Raining in the Desert

The last six weeks have been wild thunderstorm, perhaps even more so for my poor family who never quite knew from moment to moment if I was going to be sane or incoherent.  I swung from giddy, to exhausted, to mean, to distracted, to controlling, to someone who shouldn’t have been allowed behind a steering wheel. But I did it—I stared my Fear down.  Not mere quick glimpses from the corner of my eye.  A full-faced stare, unblinking, right in the eye.

The process wasn’t easy. I had heachaches; my hair fell out in small handfuls. I couldn’t sleep at night; I fought sleep during the day.  Nightmares, nausea, rashes, intestinal distress.  Mental incompetence, frenzies of hyper-rational intellectualism (mostly arguing on other people’s blogs).  Depression, repression, denial, shame, and rage.  Finally, the grace of grief.

Forty years of living, reacting, deciding from a position of fear (sometimes more, sometimes less, but never none) dissolving in the healing rain of grief.  When I could recognize what Fear had cost me, what I had lost by making so many choices from fear, without the blame, shame, and loathing I had been hurling at myself, I could finally acknowledge the pain and begin letting it go.  The grief came over me like a gentle but insistent summer rain after a long period of heavy, hot humidity, grumbling thunder and jagged heat lightning. 

Desert summers often produce heavy rainless storms that leave the land more miserable afterwards than it was before.  When at last a monsoon arrives with enough water left in it to rain on the desert, the relief is palpable in the cleansed air, on the flooding streets and swollen washes, in the soul.  Grief poured through me with the same healing touch as an August rain.

I am left weary and sore in body, bruised and aching in spirit, but whole and reborn.  The recuperative, rebuilding of body and soul will not be quick or easy, either, but at least I know I have been purged of my demons and, with proper care and feeding, the prognosis looks grand.  

Fear in Process

It has been interesting to observe my struggle with these Fear posts. The issue rather took over my thought life and I couldn't think, read or write on any other topic. When I finally posted early in the month, it was with great relief and release… until a few hours later when I started to fall apart:  feeling the fear almost as a physical thing trying to crawl back into my joints and tissues and cloud my mind.  A few detoxification therapies (salt baths, herbal preparations, meditation) helped to keep the relapsing to a minimum.

Since then I've been increasingly freer spiritually but less able physically to function. A couple mornings after my last post I woke up with a chest cold, something in my gut, and intermittent loss of executive brain function.  By the end of the week, after continuing with the detox protocols, the cold became a residual sneeze, the intestinal distress became a skin rash, and the mental incapacity returned to my usual sense of humor and spontaneous sermonizing. What I really think is going on is a working out of the tension between shedding these old no-longer-needed fears and shame and tribal taboos that turned what once was protection into toxic habits. The taboos are struggling to stay in the old "safe" patterns of thinking and behaving while the liberating freedom wants to grow up into the Light.

Distressing and inconvenient as it is to be working out this salvation during my family's second busiest month of the year, I consider this reaction, this physical struggle in my body, to be proof of my spiritual healing progress. Healing happens from the inside out, from above to below, and from most vital to least important. So to move from spiritually stuck in my fears (before this series) to mentally spinning my wheels (the process of writing the posts) and then to physically manifesting internal-to-external symptoms is definite movement in the right direction.  Although I have to say, my husband asked if I couldn’t just get an exorcism to drive all the demons out at once so he didn’t have to watch me go through this anymore.  

Shaking Like a Wet Dog

Someone recommended Dallas Willard’s books to me with “[I] keep thinking of you as he's dealing with a lot of the same concepts/issues.  He agrees that a lot, if not most, of the ways modern "fundagelical" Christians read/interpret/understand the bible and put it into practice have nothing to do with what the bible is actually saying.  He has some interesting ideas about what he thinks it is actually saying, that seem pertinent to your search.”  So I browsed Google Books version of The Divine Conspiracy and checked The Great Omission out of the library.  I thought the first book wasn’t too bad several months ago when I browsed it but didn’t find it inspiring enough to search it out at the library.  The second I’ve had here at the house long enough to read three other (big, fat) books between reading attempts.  Today I forced myself to read more than a couple paragraphs and got as far as page 15 before I slammed it shut in frustration. 

Now you have to understand that I read faster than anyone I know and generally will read every book I pick up cover to cover—from intro, preface, and acknowledgements, to endnotes, and bibliography.  I even read books I thoroughly disagree with just for the pleasure of mentally arguing with the author on every point.  For me to have such difficulty with this book is hugely unusual.  And frustrating because I think (from what I was able to read) that I would actually agree with him that Christianity is a commitment to a life lived on Jesus’ model and not just some fire-proof ticket through the Pearly Gates. 

I just can’t get past his language.  The intro and first chapter that I struggled through are peppered with words like obedience, need, must, and command; trigger words for me.  Worse, the presentation of why we “must” follow Jesus' “commands” in “obedience” made me feel like there were a lot of shoulds, oughts, and if you’re a true Christian you will.  To be sure I didn’t slight poor Willard, I just skimmed the pages again and he actually doesn’t say “should”, “ought” or delimit Christian-hood, quite.  Perhaps I’m too sensitive—having been beat over the head with the Christian stick too often—but I just don’t think I’m going to be reading any more Willard books any time soon. Maybe there’s a Cliff Notes version I can skim?

Okay, breathing deeply, shaking it off…

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.

Fear and God II: Does Fear Beget Wisdom?

"Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom...."


How often does the bible juxtapose wisdom, holiness, and the general good with fear? In particular, fear of God? What exactly does that mean?  Many of the biblical references are clearly meaning fear of God’s judgment, retribution, and punishment for sin or wrongdoing. When we “put the fear of God into” someone, in our English idiom, do we not mean that we inspired that person to “follow the straight and narrow path” of right action for fear of otherwise incurring “the wrath of God”? Is there a reasonable interpretation of “fear of God” other than living in terror that by some action we might incite the vengeful deity to send a lightning bolt our way?

As a child, I understood fear.  Deeply, experientially, from the depths of my soul, I understood fear.  Nightmares and anticipation of nightmares kept me from sleeping, panic attacks and constant anxiety during the day.  Fear of social or academic missteps at school, fear of being seen by Dad’s parishioners as less than perfect, fear of God noticing the anger I harbored in my heart against being condemned from the moment of my conception.  I lived constantly in a state of hyper-vigilance against my inherent wickedness.  Always in a state of fight-or-flight terror without being able either to fight (against whom? Was I to take on God himself?) or flee (where could I go? To the ends of the earth, God will follow me).  I understood these questions from a very early age, even if I could not articulate them.

If fear is the beginning of wisdom, I should have been the wisest person on the face of the earth. As clearly as I knew I was afraid, I knew that I was not wise. Again this enormous dichotomy between what I knew and what I was taught.  Is it any wonder that I could not reconcile the Christian God with a Divine Love?

Later, in my teenage years, I suspect when the New International Version was reissued and the new word reverence replaced fear in many verses, a church teacher told me that the whole idea was not fear that begat wisdom but respect.  It made a lot of sense at the time but now I’m not so sure that the replacement was merited.  Often the context of the phrase “fear of the Lord” is clearly describing a sense of dread, a concern over punishment, a turning away from wrongdoing—perhaps these connotations can be related to respect but the more obvious word to use would be fear. 

Regardless of whether the original writers of all those fear verses intended to promote actual fear or respect, I still carry the scars on my psyche from our usual understanding of “fear of the Lord” and if those scars led to the development of any wisdom I now possess, it was much too high a price to pay.  

Fear and God I: Love Equals Punishment

The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be. Katherine Mansfield

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 

I John 4:18

Growing up, I heard this verse countless times. It was for me a measure of my holiness, although I couldn't say whether that was the interpretation preached or simply how I heard it.  Being a child tortured by fears (of the dark; of being alone, of people; of monsters, snakes, dogs, rodents; death, dying, pain, hell, God; separation, annihilation, extermination; ...), I obviously was not anything like "perfect in love".

Within the evangelical, fundamentalist paradigm of God as Judge of Sin, I had absolutely no understanding of Love.  In my world, God's love was what had condemned me.  If he didn't love me, he wouldn't care enough to punish me for the sin I had been born with. God is love. God is punishment. Punishment is fear. But fear cannot be love. A = B. A = C. C = D. But D does not equal B? Yet another place where science and mathematics are proved wrong by the Bible!

It took a baccalaureate in psychology and sociology before I realized how perverted and schizophrenic that juxtaposition of love and punishment was. (Well, that and leaving the fundagelical world where the inerrant trumps science.) I still struggle twenty-plus years later to separate love from punishment in my own head.

But at least, I finally began to value my own mystical experiences of the Divine over the interpretations of the bible I had grown up with.  When I was able to redefine both God and Love according to my divine experience rather than the bible, suddenly the inverse relationship between Love and Fear was not only understandable in theory but also in practice.  When my experience of spiritual reality and secular description of physical reality were both allowed to trump literal, inerrant biblical interpretation, all things did become possible.

I am now so past fundamentalist literal interpretation of the bible.  I wish I were over it. 

A New Old Idea

I was listening to Bill Moyers interview Karen Armstrong when she brought up a point that I had forgotten.  She mentioned it in at least one of her books, although I don't remember which one(s).  I've read nearly her entire body of work in which she repeats Big Ideas frequently, so I tend to get them confused.  Her point was one that was peripheral to her theme so it got lost in the bigger ideas and I'd forgotten it until I heard her say it again.

Here's the background: when rabbinical Judaism was developing after the razing of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD (effectively decimating the entire source of meaning for all Jews of the era) and Jews were struggling to reframe their identity without Temple sacrifice, the rabbis (a new type of Jewish scholar/teacher who gained prominence during this period) realized that their Scriptures were confusing, contradictory, and impossible to interpret at face value.  They needed a lens through which to interpret Scripture.

The urge to fundamental literalism was overwhelming in the face of the tremendous physical and spiritual upheaval the Jewish people faced.  History shows us time and again that the greater the experience of chaos, the stronger the fundamentalist backlash of legalism, literalism, and control, the greater the desire for security and spiritual predictability.  The Christian New Testament Gospels were also written in the midst of this catastrophic religious overhaul.

The new rabbinical scholars understood, or came to understand, the dead-end that literalist fundamentalism becomes.  The Jewish Scriptures do not present a clear and coherent God--is YHWH omniscient and omnipotent or capricious, tribal, and vicious? What exactly was the nature of the covenant that made Israel the chosen people?  It had been previously cast as Temple-based sacrificial activity.  If that is now impossible since the Romans utterly destroyed the Temple, what now does God expect?  How were the Jews to understand the meaning of their God and their nation?

So, here's Karen Armstrong's point: the rabbis decided that all of scripture must be read through the interpretation that Love trumps everything, that the primary theme of scripture and therefore God is Love.  If any individual bit of scripture seems to contradict that theme--say, that YHWH commands Israel to genocide in their takeover of Canaan--that such passages MUST be interpreted as allegory rather than history and that the allegory MUST be such that shows Love for all (gentiles included)

The implications of that  presumption are rather staggering.  Too bad Christians were so keen on separating themselves from their Jewish roots in the decades after 70 AD that they missed out on that quantum leap of faith.  The canonical gospels are filled with anti-Jewish, anti-others, sentiment.  If you are looking for it the Love is there, of course, but so are a lot of Us-Good/Them-Bad polarizations that when read literally are anything but Love.

I suggest that Christians take a step back from the rabid literalization of Christian Scripture, take a page from the Jewish history that is so very nearly our own (only fundamentalist politics of the day turned the Jesus people from a Jewish minority into a separate Christian religion).  Can we not pay mere lip service to the phrase "God is Love" but place it at the forefront of our faith?  Let us, too, read our (mostly Jewish) scripture through the interpretation of Love.  Any understanding of any passage of the bible that seems to create separation, to polarize communities, to set up hierarchies of righteousness, MUST be reinterpreted so that it promotes Love, of God, by God, to all people, at all times.

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)

A Review of the Season

The Chronicles began as a service for the Lenten season, to spend time writing as a means to facilitate contemplation of all my voracious reading.  My appetite for books is huge and often threatens to overwhelm me.  Writing has proven an effective method for slowing down the ingestion enough that much better digestion occurs.  I have felt far more nourished by my reading since I began writing about it than I felt before.

Alright, enough with the digestion metaphor; make the point!  Which is to say that I have succeeded at my goals for this blog so far beyond my expectations that I intend to continue it indefinitely.  The pile of books on, in, under, and around my nightstand hasn’t really gotten any shorter but the turnaround time to the library or used bookstore has gotten a lot longer.  I’m both taking longer to read each book and playing with the material longer before diving headlong into the next book.  No one would have accused me of being a superficial or casual reader before I started writing (well, except when I’d be on a binge of trashy novels) but now I feel I’ve moved well beyond reading to learn and into reading to study.  Reading itself has almost become a meditation.  Writing certainly has.  These are outcomes of blogging that I never expected but for which I am deeply grateful.

I had hoped to rediscover my voice through writing.  For a long time there while I struggled with hypoadrenia I wasn’t able to hold cogent thought in my head long enough to string a sentence together, much less to put paragraphs into sensible essays.  I wondered if I even could anymore.  I am delighted to discover that although I still lack some of the clarity and ability to develop arguments that I used to have, I can once again state my thoughts in a reasonable manner.  I look forward to building my logical left-brain muscles again. I can say with confidence that I am well recovered from the mental state that hypoadrenia left me in and I can move forward into spiritual healing from fundamentalism.  I look eagerly ahead to continued seeking after Truth, knowing that the Divine is always present and ready to be found by all who are willing to look.