Omnipotent Lite

Honestly, I don’t think I ever worshiped an all-powerful god. Oh sure, I had faith and I believed, but fact of the matter was, there were times God didn’t protect us, no matter how faithfully we adhered to his word. Bad things happen to good people. Needless suffering – children being raped, abused, enslaved, or else starving to death – happens on such a grand scale it’s no wonder we do our best to block it out and not think about it. Of course, I can’t seem to do that.

The Problem of Pain has always, always, always been the seed of my doubt. I see that now. I wanted a god who was loving and awesome (in the old school sense) and kept his word. And hey, since my dad walked out on us before my earliest memories, I liked the idea of having a daddy who was always there looking out for me. But I didn’t think he was all-powerful.

I "knew" any number of demonic forces, generational curses, soul ties, unconfessed sins, etc (ad nauseum) could “shorten God’s arm” as my Giggy said, and could be a hindrance to Him, or could stop His blessing from being received. It’s funny, I think I had an answer to Euthyphro’s dilemma when I was six. God stopped as much evil as he could, and he was still more powerful than anyone or anything else, just not 100% powerful. In the black-and-white world of my grandmother's teachings, I had to make my god a little gray to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever really did believe God was ALL powerful. Pretty powerful, sure. Creator of the universe? Absolutely. Infinite deity? You betcha. Capable of overcoming the logical paradoxes created by an omnibenevolent omnipresent omniscient and omnipotent god existing alongside observable reality? Nope.

My god was never that cool.

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Trippin'

It was around 6:30 in the morning, and we were sprawled about the room, giggling to ourselves. Heath lay on the couch, chewing on the keychain he'd steadily destroyed throughout the night, and Ron and Amber had flung themselves onto their bed. James and i had made a nest of cushions and pillows and blankets on the floor of Ron &

Image by radiospike photography via Flickr

Amber's efficiency apartment. The light were all out save the fiber optic Christmas tree (or "Hannukah bush as Amber preferred) and we laughed for ten minutes or more at the idea of what a bunch of kids standing outside at their bus stop would think if they could see the five of us. James wrapped his arms around me, and began to nibble at my ears and neck.

Electrical explosions were going off, just beneath my skin, and the soft stroking of his wet tongue along my neck made me think of fireworks. He was testing my resolve. It was early on the morning of January 2nd, and he was hoping to end my New Year's resolution to be celibate for all of 2000. He failed, but I thoroughly enjoyed his attempts to tempt me from my course. Never mind that I was coming down from my first dose of paper acid, in a room with three other people was not how I was going to go. I thought over the previous night.

James was the only one I had known already. Ron & Amber were his friends, and Heath was one of theirs. No one else in the room had a car, and I had been willing to drive Ron to Sarasota, an hour away, to meet the guy who sold it, so my acid trip was free, once they gave me $5 for gas. When we got back to Cookie Cutter Cove Apartments* where he lived with his girlfriend in a one-room apartment, Ron snipped up the tiny slip of paper into little squares and divvied them up between us. Only after they were all in our mouths did we realize that James had been left out of the occassion. Not to worry, Ron was a pot dealer and there were forty-five pounds or so of weed in his closet - he pulled out an ounce and gifted it to James as an apology for the oversight. I smiled, thinking of how the other three had periodically referred to James as "sober guy," I kept pointing out, "He's not actually sober - just more sober than us" which always brought on a new fit of giggles from the room. The giggles! Why hadn't anybody told me how wonderfully giggly you could feel? At the beginning of the night, as the drugs kicked in, we had laughed for over an hour, over nothing, through tears. I wouldn't have been able to stop if I had wanted to, but why would I want to? This felt great.

We had played with the lights and with textures and at my visual peak I had been "walking through the garden on the ceiling." I remember Ron had pulled the bush out of its stand, casting the color changing lights onto the walls and ceiling. I laid back on the couch and saw how the color played across the popcorn above me, which twisted and morphed and became a collage of leaves - every size and shape and color, big tropical ones, tiny oak leaves,palm fronds, and pine needles. I strolled through the garden in my mind, smiling at all the leaves in turn.

At one point in the evening, it had all been too much for me. The tiny apartment grew stifling, the smoke from five people dragging down a cigarette every ten minutes was crazy thick, and I just needed a moment from all the weirdness - the assault of sights and sounds in the room, so I pushed through the curtain into the corner kitchenette and towards the front door announcing, "I'll be right back. I just need to go find the real world for a moment" - breathe some of the cool January night air outside, smoke a clove without having to give away four of them, maybe just listen to the night. From behind me a voice cackled, "There IS no real world - you're tripping!"

Whoa. It was such a profound statement. My back against the wall, I slid down to the floor, thinking. After a minute or so, I became aware of the hum of the fridge, and after a few mintues more, I started to harmonize with the fridge. I wanted to commune with it, be one with it, sing with it. "Hmmmmm" I intoned, sitting on the floor, my face pressed to the fridge door and my arms hugged around it. Eventually, Heath came into the room to refill his glass of water from the tap, and he asked me what I was doing, and I rejoined the room.

I drifted off to sleep that morning, as the rising sun peaked through the bent and broken blinds, and James made my nerves sing.

Uh, drugs are bad kids. Really. This passage is necessary for the book though. I didn't just do drugs to rebel or make Baby Jesus cry - I was actually usually trying very hard not to get caught. The part they never seem to mention in after school specials or rehab is how much fun you can have. Would I do it now? No, probably not. If I was going to, it would certainly have to be planned (like, hotel room and sitter and carton of smokes planned) and frankly, I don't even have those kinds of friends anymore, and doing drugs was always an incredibly social experience for me. I got into XTC because I loved the "PLUR" (peace love unity respect) movement and wanted to be friends with the raver kids, not the other way around. Just be responsible people, okay?

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Glitter Girl

Great-aunt Katherine was small-boned and petite. She radiated sweetness, and when she had something to add to a conversation, she'd get so excited about it she would bounce on the balls of her feet till it was her turn to speak. She was Giggy's older sister, and to this day I think Gig is still jealous of her for receiving so much of their mother's affection.

Our church, New Creation, was participating in an inter-church festival, and Katherine was in charge of preperations. My aunt Brenda and family-friend Christy Hall were both in the women's dance troupe that would be performing. They wore white dresses with big, inch-high colored jewels on the fronts, representing the twelve tribes of Israel and the priestly robes of Levi. My brother and sister and all their Sunday School classmates were in the flag twirlers troupe that Katherine led and choreographed, and their big red flags furled in the air as they practiced. In a big, busy, and poor family, it was easy for a youngest child to get left out. But Katherine thought of me, and she gave me the most important role in the entire New Creation procession: I was to be the Glitter Girl.

Like the flower girl at a wedding, as glitter girl I would lead the column of flag twirlers and dancers. Instead of scattering petals before me, I would shower the aisle with flecks of gold. Two weeks before the big day Katherine came to the house with a basket full of silver glitter. She told me that we would practice with silver, and work our way up to gold for the night of the performance. I put on my lavender bathing suit with silver flecks sewn in, so that any glitter that stuck to me during practice would be camoflouged by my outfit (until the next time I went swimming when, I'm sure, the glitter got sucked into the pool filter). We stood in the backyard and she taught me how to sprinkle the glitter in wide and sparkling arcs.

"You want the glitter to reach all the way to the first person sitting on either side of the aisle," she told me, and I stretched my arm as wide and high as I could as I carefully slipped the glitter pieces between my forefinger and thumb. The week of the festival, Gig took me to K-Mart for my first-ever brand new dress. I remember that she was feeling harried that day; Gig was always running late or running behind, so most days she was short-tempered and quick-tongued. But this day I didn't care if I was taking too long; I wanted to look at every dress they had and choose the one that was just right. I settled on a navy blue dress with white polka dots and a white lace collar with a single rose sewn in the center.

The big night came and I put on my brand new dress, stockings, and black Mary Janes. We loaded up into the station wagon and headed for the festival. I remember the practie and anticipation better than I remember the actual event. My memory of going their or coming home is fuzzy, but the memories of walking down the aisle, of stretching my limbs to get glitter to the farthest edges of my path, and of my pride in wearing that brand new dress - those memories are crystal clear.

Image credit goes to =Fallen-Stock of Deviant Art. That's not me, but it's pretty close to what I looked like at the time.

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Infant Baptism: part 1

I was baptized at six, in the pool of a fellow church member one Sunday afternoon, after repeatedly begging my mother for the honor. The fundamentalist churches of my childhood didn't have infant baptisms ("sprinklings"); we had adult baptisms ("dunkings"). It was a decision to be made by the person being baptized ("dunked"), not their parents. Of course, six was really too young to make that choice either. I hadn't explored any other options and thought of baptism as just one of several life steps I was supposed to take at some point. Why wait till seven?

Then when I went to Vineyard as a teen, I perceived a rise in "baby dedication" ceremonies. Shiny new evangelical families could "dedicate" their baby. I don't know if this was supposed to cover some of the same "what if a kid dies before being saved?" issues infant baptism is supposed to address or not. It made me really uncomfortable. Here we were - a congregation of people who had chosen to follow Christ, who read and knew His words, and did not believe that infant baptisms were religiously correct. But it was clear to me on some level that baby dedications were infant baptisms, minus the water.

The same people who absolutely cannot comprehend arranged marriage, try to arrange their children's religion. Oh sure, pick your own wife - that's love! That's romance! That's part of Western culture! But picking your own god? Nah, your parents don't trust you enough for *that*. Or maybe they don't trust God enough to think he'll care for their baby if there hasn't been some obeisance made to him, publicly and ritually. Still, the Vineyard baby dedications didn't really bug me. They were ultimately sweet - with the parents beeming with pride on their little bundle, and Dave, the pastor I adored, essentially wishing good things for the child.

In my early twenties I went to the dedication of cousin's little girl. Neither he nor his wife had a church they belonged to. They got married while expecting their daughter. Yet when it came time to raise their daughter, they chose the church route that neither one followed and the faith that neither lived by. Tradition! The service was held at my cousin-in-law's aunt's church: a small, acoustic-cieling tiled office space near the air force base. The pastor was frenzied and the message disturbing. The music was some of the worst I'd ever heard, on an old baseball diamond organ. The whole atmosphere was creepy, weird, and musty. Of course the three-minute prayer for my cousin was after the sermon: Why on earth would the pastor waste a captive audience of unwilling far-flung relatives and varied religious persuasions? (Part 2 on baptizing my son tomorrow)

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Prayer Bugs Me

My mother never pried. She had faults as a mother, but invasion of privacy was never one of them. She knew the importance of private thoughts. While I think her unwillingness to pry into my feelings left her unaware of the pain and mental confusion I was in for a long time, I have to say I value and respect the choice she made to let me be my own person, with my own thoughts and feelings. I could leave my diary open on the coffee table and know that she'd never read it.

Yet, I always felt better writing outside of the house, somewhere secret and quasi-magical. It was down by the blackberry patch at the creek when I was a small child, then onto a copse of trees beside a frozen golf course waterfall at the first place in Iowa, and either in a tree at the edge of a cornfield or on top of a wall holding back a hill from a parking lot at the second place in Iowa. When we first moved back to Florida, in to the apartments, I would sit beneath the willow tree on the bank of the man-made lake; once we moved into the house in the suburbs, I sat at on the dock at the riverfront park down the road.

So it shouldn't have surprised me, at 20 years old and living in my own place, that I still might feel the need to leave to write in peace. I remember crying, gasping in big tantruming toddler gulps of air, sobbing out loud to Jesus. "They say you won't give me more than I handle, but I'm telling you, I can't handle this! It's too hard. It never gets any easier and it never gets any better. Every time I think it's gonna get better, it just gets worse, and I'm tired of fighting all the damn time!" At the time, I was crying about money and how there just didn't seem to be enough of it. At other times, I cried nearly the exact same script, at the end of my rope, utterly desperate, crying heavenward and begging for mercy. Sometimes things would seem to get a little bit better following one of these break downs, but I didn't seem to be getting spiritual fruit or reaping any benefit for the trials I was going through. I was under the impression that when God tested you, when He gave you all that you could handle, when you survived it, you were rewarded for remaining faithful. Wasn't that the whole point of Job?

I feel sad and betrayed when I look back on those times. I knew that I needed help to carry life's burdens, but because I thought God was going to do that - and when there were only one set of footprints in the sand, that meant He was carrying me - I didn't look hard enough at the resources around me. Two weeks later, one night instead of calling on God, I called the suicide hotline. I'm typing this today because that was the right choice. It would still be another year till I got my first mental health diagnosis, and another five years till I found the right combination of diet, exercise, sleep, and medication, but it was a start. I was beginning to deal with my problems, instead of waiting on God to fix my breakfast.

Because God was nothing more than a voice in a head, He could never offer any comfort I wasn't capable of giving myself, or any insight I was incapable of having. Reliance on God, in mental and emotional anguish as in all things, caused me more pain. When I depend on God, when I say "It's all in His hands", I stop taking positive actions in my own life.

I would have gotten a therapist, a diagnosis, and medication sooner if I hadn't been raised in a faith healing cult, certainly. But I think I would have got them sooner still if I hadn't been raised a believer. I hate prayer now. It actively infuriates me when people bow before an imaginary construct, grovel and beg NOTHING, to fix their problems instead of working to fix them themselves.

I still struggle with money and I still struggle with a list of mental disorders. I am still crazy. But I don't have to beg any god to make me sane now - I can take medications, make alterations to my lifestyle, avoid certain foods. I can manage my life without a higher power. Believing in one hindered my drive for self-sufficiency and kept me dependent and child-like long past the time the world expected me to behave as an adult.

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Second Grade; part one

I liked Christian school. On my first day, all the kids gathered on the playground as their parents dropped them off, and played on the giant wooden roundabout, the long swing set, and the many slides. As we gathered into lines by grade, and I lined up with the second grade class, the petite dark skinned girl in front of me turned around and said, "Hi, our moms are friends. I'm Brooke. We should be best friends, too!" And so we were. And it really was that easy to join the social workings of the group. My cousin and I were instantly accepted, although Jason had a lot more shyness to contend with than I did.

I was friends with most with of the girls, and he was friends with most of the boys, and so we were the only two kids in class exempt from cooties. My friend Natalia might say, "Boys have cooties" and then, at a look from me she'd add, "except Jason." Likewise, he kept my reputation unsullied by the dreaded gender germ.

My teacher Mrs. Dempsey was married to the pastor of the church that owned the school. We went to a different church, so I only saw him as he lead Wednesday chapel services during school, but I thought she was wonderful. I've run into her over the years and over a decade a later she still recognizes me from the 8 year old girl I once was, and is happy to greet me in a grocery store or library. A few years after we left, we learned that Mr. Dempsey had been having an affair with - who else? - the church secretary.

Of all the philandering pastors, I'm maddest at him, because there are few people as genuinely loving as Mrs. Dempsey, and he blew it. Their two boys had graduated from the school's high school by then, so there was no pretense of staying for the kids. She stayed here in town with her head held high, and he was the one who left in shame.

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Senseless Tragedy

So my profile says that I'm a cult survivor, and that's true. My grandmother started a Word of Faith faith healing cult in the late 1970s. I was born (at home, with her as "spiritual midwife") in 1983, and grew up with her as our live-in childcare. I'm writing a book about all this and posting excerpts here. I've changed names in this posting, but real ones will appear in the final product. [EDIT: Names have now been restored. Whatever fear I still had, whatever concerns about staying anonymous, are gone by now, Jan. 2010.]

This excerpt begins with me watching 30 children for 3 days while their parents attend my grandmother's faith healing lecture, held in the clubhouse of a south Florida trailer park. This all happened in the fall of my Freshman year of high school.

Harrison Johnson was two years old, blond, quiet and sweet. He was one of the kids still in diapers, but he was the only one in cloth ones. I thought they were gross, messy, and more work; I was worried about sticking him with one of the pins.

Now that I have a young child, I know what a huge stress that weekend must have been for Harrison. He had never been left with anyone other than this grandmother before, and hadn't even gone to Sunday School with other children. He spent with 3 days in a strange mobile home, with 30 strange children, cared for by a strange teenager with purple hair who didn't understand his diapers. He did remarkably little crying for that combination.

Somehow I wasn't involved when the terms of my pay were discussed. Gig just told her followers to pay me whatever they felt was right, and these were not the kind of people who would fight over the honor of paying the check at IHOP. Left to the generosity of her followers, over the course of three days, for watching 32 children, I received a grand total of $40, or about $1.35 per kid (or an hourly per child rate of just 15¢).

Three months later Harrison's parents, Kelly and Wylie, brought him back to the trailer park, for a visit with my grandmother, and her ministry employees Van and Nicole. I wasn't there that day. I read about it the next day though, on the front page of four different newspapers. My grandmother was inside with Kelly and Nicole while Harrison, his dad, and Van were all talking outside, at the edge of the green belt - a swath of protected Florida woods running between the outer edge of the trailer park and a nearby water treatment facility. Somehow, Harrison fell onto a yellow jacket's nest in the ground. They swarmed and stung him, over 400 times.

The men took him inside Van and Nicole's red double-wide trailer, and my grandmother instructed them to give him a bath and make him comfortable. Gig later reported to police that Harrison seemed "fine", that he was watching television, and that he only asked for a glass of milk. Seven hours after Harrison Johnson was stung 432 times his parents called 9-1-1. Seven hours. Harrison wasn't allergic to stings, but the sheer volume of poison in his small body overpowered him, and his heart stopped. His parents, my grandmother, and her employees waited for over forty minutes between the time when Harrison stopped breathing, and when they called for help.

Even then, I still believed that my grandmother was good, and that she was right about medicine most of the time. A little boy I had known, a toddler with the kind of face that makes the news if he gets hurt, died a slow, painful death, in my grandmother's presence. And he didn't have to. It saddened me, and it worried me, but I wasn't ready to rewrite my programming just yet.

My son got stung by a yellow jacket recently. We were on a walk around our neighborhood and he stuck his hand into a hole in a light post. He drew it back out quickly, screaming. I carried him - running - a quarter mile home. As I did so, I called a med-student friend and left a frantic voicemail asking for help. Then I called my mother and asked her to look up yellow jacket stings online, and tell me how to treat my son's hand. The whole time he was crying in my ear, and I was panicked and running home. I got him home, cleaned his hand, removed the stinger, and put Benadryl cream and a bandaid on it. The total time between my son being stung by one yellow jacket and having that bandaid on him was less than 15 minutes.

Yet I am descended from, was raised by, and was brainwashed to follow, a woman who would sit for seven hours and watch a toddler die. Gig's own fourth daughter, my mythic aunt Natalie, died at six weeks old of a congenital heart defect. I can't help but wonder sometimes, when I think about the children she knew were dying because of her teachings, if she wanted other parents to suffer as much as she had.

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I watched Daniel Dennet's presentation at TED recently, and was struck when he mentioned that "Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain".

This can be very useful when studying. In college I would carry a single small notebook in my purse, and jot down practically every single word one of my professors would say. Once I got home, I'd recopy these notes into separate notebooks for each course. Each weekend, I'd review the notes for each course, and as exams approached, I'd go over them once again. For classes which required a lot of memorization of specific facts or definitions, I'd also make flash cards, and keep these in my back pocket to review while standing in line or between classes or at red lights in traffic. I made repeated copies of the information in my brain, so that I could recall it with ease in the high-pressure setting of an exam. I would know the right answers, because I had drilled myself on them so many times.

I got to thinking about what this meant in terms of religious practice. As a child, prayer was woven into the fabric of everyday life. We prayed over meals, in the mornings before traveling, and at night before going to bed. We went to church every week, at least once a week, and sang the same songs over and over every year. We made copy after copy after copy of these ideas in our brains. Perhaps this is exactly why so many religions emphasize the importance of daily devotions, bible studies, offices of prayer, and weekly church attendance. Each of these activities acts as a form of memorization, embedding the ideas more and more thoroughly into our minds, so that they occur to as the "right" answers, much as the notes I studied before exams.

I quit attending church services regularly after my son was born. For one thing, I was tired all the time. He was sickly as a young child, and I was nursing him, which was difficult when the church wanted me to leave him in the nursery, where he wouldn't be a distraction during the service. I also didn't fit very well in my "Sunday best" anymore with the addition of baby weight, and happened to break my ankle when my son was only a few weeks old. The combination left me at home a lot of Sunday mornings. As time went on and I could reasonably have begun attending services regularly again, I had begun to appreciate the heathen thrill of sleeping in, or lounging around in my pajamas, on a Sunday morning. I didn't quit attending church because I didn't believe in God, but as I failed to go to church, my belief waned. I'm not sure it would have been as easy for me to disbelieve as it was, if I'd been hearing the counter-message "God is true, God is real, God is here, God loves you, God cares inordinately about your sex life" every single weekend.

Many former believers I know talk about still having fears of hell, or dreams about church attendance, long after they leave their faith behind. I think this concept of "making another copy in your brain" may be the root of it. There are some things I learned in college I doubt I'll ever forget, like the principals involved in the "Corrupt Bargain of 1824" (when John Quincy Adams stole the election from Andrew Jackson). In the same way, I don't know that I'll ever forget the words and sign language to "Jesus Loves the Little Children" which I must have sung a thousand times in my early years of life. So when thoughts of God or Christian songs pop into my head, I don't need to give them any more credibility than the memories that they are. I was taught a myth as truth for over 20 years; it seems reasonable to believe, it may take some time before these ideas fade. In the meanwhile, I can study and drill and read and write over and over again the things I know ascertain to be true - the universe is a weird and wonderful place, no more designed for me than for the influenza virus. And I'm going to enjoy every guilt-free moment of the brief life I have in it.

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