alcohol intervention for her sister, my first exposure to the ideas of addiction, 12 Steps, and the co-dependent alcoholic family system from a perspective other than Sin, Moral Depravity, and Lack of Faith or Willpower.  Her story felt familiar but I didn’t understand why.  Years later, I described my family of origin to a shrink friend as “like alcoholics but addicted to God instead of drink.” She nodded knowingly and replied that there is nothing more deeply damaging than when the soul gets caught in addiction. She shocked me because I had never really considered that I had sustained soul damage from my family’s religion.  I promptly shoved those thoughts back under the rug of my unconscious.

But, still, I didn’t understand the source of these terrible fears. Even my friends who had lived with alcohol dysfunction and sexual molestation weren’t tortured by fear the way I was.  Surely there was some horrible event in my early life to which all this anxiety was post-traumatic stress.  The things I needed to see were staring me in the face, pointed out to me by friends; I even stated them to others, but without acknowledging the crucial relevance.  Even now that I can admit the relevance, I can only look at my fear from the corner of my eye in quick glances.  To stare my fear right in the face, to admit that I had reason to be afraid for my very soul, is more courage than I seem to have. 

I have been writing this post for weeks, it has consumed me.  I can’t write on any other topic. My virtual trashcan is overflowing with aborted attempts, stream-of-consciousness scraps, false starts and tangential leads.  I can’t read except escapist trash. Every conversation with friends turns to the Fear in my childhood.  Obviously I am struggling to bring to consciousness something that has been long denied.  These old wounds have festered under the surface of my awareness for so long that even the healing is frightening and painful.

Beginning the Quest

 Last summer, I was walking through my favorite used bookstore and a book fell off a table onto my foot.  I picked up The 19th Wife, a fictionalized account of the history of polygamy in Mormonism and Mormon fundamentalism.  In horrified fascination, I googled for several days about these FLDS communities and the whole topic of religious fundamentalism.  I couldn't get these women's stories out of my head.  I realized that at some level, I was identifying with them—that their quest for spiritual communion with God would lead them to participate in these stifling, degrading, anti-gracious communities and then breaking free of the legalism.  The more I read about Christian fundamentalism, the more appalled I became.  The extreme practices these Christians have taken up seemed so absurd yet so oddly familiar.

Quiverfull, militant fecundity, Joel's Army, dominionism, Bill Gothard, Integrated Family Church, Patriarchy and complementarians, the purity movement, and the stories of women and children who have escaped from these families and churches. Essentially, in the words of one former quiverfull, IFC, extreme mother, “each family becomes it's own cult centered around the father and families of sheeple following Vision Forum and other quasi-educational, cultic, Christian homeschooling groups or churches”.

It grossed me out, actually, but after my initial revulsion, I realized that most of these ideas (women under authority of men before God, faith+works to prove salvation, head coverings, breaking the will of the child, rebuilding America on God's ideals, no interracial or same sex unions, and more) floated through most of the churches we attended and probably were much stronger an influence than I noticed as a child in the 1970s.  It is just that since my childhood in these churches, these ideas have become institutionalized and given names and have movements with followers.  I mean, there are hordes of families who believe that their children, in particular daughters, shouldn't attend Bob Jones University because of the liberal humanist ideas they will be exposed to.  REALLY? BJU is too LIBERAL for the True Christian?

But I digress... despite having left all organized religion well more than a decade ago and Evangelical Christianity even longer ago, I find that I still harbor those little voices in my heart of hearts.  The ones that say if I know a better way (to save money, to eat healthy, to teach kids) but don't do it, I'm unworthy.  That everyone else's needs not only come before mine but that I don't deserve to have my needs met (servant leadership, death to self, who can trust a heart that is desperately wicked), etc.  I've just picked a different subset of "rules" to be unable to live up to than the fundies.

I used to tell people that I grew up in a dysfunctional household but instead of alcohol, it was religion that my parents were addicted to.  I thought I had left all that behind after I quit church and turned my back on all that “women submit, raise perfect children, do everything exactly right or God will turn his back on you” stuff.  But apparently, I have just as much of the addiction gene as all my forebears.

So I'm still a recovering Christian?  I've now added to my googling the rebuilding one's self and spirit after spiritual abuse.  Not that what I experienced was even remotely extreme compared to the stories I've been reading but the underlying philosophies were the same.  And our family and churches fit all 7 of the checkpoints for spiritual abuse listed by Jeff VanVonderan of Intervention television fame (and apparently well regarded by several of the fundy survivors I've been reading).

I guess the point of this post is to declare publicly that I'm powerless over the effects left in me by my spiritual upbringing.  That I have not shown myself the grace and mercy that I believe is the soul of God.  And that I'm a little unclear about where to go from here. Having recognized the signs of religious abuse and more than a little gun-shy of religious communities, yet no longer satisfied with the mishmash of spiritual traditions I’ve collected since leaving Christianity, what is the next step in recovery? In finding a spiritual tradition in which I feel at home?