Get Thee to the Monastery

So I went on a private retreat this weekend to a Benedictine Monastery. (It's only fitting now that I've decided to not join the church.) How refreshing to be in a spiritual community that was open and free, at least on the surface of things. Twelve round monks dressed in white hooded robes chanted and sang five times a day and I got to sit in and listen. A wonderful time to think and pray, read and write...

Here's a poem I wrote while I was there.

An Encounter While Reading Thomas Merton

He says that love depends on
believing we are loved and
contemplation is not for loners.

I turn the pages, underlined with pencil.
It's in the mid-80's, this bright May morning.
She plods up the hill, carrying something,
stops at my faded Adirondack chair
and shows me a large triangle of driftwood.
"It looks like a mobia strip," I say.
"Or the pelvis of a buffalo," she adds
and we laugh. It just floated up to her
from the river as she was standing on the bank.

She sits down on the ground next to me,
says she has needed this alone time.
She confesses that she has decided
to restart her medication and I say everyone
I know is on medication for something, including me.
And she says the wheels in her head just won't
stop churning and she judges herself so harshly
sometimes to the point of hatred. She lives in Brooklyn
and is four years married to a fireman, "a good man,"
who fought at the World Trade Center. She goes to
Al-Anon and has a two-year-old son named Adam.
I listen, weigh each word like Merton, then I tell
her my secrets which are no secrets at all,
but they hang in the air like pollen.
"Unseasonable weather," she says at last.

When she leaves, she thanks me for my kindness
and we hug. Then the gulf within me opens
and my mind turns round and round
like the tangled root she brought
up from the shore.

Trauma and Recovery

I recently co-facilitated a former-members support group for ex-cultists. We met in a spacious office and went around the circle and told our stories by turn. There were survivors of all sorts of groups - Bible-based cults, therapy cults, new age cults, even political cults. We listened to each other's stories, reacted and asked questions. Even though I had heard many similar accounts, it didn't mitigate the shock of what people do under cult mind-control.

When it came to me, I rattled off the litany of abuse which I'd suffered while involved with The Way International- things like sexual abuse, physical abuse, spiritual exploitation, psychological manipulation, severe depression, suicide attempts. They were all old hat to me. But when I finished my recounting, everyone sat in silence. I felt embarrassed, like I had done something wrong and upset the group.

On my way home, while driving, I had a chance to reflect on what had taken place. I had been horrified by some of the things I heard from some of the ex-members - things like hypnotism, child abuse, brainwashing. Perhaps, I thought, other people had had a similar reaction to my story. Even though I'd been through it a thousand times, I even wrote a book about it all, it was still unsettling for me to see people's response to my story. They were looking at me the way I had looked at them.

I think whenever people hear about trauma of any sort, the reaction is the same. Shock, denial, horror, anger and grief and so on. Even if you've been through abuse yourself, hearing other people's stories can elicit these same emotions. Now I think I understand how people I know feel when they read my book - why some of them look at me cross-eyed and don't know what to say. Perhaps they worry that these aberrations of normal human experience are contagious.

My abuse took place over twenty-five years ago. I'm healthy, happy and living a more or less sane life. But when I show my scars, and see myself through the eyes of others, I am reminded of the pain. The pain is new to the ones who are hearing it for the first time. But, for me, these wounds are healed and I am basically whole. I only get thrown if I react to their shock, like a baby that falls and looks at the pain on its mother's face then starts to cry.

I have to remind myself that I am not a child. I am no longer a victim. I will always be an ex-member, always a survivor but now, by God's grace, I'm a "thriver." It's been a long road from trauma to recovery and I need not go back. Except to hold out a hand to someone who is trying to cross the chasm to healing themselves. That is why I'm co-facilitating the group. But that doesn't mean I still don't get tweaked by my own story. Sometimes it's just plain hard for me to believe I went through all that stuff. And if it's hard for me to believe it, why should I be surprised that others feel the same way, too?

Blaming the Victim

Last week, there was a suicide in the prison where I work. I didn't know the young man but the incident has affected me deeply. We disn't know a lot about the victim because he was new to our prison but, as in all suicides, the staff is asking what we could have done differently.

I've gone through the gamut of emotions this week - from sadness to anger to guilt to grief. My husband tells me that I can't control the whole world - I am not responsible for the young man's actions and yet there's a part of me that says, "if only" and "what if." My control fantasies are enormous, I guess. I need to let it go.

In the Way, we were taught that suicides were caused by devil spirits possessing the despairing person. There was no understanding that they may be clinically depressed and caught in the vortex of hopelessness, causing them to feel so desperate and helpless that they take their own life. Unfortunately it's not uncommon in prison.

But devil spirits? This young man was an addict. But he was also a son and a father, a brother and a boyfriend. He had witnessed the tragic death of his brother when he was sixteen. Before that he was an honor student - after that, he turned to drugs. Did the devil spirit cause the brother's death? The Way would say "yes." That's an easy answer to the hardest question. Why do bad things happen to good people?

I don't know whether the man was "good" or "bad", "possessed" or not. I am not here to judge. But I do know that being alive means to grapple with these unknowns and to live in spite of the uncertainty. To live. Blaming the victim is the easy way out - as is blaming myself or blaming the system or blaming anyone for that matter.

What can we learn from this incident? That is the important question- not who is to blame, especially the victim.

In Praise of Imperfection

Yesterday, I mailed off a bundle of Christmas cards, finished the last of my Christmas shopping, came home and wrapped presents while "Scrooge" was playing on the TV. A perfect holiday-prep day, all around. And yet I felt like garbage inside.

I had done all the right things. Not in the order of Mother Teresa, mind you. I wasn't collecting money for the poor or passing out Toys for Tots but I hadn't murdered anyone or stolen anything. Now why is it that every time I do something decent, maybe even good, I feel so bad?

I have a cantankerous mind. It misbehaves in all sorts of ways but the most annoying aspect is this inclination to cut myself to shreds when I have tried to be good. I guess the Apostle Paul called that our sinful nature (see Romans 7.) But I no longer believe in sin. Then again, I might rethink this.

I no longer believe in a personal savior either though I might rethink that, too. I'm certainly in need of one. But whenever I call upon the name of God or Jesus, it's as if someone shouted "Incoming" and I feel like diving under the nearest table for cover. No offense on the Almighty. It's not Her fault. It's a residual effect of the cult.

So, I pick myself up and dust myself off, a daily experience. I've gotten to the point that I pray to God just to help me not be afraid to pray to God. If that makes sense. The last sentence in Paul Tillich's incredible book The Courage to Be goes something like this: "The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God disappears in the anxiety of doubt."

This God that's bigger than God is the God of imperfection, the God of what is. This God does not condemn. This God lives with, grows with, falls with, suffers with me. Sounds suspiciously like the little child born in Bethlehem. Maybe I do believe after all. Believing through self- doubt like mine is like trying to see in a monsoon. But I'll give it a whirl and when I do, I'll remember that I'm allowed to be imperfect. There's a word for that, too. Grace.

Merry Christmas.