A Haunting

Halloween. The veil between the worlds of spirit and body wavers and thins.  Knowledge and fear of knowledge, consciousness of The Unknown, are close at hand.  Ghosts walk, demons dance, all the skeletons in the closet rattle.  I am tense with horror at what I am about to call up, at my own deadly courage in facing the shade that hovers.   

A year ago, I was lying here in my bed, weeping again from exhaustion.  It was 7pm, the trick-or-treaters were in full parade.  One daughter was downstairs dispensing candy to the crowds and laughing with the neighbors; the other daughter pacing the floor, waiting for a ride to a party who never showed up. I was so tired, fatigued from my hysterical illness, the six weeks of continuous bleeding, the runaround in the health-care system.  I drove my daughter to her party, shaking like a palsied old woman.  Three hours from now, I was checking into the Emergency Hospital.

A year of doctors and tests that told no story, of healers and pills and therapies that dug new stories out of the depths of lost memory.  I lost forty pounds; it all found me again and brought extra.  I've been to a dozen doctors. I've consulted astrologers, psychics, and charlatans.  I've been hopeful and morose, resigned, and suicidal.  I spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in analysis, diagnosis, meditation--scouring my case history for clues, making peace with skeletons in my past, finding skeletons lurking that I never suspected.

Last Christmas I lay in my bed, wishing I were dead.  Lent came around to find me hopeful of a resurrection into new life, a renewed spirit.  I wondered what would grow from my broken body and bruised heart.  Grace had cracked open my life, deeper than I imagined possible.  The self I laid down is dead; the self that rises now, I still don't recognize.

Not two weeks after my Lenten post, I lay on my healer's table, confronting my long-dead mother.  More than one of my sensitive friends told me that I had an attachment, that the ghosts of uneasy souls lay in my spirit.  My mother appeared to me with remorse, anxiety and longing.  Death had given her a new perspective of our lives.  She begged my forgiveness for her sins.  She warned me of demons hiding in my psyche.  She gave me few words but what she said turned everything I remembered of my childhood upside down.

It felt like my memories, and the meanings I attached to them, were a kaleidoscope, a familiar pattern of sights and sounds and feelings.  But Mom came and shifted the lens just a quarter turn.  All those  pieces suddenly fell into a different pattern with all new meaning.  Everything I thought I understood about myself, my childhood, my family was new.  I had stepped into a parallel universe, a Twilight Zone.

But how could these implications of my mother's words be true?  I had no recollection of anything that supported what she suggested that day. I was haunted now as I'd never been when her spirit had lingered.  I'd watched her fade into the light of my healer's window but I was burdened now with a new, terrible truth I couldn't accept.

My lack of confirmation weighed heavy, though the scars of the truth were now clear.  I felt like a physicist who hadn't seen the unknown planet but knew it had to exist because of its effects on nearby space were obvious.  Suddenly, the many questions through the years from psychologists and psychics weren't so absurd.  Perhaps the wounds they suggested had happened.

Then the memories began to leak out.  In dreams.  And flashbacks.  Glimpses of sights and sensations that had no context but I could feel them in my body, gagging me, tearing my most sensitive places, burning my belly, the gall strong.The demon danced always just out of sight, daring me to call him by name.

My body is the battleground of this fight to own my memories.  I was struck with Bell's palsy; I lost part of the vision in one eye, and have been tortured with pain that threatened to blast my brain out through the sutures of my skull bones.  The medicines and therapies prescribed to lessen the pain, served also to weaken my defenses that blocked these memories to begin with.  The more I mediate the pain, the more the demon dances and, by force of long and well-ingrained habit, I try to repress him.  I am about to start my third round of remedy/therapy combinations that will safely exorcise this evil from me.

I long to name this demon with confidence.  Fetch him to dance to my tune.  Tame him to work for me in healing, not destroy me.  As I write, a muscle under my eye is twitching, my whole body aches in a permanent flinch, the frozen trauma caught in the muscle memory I can't yet allow fully into consciousness.  

Tonight I step into the circle, howling my terror, singing my strength, this demon is mine.  Bring to consciousness the fears and the memories that terrify. While the veil to the unconscious is thin and shifting, when the power of those saints who passed before us lingers close, I invoke Grace.  The demon Grace who dances, not to terrify but to save me from what I could not be permitted to see.  Grace, whose blindness now will be sight, I call you to transmute from fear to love, no longer Death but Life.  

Tomorrow, I go to a Franciscan labyrinth to honor All Saints Day/Dia de los Muertes.  I will walk into the path as to the grave, to bury my fears and traumas.  The dreams and knowings I call forth tonight will go with me tomorrow into the labyrinth. I will bring the demon fears with me, but in the holy center space where grace happens, he will be no demon to me. When I come out, it will be wisdom that walks with me.  

Being Eeyore: When You Are a Melancholy Child

Recently I was talking with someone who asked if I’d ever struggled with depression.  I chuckled ironically and replied, “Eeyore is my patron saint.”  Gloomy, broody, shades-of-grey melancholia has been my gift/curse for as long as I can remember.  For my sixth birthday, my father bought me a stuffed Eeyore because it reminded him so much of me.  I treasured that little donkey for years because he understood me.  Though I lost his pinned-on tail more often than I repinned it. And, eventually, to my continued regret, I lost the animal himself.

When my friend asked if I’d ever been diagnosed with clinical depression and I said, “no, but only because I never went into a clinic for a diagnosis.”  Growing up fundy Christian, we had a horror of both depression and psychology.  “Just give it to God,” I heard, “depression is only the prideful ego holding onto willful selfishness.”  And the only cure preached was a deeper commitment to “submitting to God’s Will” because the Bible says that True Christians will always have joy, which was interpreted to mean being “cheerful and joyous at all times.” 

I faked it as best I could, but still found myself in pastoral counseling with my father as the pastoral counselor (who thought that was a good idea?) and when he gave up in frustration, I was sent with my despair to the senior pastor.  His answer to my 12-year-old inquiry, “how can I ‘love my neighbor as myself’ if I don’t love myself?” was to turn Jesus’s lesson on its head with an explanation of how hating myself was actually a good thing and loving others more than I loved myself was really what the Bible meant to say.

About the same time, my school started a series of suicide-prevention public service announcements and I began to wonder why Christians didn’t just engage in mass suicide and be done with it.  If physical life was just something to be endured until the “race was won” and we achieved our “eternal reward,” then why go through the rigmarole of petty humanity at all?  I determined then never to marry or have children and thereby tie myself to mortal life since spiritual eternity was all that mattered.

Existential angst has been the descant my soul sings against the dueling melodies of fundamentalism and secular materialism.  Both church and culture insist that melancholia and pessimism are wrong, real downers, and avoidable character flaws if only we Grumpy Gus’s tried harder to be happy (or, more recently, would take our  pills to change our obviously pathological brain chemistry).  When I first heard of existential philosophy, a rush of gratitude flowed through me—I wasn’t flawed, deficient or sinful!  Many brilliant mental giants asked these same questions I labored with.  My euphoria was short-lived when I recognized that both religion and psychology still saw them as something to be fixed, saved, analyzed. 

Years later, when I went on to college and studied psychology despite the tut-tutting of my family and church, I came across a little statistic that made me chuckle: depressed people have a more accurate perception of reality than non-depressed people.  So, I realized, happy people were just lying to themselves in order to feel good.  That made so much sense!  If my experience of the world were normal, I couldn’t understand how anyone kept getting up in the morning.  I began to understand that what I’d thought for so long really was true—they were all faking it, but the primary people they were lying to were themselves! 

I felt vindicated but no more able to jump out of bed and be a good little cog in the economic wheel than ever.  I continued faking it, only with the self-knowledge that I was faking it.

Big Lies I Believe

Fundamental beliefs (aka Big Lies) held in common by people who suffer from chronic illness:

1.     I have to be strong. (Strong enough to handle anything, regardless of whether the weight is unbearable by anyone.)

2.     It is not right for me to be angry. (I have no right to anger, my anger is not justified, or even that anger is a sin akin to murder.)

3.     If I’m angry, I will not be loveable. (Love and acceptance are earned by our character or our behaviors—which are inseparable.)

4.     I’m responsible for the whole world. (Leading to hyper-controlling behaviors, being the Fixer, a compulsion to “save the world.”)

5.     I can handle anything. (It is easier just to do it myself than get other people to do it, if you want it done “right” you have to do it yourself, needing to be perfectly competent in all areas of life—perfect mom, perfectly decorated and kept house, perfect garden, perfect on the job, in the bedroom, in the ministry—being good enough is never acceptable in anything.)

6.     I’m not wanted—I’m not lovable. (Regardless of others’ intentions, I perceive that I am unwanted/unloved.)

7.     I don’t exist unless I do something.  I must justify my existence.  (My only worth lies in my utility.  I cannot fathom being valuable simple for Being.)

8.     I have to be very ill to deserve being taken care of.  (I should be able to buck up, mind-over-matter, just get on with things, no matte what.)

A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases… is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs.  If we would heal, it is essential to being the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life.  Whatever external treatment is administered, the healing agent lies within.  The internal milieu must be changed.  To find health, and to know it fully, necessitates a quest, a journey to the center of our own biology of belief.  That means rethinking and recognizing—re-cognizing: literally, to “know again”—in our lives.

…The key to healing is the individual’s active, free and informed choice.  … Liberation from oppressive and stressful external circumstances is essential, but that is only possible if we first liberate ourselves from the tyranny of our ingrained biology of belief.

From When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate, MD (the parenthetical remarks are my own)

30 Days

Thirty days ago ... I took to my bed. I only got dressed when going out of the house was imperative. I didn't often venture even so far as the couch. I only cooked when I felt like it and didn't shop at all; everyone had to fend for herself (I did share my meals when I made them but more often they shared with me). I watched cartoons and cooking shows, carried on conversations with people from across town, across the continent, and around the world. I read theology and Sufi poetry, WebMD and personal stories of chronic illness. I meditated and prayed, sought solace and slept. I skipped swim meets and music lessons, parties and family holidays.

A couple weeks into my sabbatical, when my body had rested enough that my mind started to come back online, I began to notice how little I was enjoying myself. I was finally able to do what I've said for two years that I needed to do to get a hold on recovery yet all I really was doing with myself was to lay here and fret: I castigated myself with shoulds and oughts and you reallys and why don't yous. My scourges were my assumptions of other people’s expectations. I compared myself to superwomen and saints and stories that I really didn't know the half of (you know that dark side that no one writes in their blogs). Look what they've done... see what you ought... a real woman/writer/healer/mother wouldn’t be so lazy/forgetful/emotional/incompetent.... And I thought, "goddammit! I can't even be sick without beating myself with the guilt-stick?"

I felt stomach-churning, muscle-aching, joint-burning, head-bursting pain every time one of these self-flagellating thoughts burst into my mind. Usually long before they ever became conscious thoughts, my body was punishing me on behalf of this guilt. Eventually I began to associate the pain with the punishing guilt and I could do a little in-the-moment therapy to relieve the worst of the symptoms. But I couldn't prevent those demon-voices from sermonizing again and again.

About the same time as I was making this pain-guilt connection, I went to lunch at a friend's. She is an astrologer and for an early birthday gift, she read my chart. As she listed for me the planets and their positions in my zodiacal houses (and interpreted that all into English because I am fairly illiterate in astrology), I was struck by the fact that the same things I beat myself up over are the very things that she proclaimed "my gift to offer the world". All the lazy, selfish navel-gazing, she called an ability to see deeply into myself and present it (myself) as a teaching story. The fact that I am neither a great scholar nor an outstanding psychic, leading me to feel incompetent in both fields, is, according to my chart, a stunning ability to synthesize nearly indigestible quantities of almost irreconcilable information from academic and intuitive sources into approachable and understandable ideas. (Who knew?)  

Everything about myself that Christian fundamentalism and my family told me was evil, conceived in wickedness, rebellious, bossy, an over-active imagination, too analytical, thinks too hard, lazy, crazy, or wrong was, in fact, divinely created uniquely to be me.  A gift from God, through me, to the whole rest of his creation. 

That shakes the very foundations of my soul.  I hope it breaks them into tiny little dust-mote fragments, suitable for rebuilding into the belief of my own beauty and worth.   That may take a little more lying around on the bed to accomplish, though; I hope my family continues to have patience and tolerance….

The Death of a Man, the Death of a Myth

I have no pleasure in the death (execution? assassination? can we call a spade a spade?) of bin Laden but I am immensely grateful that he is no longer able to provoke the ruination of lives, families, social systems and countries. I still have hope that he can find the redemption of God, however that happens.

I feel a wary relief in the face of ongoing political realities. But, also I feel a clean, fierce joy for the resolution of a chapter of grief for those who lives were destroyed by bin Laden's megalomania. I regret that it was required of us (us in the collective humanity sense, not the political entity of the US) to kill him to protect, respect, and accept the people he threatened. But sometimes that is necessary—we cannot honor the holiness of humanity in the one at the expense of the holiness of humanity in the many.

I can have no room to gloat—that is as irresponsible for me as letting an abuser continue abusing, it makes me as spiritually abusive as the dead one—but neither will I feel guilt for my terrible gladness nor condone guilt for those unable to separate gloating from a deep-seated satisfaction at a horrible job finally accomplished. 



Someone pointed out the contrast between these two verses: 

 Proverbs 11:10 (New King James Version) “When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices; And when the wicked perish, there is jubilation” and 

Prov. 24:17 "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles lest the LORD see it and be displeased." I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction here. There can be jubilation at the cessation of the wicked one's evil machinations that is not a rejoicing in the degradation and humiliation of the enemy. Too often, I agree, the two are combined in one long, vicious scree of sadistic joy, but it is not inevitable.

I’m frustrated with both those who glory in the death of bin Laden, gloating at his assumed eternal torture in hell, and those who heap guilt on anyone not saddened and burdened by the death.   Those who gloat demonstrate that the line between good and evil runs right through each of us and that sometimes the good and the evil masquerade as the other.  Those who heap guilt make no distinction between gloaters and those who take grim satisfaction in a necessary gory responsibility to take life in order to preserve life.  When we preach about the sanctity of life of perpetrators of this magnitude (those who will not be socially redeemed by lesser means than death) and claim that it is not our place but God’s to order their death, we denigrate the sanctity of the lives he destroys.  When abusers are protected more than his victims, something is seriously wrong.

When, as is sometimes the case as it was here in bin Laden's, it is necessary to end a life in order to preserve, protect and cherish other lives, I am willing to accept responsibility for that killing—whether it requires my personal participation or my spiritual ownership. But along with that acceptance of responsibility—and no little satisfaction at its accomplishment—comes the responsibility to be creating a world where bin Ladens are universally unacceptable and unable to flourish and where the victims of bin Ladens (which all of humanity has been to some degree or another) are given the resources to grieve, to heal, to love. 



May this event be not only, as I heard someone report on National Public Radio, “the punctuation at the end of an old story”, the last gasping of a lust for reactionary radicalism, but also the end of an era marked by tribalism and parochial terror.  May we all channel our passions into compassion, love and service.  

I AM

I am, you anxious one.

Don't you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can't you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn't my longing ripened in you 
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that  wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

--Rainer Maria Rilke
from For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics

On Suffering I: If Not I, Then Who?

“No one deserves to live that way.” [comment to “A View from the Abyss”]

I am humbled and grateful for the quality of compassion that motivated the above commenter’s declaration and, in its literal statement, I agree with it.  No one deserves to live in the state of terror, darkness, anger, futility and resignation that I experience while staring into the Abyss, no longer even clawing desparately to hang on to the edge of sanity.  However, what is usually meant when people say “no one deserves to live” in any given manner, is that no one ought to live in that manner.  Yet, most of those conditions so decried are necessary within the range of human existence: there will always be abject poverty, war, evil, greed, and psycho-spiritual instability.  Without them, our humanity would be a meaningless single dimension.  (I am not saying that striving to improve the human condition is a bad thing; in fact, I think it is our very striving to eradicate many of these conditions that we find a state of grace.)

Staring into the Abyss, acknowledging death, experiencing eternity in the endless space between heartbeats, is a necessity that gives depth of meaning to the rest of human life.  The question ceases to be “why me?” and becomes instead “why not me?”  If someone must travel the darkness, better that it be I and not someone else.  I would not curse anyone else with my experiences, yet I am grateful for the blessedness of having experienced them.

Is that an absurd contradiction? Of course, all the mysteries are absurd.

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.

A View From the Abyss

"I tried so hard to do and think all the Right Stuff and now I’ve spent the last three years unable to function to anyone’s expectations, much less everyone’s.  When I attempt too much, my body starts to give out.  And should I not pay sufficient attention, my mind goes—the black holes in there take over more and more of my cognitive function. I extended myself no grace for failure all those years and now I lack grace of gait and thought, a lurching facility of deed and word." (here)

After I posted these words six weeks ago, I hoped this admission and the victorious declaration that followed would become truth for having been stated.  When that expectation did not become my experience, oh, how I crawled like Jonah into my little hovel to hold close my misery and chant my “woe-is-me’s”.

“Just kill me now, LORD! I'd rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen."  (Jonah 4:3, New Living Translation) 

The weather here has finally turned to fall.  From unseasonable daytime highs of 90F/42C when November began, we are belatedly getting to temperatures around 70F/22C.  The lower temps have been great for my physical well-being.  Part of the mess I’ve been in this year stems from the fact that my autonomic nervous system is wildly dysfunctional.  Among other effects of this dysfunction is an inability to tolerate heat (or cold, but that is not so often a problem here in the desert).  Having accomplished so much healing spiritually and physically last fall and winter, I was entirely unprepared for how much this summer’s heat would debilitate me. 

The real kicker of the year, though, was what I did to myself.  Late last spring our Medical Benefits Account managers decided that the supplement protocol I was buying for my condition was no longer an approved expense.  Neither is it covered by my insurance so my remedies had to start coming out of our regular monthly budget.  And that is very hard for me to do.

Allowing myself and my healing process to rank high enough on the list of priority spending is all but impossible when it means admitting that I am actually sick and not just lazy or malingering, and that I deserve to spend money on my health even if it means the sacrifices will be some of my girls’ educational or extracurricular activities, or the family’s groceries.  The martyred mother archetype has been ingrained in me by our culture, my childhood religion, and the immediate example of my mother’s own early death. Like the Good Mother, the self-sacrificing, self-martyring, Holy Mutha’ that I am, I rarely place refilling my supplement protocol above near-bottom of our budget.

I let my remedies run down, didn’t refill them promptly or at all.  By October, I was completely off all my supplements and my triumph-over-perfectionism post marked the last-ditch effort to pull myself out of the abyss by willpower alone.  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work against the physical dysfunctions of my body and brain.  A week later, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably in the bathtub while my husband begged me to get help.  I scared my family but I scared myself even more because I was already thinking favorably about a Final Solution.  My usual injunctions against suicide, with appeals to familial obligation, leaving my children motherless, left me untouched.  And that terrified me.

I told my husband that I still don’t trust anyone not to make me worse (as has been the case with the overwhelming majority of professionals whose help I have sought over the years).  I already know the remedies I need, I just can’t make myself order them regularly.  It was an enormous effort on my part, much greater than it would seem from reading these words, to ask my husband for his help.  I simply need someone to make sure that I treat myself with the same care that I would give a client—monthly follow-ups and adjustments to protocols—and to check that I’ve actually ordered the remedies.

So I’ve been back on my protocol for a month.  Although the first doses pulled me back from the very precipice, it had taken most of these weeks to feel as though I’m not within stepping distance of the Abyss.  It has been hard to admit that I really cannot control my life, my body, my health or well-being by sheer will-power.  That there are conditions that a “suck it up and get on with things” attitude simply cannot overcome.  That I am not lazy or malingering, nor shirking my responsibilities, nor letting my family down, when I take the time, money, or rest necessary to my health.  That martyrdom is not holy.   Holiness is life, lived abundantly, joyously, and with humble gratitude for the precarious precious nature of life’s realities.

Perfectionism I: Pursuing Ever Greater Righteousness

Last weekend, we hosted a dinner party in honor of my daughter’s twelfth birthday.  A diva-in-training, she requested a formal, black-tie celebration.  She, of course, already owned a sparkly, be-sequined cocktail dress (yes, really, at less than twelve) but I had to outfit the rest of us. We are now all members of the little black dress brigade.  She planned a simple menu of steak, mashed potato, “mushy carrots”, and salad, which I thought was fortunate so that I wouldn’t tire myself unduly with the cooking and be unable to enjoy the party (something that happens regularly since I developed my chronic hysterical illness). I really wanted to make this party perfect for her.

I started the cooking for last night's dinner about 5 hours ahead.  My plan was that I'd cook ahead, have it all ready to reheat (aside from the steak, which my husband would be grilling), then shower and change into my little black dress and pearls.  But as I worked, making up the carrot recipe as I went along, I kept thinking of another little special touch that would "make it all just right", so that I ended up touching up the reheated foods in my undies (because even in an apron, stuff jumps right at my nice clothes) just minutes before the company arrived--despite, or maybe because of, having three helpers and a serious intention of not going too crazy.

I had to ask myself "what constitutes perfect?"  If I think of another little touch, an extra ingredient, a little twist, and don't do it, then is the result less than perfect?  I know that stems from the whole Pauline idea that if we do not do what we know is good, we have sinned. A total paraphrase and gross misapplication but is it really so far removed from the fundy Modesty codes or the Pharisees’ Purity codes and other absurdities in the name of sanctified living?

And then, when we actually served the meal, the steaks were charred on the outside, overdone on the inside from appliance faults rather than operator error; the mashed potatoes too thin and the gravy too thick (almost the same consistency) from reheating problems that were operator error (mine); we ran out of wine; and the toppings for the cheesecake only glopped instead of drizzled.  And everyone who ate thought it was absolutely the best food (well, except for my husband and me who both have these perfection issues). The guests ate it all up and asked for seconds.  

So, by what standard do we measure perfection? The eaters' enjoyment? (Excellent.) How relaxed and peaceful the cook was while she produced the food (poor, but not at all the worst, at least I didn't fall to pieces or start crying this time).   The comparison to how it would have turned out in a professionally equipped kitchen by, say, Bobby Flay? (As if...! But you know I made that judgment!)  And is the ante really, fairly, upped every time I think of some extra finesse? (Absurd, when you think about it, but isn't that what we do all the time?)

It seems ridiculous to over-analyze a dinner party this way but the prep and presentation seems an apt metaphor for the striving for perfection that we Christians do, and are taught to do.  Why is it so universal to teach the do-more-work-harder-feel-guilty model of Christian living but so rare to teach the rest-in-the-Lord-be-still-enjoy-the-simple-things model? Why do we let ourselves be consumed by the judgmental, perfection-seeking, always-something-holier-to-do, Pharisaical, conspicuous religiosity?

A Day to Remember

Last night I went to see Authority Zero perform music from their upcoming CD, Stories of Survival.  The venue allowed minors and I took my 11 and 13 year old daughters.  My husband did not accompany us as he was on a business trip but we did meet up with another family (whose mom is a rock band photographer and introduces us to lots of music, including this group).  It was my children’s first rock concert experience.

In the manner of rock concerts, it was raucous, boisterous, and crowded.  As the night went on, the mosh pit got crazier—the show actually stopped briefly because some other family was letting their toddler and two other young children surf the pit and one fell down—and the crowd got drunker and louder.  The longer I was there, the more agitated and anxious I became.  I’m never very comfortable in crowds but I was sitting well back from the action where the other family’s dad took all the kids.  So I was a little bewildered by where this agitation was coming from.

The first clue about whence this anxiety arose happened earlier in the night as we were standing around waiting for a table and my daughters got thirsty.  I had to go to the bar myself and order drinks.  When I procrastinated, one daughter asked what the problem was since I’d “been to these sorts of things before, even after I got out of the bubble” (the family term for living in the bubble of fear that caused my parents to raise us in such a legalistic Christian lifestyle).  I had to admit I’d never ordered my own drinks at a bar; there had always been some more worldly girlfriend or the man I was with who would unwittingly keep me just that little bit separated from “going all the way” into bar depravity.

By the time the show had to stop to pull those children out of the mosh pit, I was pulling out all my tricks to keep from disintegrating into a full-on anxiety attack.  Feelings of shame clutched at my gut. Fear clenched the muscles in my neck. And that pissed me off!  I was hardly doing anything wrong or ill-considered.  Our children were well-supervised, well-educated about safety; exit strategies had been reviewed. No one in our party had even had a drink, so there was absolutely no reason to think our children were being neglected or endangered.  Why did I feel as though I had introduced them to Evil? 

It wasn’t the music itself since we listen to rock of all kinds at home without triggering this anxiety.  Even when I was still “in the bubble”, I listened to Stryper, Petra, and REZ.  I went to a lot of Christian concerts that weren’t qualitatively different (the biggest difference was that Christians tended to clap on beats one and three right from the start without having to get drunk first and lose the beat).  Now The Family Jewels is a favorite show that my younger daughter and I like to watch together.  While I write this post, I’ve got the KISS station on Pandora playing through the stereo.

I can’t even say it was the presence of alcohol that set off my internal alarms.  Although as a teen I worried over the salvation of a church member who had a beer in his fridge, we now keep liquor, beer and wine in the house, drink occasionally while dining out, and sometimes even get together with friends for the sole purpose of drinking and socializing while the kids all hang out downstairs. At the concert, there were undoubtedly people who were exceedingly less sober than my daughters have ever seen, but no one was really plastered either.

But something about the venue obviously triggered my knee-jerk shame.  Instead of the usual fear accompanying the shame, this time I got angry.  Not the best reaction because it is still a reaction rather than simply living according to my own code of honor, but I consider it an enormous improvement over the fear.  I’m glad to be angry.  Anger is excess energy, whereas fear sucks energy right out of you.  Anger can provide the energy needed to make necessary difficult changes.  Anger gives me the energy I need to cast forth yet another demon leftover from the fundamentalist legalism I lived in for so many years.

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.

Finding My Fundamentalism

(responding to the Epilogue of her book Quivering Daughters)

Dear Hillary,

Thank God for you. Your ability to translate the depth of my (your) pain into words is a thing of terrible beauty. I would probably not have identified myself as a casualty of spiritual abuse without your words. And, therefore, never begun the healing of these old and deep wounds in my soul.

My family of origin lived on the liberal edge of fundamentalist Christianity in the 70's and 80's. My father was a pastor/music director/various positions of authority in a variety of Baptist, Church of God, and Plymouth Brethren assemblies and always somehow "in ministry". Our family's own practices were rarely so extreme as what I've been reading on your blog and the blogs of other survivors of radically right Christianity but the ideas, and ideals on which those ideas are based, were a large part of our theology. Your description of the spiritually abusive family fit my childhood to a T. I can now admit that the quality of abuse in my family is in no way less because the quantity of abuse was less than some.

I left organized religion at the death of my mother from cancer (at 49) nearly twenty years ago, thinking that I was leaving behind all the self-righteous hypocrisy and with it the pain and self-hatred engendered by church and family. I came to see however that hypocrites and Pharisees exist in every social group. Legalism is alive and well in the Simple Living Movement, Waldorf Education, neo hippie Back-to-the-Landers, and alternative medicine circles.

What I didn't notice until more recently was that the depression, anxiety, and perfectionism that plague my adult life resulted from the same deep self-loathing I thought I had left in the church. Having recognized it finally, a couple years ago, I didn't know how to change it. I had no capacity to extend myself the grace and forgiveness I have long extended my family (all of whom remain in church). I knew intuitively that my soul held long unhealed scars, festering abscesses that needed lancing, but I have kept my pain so deeply buried that I didn't know where to find it anymore.

My body and mind have paid the price of my denial and I developed hypoadrenia that left me unable to function or even to think in complete sentences for the better part of two years. Fortunately, I am over a year into recovery from that and am at least a contributing member of my family again. Part of the recovery process, however, is to search out the beliefs, behaviors, and situations that caused me to abuse my very Being to the extent that my body and mind were nearly lost. I knew I needed to reach those soul scars. If only I knew what they were!

A couple weeks ago, I was net-surfing about my daughters’ fascination with the Duggars and started finding references to Quiverfull and associated ideas. And I became addicted to reading about extreme Christians and those who've left the extremism. I started to get an inkling that maybe this was It ... the source of my festering. But even your Quivering Daughters blog with its evocative writing, while extremely helpful in identifying and describing spiritual abuse such as my childhood, simply couldn't pierce through my intellect to the emotional pain.

Today I read your new blog [edit: this blog is no longer public] and the post about mothering the child you were. For the first time, I cried. Only a little, not nearly enough. But I know it's a start. The rawness, the achingly fragile quality of the strength that kept you alive touched me in a different place than your other writing. The very personal pain that you strive to keep separate from your other blog (and probably rightly so) was the key that unlocked my own pain.

Thank you for being able to put that staggeringly choking clawing gripping reality on display for me. As I ache for the Luna in you, I am finally able to ache for the soul-hungry, whimpering, terrified, furious child in me.

Many blessings to you.

Sandra