A Counterfeit Spirit

As I have become more comfortable in my own heretical skin this last year, embracing all of who and what I am as wholly Holy, I had begun to doubt how seriously I would have been spiritually annihilated as a child if I had come out of the mystical closet.  I castigated myself for hiding in that closet for 40 years.  I reprimanded my self with “See?  It hasn’t been that bad coming out! What were you so afraid of?” 

Well, … this: http://solasisters.blogspot.com/2009/12/mysticism-counterfeit-holy-spirit.html

The writing of someone who had embraced everything that I have spent a lifetime struggling to integrate before she threw it away on a limited, exclusionary, superstitious Christianity.  Her words are echoes, resounding gongs, screeching nails on the blackboard of my memory, of the teachings I heard over and over in my childhood.  Everything I was trying to convince myself was overblown, childish hyperbole is right there calmly damning me from my computer screen.

Even the calmly logical, condescendingly simple explanations of how Satan takes over the mind and will of the unsuspecting mystic who uses prayer beads, walks a labyrinth, prays with imagination, or meets with a spiritual mentor sounds like the patronizing, self-righteous, religious know-it-alls of my childhood.   Did I risk a verbal, emotional, if not literally physical, stoning as a witch, a dupe of Satan, evil incarnate, if I had freely shared my psychic knowledge, my awareness of mystical union with God?

Hell, yes.

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….

Fear and God IV: Suffer Not the Witch to Live

The religious teachings of my family disallowed for the paranormal. As if being told the horrific old testament stories as literal history from my infancy wasn’t gruesome and damaging enough to a sensitive psyche, the punishing and judgmental God who ordered genocide, child-killing, and the wholesale slaughter of those whose cultural and religious practices marked them different also commanded the brutal execution of those who practiced witchcraft and spoke to the dead.  Anyone who performed paranormal acts or who had extrasensory knowledge but wasn’t specifically sanctioned by God was to be killed.

Would I have actually have risked my life to continue seeing the spiritual world I saw?  Did I come to block from my vision the spirits, the auras, the “ghosts”, because I knew I risked spiritual annihilation?  Would I have been stoned for a witch, if not literally, then metaphorically with punishment, shunning, and prayers for my release from Satan’s grasp? 

Oh, yes.  I’m sure of it.  The struggle with writing this post has been to recognize what it has cost me to live for the last forty-plus years in denial of my ability to live in the thin places—seeing what others can’t see, knowing what no one told me, feeling emotions that aren’t mine, knowing events that haven’t yet happened. 

God doesn’t work that way anymore, I was told.  God doesn’t give visions, send prophecies, or work miracles (unless it was the occasional answer to prayer for the ill or overwhelmed).  There is no such thing as a “ghost”.  Only Satan uses these tricks in this modern day. The unspoken corollary was that if I kept insisting that I saw, heard, knew, changed things, I must be under the influence of the Evil One.  

From at least as early as three years old, I was dreaming prophecy.  By four, I was confronted with the unspeakable truth—that I knew what my parents said couldn’t be. My parents, well-regarded as godly people in our community, my father a pastor, assured me that my dreams were “just dreams, they’re not real”, that “there’s no such thing as ghosts”.  My mother tried to prove false my dream about my babysitter’s injury after a car accident.

I dreamed that the doctors had put an eye in the back of her head at the hospital.  My mother took me to visit when she returned home.  The babysitter’s mother answered the door with “but she DOES have an eye in the back of her head now. Come, see!” We entered and the woman lifted the hair on the back of my babysitter’s head to reveal a line of heavy black stitches in a shaved spot still bloody and swollen.  It did look exactly like a large closed eye. The proof my mother had hoped to demonstrate instead proved her wrong and my dream the truth.

In that moment of screaming hysteria, I knew that I was evil.  It was much easier to believe in my own evil, bolstered as that belief was by church and family teachings on the utter wickedness of the human heart and the moral depravity of all mankind, than to accept that my parents and the fundamentalist evangelical church might be wrong about God.  According to them, the God who was so wholly Good could not abide Evil, anyone who persisted in evil must be wiped from the face of the earth. 

For the rest of my childhood, I prayed for forgiveness, for salvation, to be relieved of this terrible burden of sin. Lying in my bed at night, I developed long rituals to hold the Fear of God’s wrath from consuming me.  I became convinced that while God may despise my evil self, Jesus loved me.  I sang to myself through the night “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”.  After all, the Bible had convinced me of my terrible evil, I clung to any assurance that kept me from the Hell I so obviously deserved.  Not that it was much of a salvation, I experienced hell every night in the dark while I wondered if tonight God would let Satan have me.

Despite my best efforts, though, if was clearly apparent to me that God had not delivered me from my visions, my clairvoyance, my empathic knowledge.  I was still plagued by the evil. By nine I was horribly near-sighted, much more so than genetics might allow, I believe I was struggling so hard to avoid seeing the unacceptable that I was becoming blind. I tried my best to keep it to myself but things just seemed to leak out when I was talking to people.  And they came in my dreams.

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.

Authority of the Word of God I

I am a mystic.  I suspect that I have always been a mystic. Mysticism and fundamentalism are about as diametrically opposed as it is possible for two approaches to the Sacred to be.  Fundamentalism is by definition and by history a rigid adherence to a pre-determined set of legalisms, whereas mysticism is knowledge of the divine by direct experience. I can tell you from long experience that it is categorically impossible to be both mystical and evangelical, even in theory, most certainly in practice.

From the time of my earliest memories I have been highly intuitive, even psychic.  Such things are anathema to evangelical fundamentalism.  My father himself was named after two of the major authors and an editor of The Fundamentals (the set of essays in the early 20^th Century that gave the movement its name).  Staunch doctrinal legalism was obviously important to his family and he passed it along the generations.

Prime among the fundamental doctrinal statements is sola scriptura, which declares that the bible is inerrant, infallible, historically literal, the very Word of God and, indeed, the only source by which God may be known. I obviously had knowledge of things beyond my ken.  When that knowledge didn’t corroborate the bible interpretations being preached, where did that leave me? I can tell you exactly: sitting in the back pew with my mother, worried desperately that I was a witch, that I wasn’t really saved, even that I was possessed by Satan.

Not knowing, or acknowledging, that there was any kind of True Christian other than evangelical fundamentalist, I stuffed my mysticism, my intuitive and psychic knowledge, into the deepest darkest closets of my very Being.  Where, of course, it leaked out constantly to disrupt my practice of Christianity!  Oh, how I prayed that God would take away these weird feelings, these visions, the dreams, the knowledge I had of people and of Life Itself.  And how I wished I had been born in Bible Times when it was still possible, permissible, to hear God directly, to be a prophet.  Everything I was seemed much better suited to some other Dispensation than these Almost End Times (or at the very least some other gender).

Religion, mostly evangelical Christianity but really all religions that I studied, always tries to tell me how to know God—what must I do, actions I must take, doctrinal statements I must believe, attitudes and behaviors I must model, in order to be in fellowship with God. The practice of religion is supposed to make possible a connection to the Sacred Other that is Beyond Me.

But the place where I begin my spiritual seeking (my Fundamental, as it were) is to notice that I already have a relationship with Something Beyond Myself that I call God, or The Divine when I want to differentiate from a specific conventional concept of God.  I am a mystic looking to reconcile my experience--what I know that I know that I know--with the intellectual exercise and physical practice of religion.

As a mystic, my ultimate standard of Truth is this experience of the relationship that I already have, rather than a particular canon of scripture or set of doctrinal statements.  My experience of God is so essential and visceral that I can only describe its validity as similar to the validity of knowing that water is wet.  Wetness is not a quality that you can define or explain.  You can learn the chemical formula for water, or the phase changes of the water cycle, you can learn the uses of water; but you cannot learn Wet.  I know God like I know Wet.  

When I read other people's opinions of the nature of spiritual reality--whether that is the bible or other writings--I compare that to what I already know.  When I read other mystics, whether Christian or not, we all sound the same.  Our words are not always the same but there is this quality of knowing the Divine that is so visceral as to be indescribable.  But when I read theologians, they are always trying to define and delimit what my experience should be.  It often feels like going to school for years to learn all about the properties of water and all the stuff water can do before being allowed to walk outside to step into the stream and JUST GET WET.

That's the number one reason that I don't trust the bible to be the Word Of God but rather lots of words about other people's experiences with God--extremely valuable in their own right but not at all the same thing as an ultimate spiritual authority.  If the bible, or any other teacher, doesn't jive with what I already know about Wet, I will search long and hard to reconcile the differences but the final authority for me is, for lack of a fuller description, that still small voice that speaks to me on my very breath.

And that is only the first of many ways in which I am a heretic.

(Part 2)