Category: healing | Page 18 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Missing the mark: Exploring the meaning of ‘sin’ beyond fundamentalism

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on November 9, 2014.

I cry, Father, Father, forgive me
You say, Child, I already have.
– Joy Williams, Beautiful Redemption

I pulled back on the bowstring, my arm trembling to hold it taut.

My friend Ashley gave me pointers from the other side of the archery pit.

“Pull your finger back before you release so the arrow doesn’t catch.”

“Aim a bit to the other side and higher.”

Steel slipped between my two hands, out and away through the crisp November dusk. The arrow struck the hay bale near orange spray paint.

“Hey! That one wasn’t bad!” I said, extracting the arrow from the netting.

Using a bow and arrow involves rewiring neural connections to tune hand-eye coordination. Which takes repetition. I still miss, mostly.

Living requires the same dedication. I mess up every day, missing a deadline, saying the wrong thing.

But, as my friend Elraen often says, you are not what you do.

Modern church has many sermons and worship choruses about sin and sinners. We’re told from an early age that “we have all sinned, and come short of the glory of God,” as part of the Romans Road.

But cultural connotations are lost in language translation, because Koine Greek and Hebrew have evolved into modern forms.

In my two semesters of Koine Greek this year, I discovered the original meaning of “sin.” The word is ἁμαρτία, pronounced “hamartia” and means “to miss the mark,” specifically in archery. Basically, a mistake. Sinner is ἁμαρτωλός: a poor marksman or mistake-maker.

But our American culture has no physical reference for the word. So we’ve made it a state of being. Pretty much since the word came into the English language.

In the opening paragraphs of A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses it to describe Ebenezer Scrooge:

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”

And Shakespeare does it, although Elizabethan England lacks the rigid sanctimoniousness of Victorian society:

“Those healths will make thee and thy state
look ill, Timon. Here’s that which is too weak to
be a sinner, honest water, which ne’er left man i’ the mire”
(Apemantus, in Timon of Athens – Act 1, Scene 2)

“Well, I will be so much a sinner, to be a
double-dealer: there’s another.”
(Duke Orsino, Twelfth Night – Act 5, Scene 1)

English usage often links sinner with a “be” verb, making “sinner” a label, a title. Like an occupation. The word becomes an identifier, it sticks to us.

Guess who else liked to use “sinner” to label people? The Pharisees.

The Gospels contain 30 total references to “sinner.”

Five of them are used by the gospel writers (Matthew 9:10, Mark 2:15, Mark 2:16, Luke 7:37, Luke 15:1).

Eight times, the Pharisees point out specific people they do not approve of (twice calling Jesus a sinner). (Matthew 9:11, Mark 2:16, Luke 5:30, Luke 7:39, Luke 15:2, Luke 19:7, John 9:16, John 9:24)

Jesus uses the word 14 times, five in direct response to the Pharisee’s accusations (Matthew 9:13, Matthew 11:19, Mark 2:17, Luke 5:32, Luke 7:34), seven in talking to the disciples, often opposing some Pharisaical idea (Luke 6:32, Luke 6:33, twice in Luke 6:34, Luke 13:2, Luke 15:7, Luke 15:10), and twice when being betrayed, ironically, to the Pharisees (“into the hands of sinners,” Matthew 26:45, Mark 14:41).

Then one mention by the repentant tax collector (Luke 18:13) and twice from a healed blind man (John 9:25, John 9:31).

I get the sense that Jesus didn’t like to label people, because his conversations with the Pharisees usually go something like this:

Pharisees: “WHY ARE YOU HANGING OUT WITH /SINNERS/?”
Jesus: “Um…because I came for sinners?”

And the Pharisees don’t recognize that sometimes, they are also mark-missers.

The Gospels mention “sin” 126 times total (Matthew: 32, Mark: 21, Luke: 45, John: 28). Just the action. And those verses have new connotations for me, too.

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.” (Matthew 18:15, ESV). Oh. So, if my friend misses the mark in our friendship, if I am hurt, I should tell him directly.

Humans hurt and disappoint each other every day. Sometimes missing the mark can be overcome with practice, behavior patterns can be altered.

Other times a mistake is serious or even fatal. My aim in the archery pit isn’t the sum of my identity, but a misfired arrow can wound.

Maybe that’s what Jesus’ redemption is about – he makes it so our mistakes no longer define us, so we stop attaching the name “sinner” to ourselves. The labels peel off like a used “hello my name is” sticker, and I am free.

But he saw through my labels all along.

The Lighthouse Girl

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on June 17, 2014.

There was once was a little girl, raised in the Village.

The Village was a utopia, walled off for protection and insulated from the world. Even the families in the girl’s section of the Village did not see each other very often, but lived peaceably, like hermits, in accordance with the Code.

When the girl grew to be a maiden, sometimes she crept through cracks in the wall and explored the countryside. She gradually even made friends with the woodland folk, discovering new ballads and gypsy dances banned in the Village.

One day, the elders of the Village told the girl that absolute obedience was the only way to honor her parents and the Code. But the girl had dreams, and this meant soul death.

So one night the girl left the Village forever.

Her friends on the outside helped her travel to the coast, where she built a lighthouse with bricks and mortar and timber they brought. That section of the coast was so rugged that the deaths on its rocks were legend. Other attempts to build lighthouses had not survived.

The girl maintained it for years, weathering many storms. Her friends visited often to encourage her and the prosperity of the lighthouse, but sometimes she was lonely. Her friends started to call her Lighthouse, shortened to Light.

One friend was a girl-pirate who was once raised in the Village like her, but they had met beyond the walls.

Another village girl had become a spy for a local Baron. She took shelter in the lighthouse and lived with Light for many moons.

All three of them knew an older girl who escaped a failed utopia several years before. This girl had been cursed by her own Elders and turned into a mermaid, forever chained to the waves and spume. She shared the birth name of the girl-pirate.

The friends often wondered about their kinsmen in the Village, and hoped someday many more could be free from the well-meaning tyranny of the Elders. The four swore a solemn pact against injustice in the land.

A cyclone rolled across the waters one night, spewing hailstones like vomit. The lighthouse girl manned the tower, keeping the light alive. In her telescope, she spied the signal of a small boat foundering on the waves. Two passengers, one with gold hair and one with the hair of a raven, rowed and bailed water to no avail.

Despite the peril, the three friends, followed by the mermaid, took a larger ship. They rode out toward the lost girls, just before their rowboat crashed against the rocks.

Light, the girl-pirate, the spy, and the mermaid embraced the lost girls on the beach and welcomed them to safety. Light helped them to warm inside by the fire and dry their clothes. The lost girls told the friends that they fled another section of the Village, inspired by their love for one another, because their Elders had banned their friendship.

The four friends all knew the value of friendship, and told the lost girls to stay together, no matter what the Elders said, and to explore their newfound freedom.

Soon the spy-girl left on a clandestine mission for the Baron, and couldn’t send letters to the lighthouse girl.

The girl-pirate took the lost girls rafting, teaching them how to navigate currents and giving them sea legs.

Light helped the lost girls find a trade in town with a basket-weaver, but their spirits were wild and young, and they joined a band of traveling gypsies, squandering their earnings on trinkets.

Midsummer gales brewed out in the gulf, and the lighthouse was empty again except for Light. She was lonely once more, yearning for her old friends and for new refugees from the Village. She often visited the mermaid down in the tidal pool on calm, starlit evenings to plan new adventures.

One day, the girl-pirate came to the lighthouse girl and said she couldn’t stay on land anymore. She was bound for faraway oceans and adventures far from the Village.

Light hugged the pirate and cried. They walked down to the docks together.

Light told the girl-pirate how much she had learned from her. She knew how to tie sailor’s knots. She could brew herbal mushroom tea from the Orient. She could debate the Elders now if they confronted her and told her to tear down the lighthouse.

Deep in her heart, Light knew how much the pirate yearned for the sea, how the land was ebbing away at her friend’s spirit.

The lighthouse girl said the girl-pirate needed to sail. It was time. And she understood.

Embracing Sobriety in Spiritual Practice – An Interview with Elizabeth Esther

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on June 9, 2016.

Another blogging friend, Laurie Works, introduced me to Elizabeth Esther’s blog back in 2014.

Recently I ran across her top ten signs of a spiritually abusive church YouTube video and I was so, so glad someone finally mentioned the dangers of “independent fundamental” churches like the ones I attended when I was a teenager, where most of the experiences that I write about came from.

Her more recent posts about the need for art to change as we get further and further out of that system have also been healing for me. Self-care is so vital and it’s not something cults encourage.

I didn’t reply to her survey last summer for Spiritual Sobriety because I wasn’t really in a place to do that yet, but I found her questions compelling and I couldn’t wait to read the book when it released this spring.

My friends and I who got out are healing and growing, but there aren’t many resources for people like us. Most people who shared our experiences are still on the inside. That’s why I was so excited about Elizabeth Esther’s new book and I wanted to know more. She and I did an interview for the release.

Here’s our conversation.

First, I’d like to ask you what specifically prompted you to write this book. What was the tipping point that made you realize that an unhealthy relationship between spiritual practice and addiction exists?

A lot of it was my own experience. I began to see similarities between the ways I used God addictively, in the same way that alcoholics rely on booze to escape pain, enhance pleasure and escape reality. I was sick of using God as a kind of “vending machine” to get what I wanted out of life. Knowing God is different than “getting things” from God. But when I began searching for a “sober” way of relating to God, I found that many churches only offered emotional experiences or magical thinking. Many churches were enablers!

Probably most of us have heard sermons interpreting Ephesians 5:18-20 to mean that we should be drunk on God the same way that you can get drunk with wine. How do you view this now, after writing your book?

I’m not gonna mock someone’s ecstatic experience with God. But I am going to suggest that too often we mistake “intoxicated” religious feelings for love of God. If love is real, it will be manifested in our actions—not just in how many awesome, amazing, WHOA worship/preaching conferences we attend. Scripture also tells us that we will know each other by the fruit of our lives. So, a lifelong journey of Christianity isn’t really about our conversion experience so much as everything that comes afterward. Are we kinder, gentler, more joyful, peaceful, patient, self-controlling? Those are the fruits of the Spirit. THAT’S what defines a true faith practice.

When you hear songs about giving all for God or being on fire now, what is your reaction to them?

I think those songs have a time and place and can be especially meaningful for brand new believers finding God for the first time. But those songs don’t do anything for me, personally, anymore. I don’t think those songs are SUPPOSED to define our entire faith experience. Because, like life, faith is a journey. I’m so glad I’m not a teenager anymore! I don’t need the hyped-up feelings because I know those can lead me into addictive burnout. When I hear those songs now I feel sorta like: “awww, that’s so cute.” But my tastes have changed. Or matured, maybe. I’m not really interested in the grand gestures or the huge, meteoric displays of passion or “giving it all to God.” I want something sustainable. A relationship that lasts a lifetime, not for one amazing summer. I know now that God doesn’t ask me to burn out for Him or to neglect myself to the point of a health breakdown. God likes me and delights in me and I’m just doing the best I can today, trusting that God will take care of the rest.

For those who have been spiritually abused and want to return to church attendance but are wrestling with reconciling their new perspectives and insights with the old memories, do you have any advice on where to start?

Start where you are. Take the pressure off. You have a whole lifetime to figure it out. There’s no rush. I would only suggest to keep trying. Even if that trying means giving up. Sometimes giving up is the best way to start! Here’s the good news: God isn’t going anywhere. You’re not going to “miss out” on God just because you don’t attend church. God is big enough to find us anywhere. Start where you are and let God find YOU. 🙂

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You can order Spiritual Sobriety here on Amazon. I’ll be posting my review soon.

Purity Rings: How I reclaimed a patriarchal evangelical tradition

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 5, 2013.

I was one of those pre-teens longingly looking through the True Love Waits catalog back in the early 2000s. Wondering. Waiting.

Somehow, I wanted to believe that wearing one of these rings and promising to keep my thoughts pure and my body untouched would magically cause the man God had prepared for me to appear, just like Prince Charming of the fairy tales. I composed letters in my head to my future husband. I dreamed of the day when he would remove my purity ring from my finger and replace it with our engagement ring. I would save myself for him, and we would live happily ever after in the enjoyment of each other’s company.

My parents didn’t buy me a True Love Waits ring. Instead, on the Christmas I was 13, my dad gave me a simple tanzanite ring. I wore it until last year, when the gold band finally snapped.

I didn’t put it back on. And I haven’t repaired it yet. Someday, I probably will. But I was already questioning the thinking behind the purity movement of my teen years. Now don’t get me wrong. I still want to remain a virgin until marriage, and I think there is something to be said for seeking to live well. But now I have a different definition of purity.

Many Christian girls of my generation – including some of my closest friends – committed themselves to the “pure girls” movement, yet ended up wounded by it.

A blogger who posts under the pseudonym gracefortheroad explains it in a post called, “I don’t wait anymore.” She says, “A lot of girls were sold on a deal and not on a Savior” and ends with this thought, “I just didn’t want to wait anymore – didn’t want to live like I was waiting on anyone to get here. I already have Him … and He is everything.”

The Recovering Grace website has an article regarding the pitfalls of the emotional purity teaching prevalent ten years ago, which argues that if you have a crush, you are sinning and giving a piece of your heart away to someone or losing your emotional virginity. Believing these ideas caused me to become paranoid of hugging a guy friend or allowing myself to become attracted to a man.

Last year, my friend Anna G. shared a story with me called “The girl and the glass heart.” It confronts the lie that if I freely love, I am left with less to love other people with in the future. The lies that tell me that if I love and I am left heartbroken, I am tarnished and used up, unfit for another relationship. The Heart-Healer in the tale tells the girl:

“Only in brokenness can [your heart] truly be whole. …. Wholeness does not come from perfection. Wholeness comes from purpose. There is no purpose in a perfect heart. There is purpose in a broken one.”

I had forgotten about my old purity ring until a few weeks ago.

Last December, over Christmas break, I finally told someone about my history of self-harm throughout my childhood and my youth. For the first time, the darkest lies I believed and deepest wounds I carried flowed out of my heart in a 3 am chat powered by Mountain Dew.

Later, I bought two rings engraved with the words “Forgiven” and “Jesus” to remind myself of why I never need to punish myself. But when my friend Cynthia B. first saw them, she said, “Congratulations on your first real purity rings.”

I drew back and paused, then smiled. “Yes. They are my purity rings.” The rings I wear now are not to symbolize something I do or don’t do. They don’t have much to do with me at all.

Instead, these rings point to what He did. For me.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 5: This is your life

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 6, 2014.

Continued from Part 4

I remember when
We used to drive
Anywhere but here
As long as we’d forget our lives
We were so young and confused
that we didn’t know
To laugh or cry
Those nights were ours
They will live and never die
Together we’d stand forever…
– Skillet, Those Nights

The first week of February 2014 at around 4:30 am, I was driving my little white Toyota sedan that I named Journey somewhere between east Houston and Beaumont, Texas, floating through bayou fog and the darkness before dawn.

I adore roadtrips. Few other activities allow my brain that raw time stretching as far as the humming asphalt between my tires for pondering my life’s direction and my purpose.

No school, no work, just hours and hours of listening to music and calling friends or chatting with anyone in the car I’ve managed to kidnap. I can just be and enjoy existence. Roadtrips make me feel alive.

Two of my housemates traveling with me had fallen asleep in the backseat a few hours before. Our little escapade is still nicknamed “that one time we drove an extra 15 hours to have a 20 minute conversation with Mullet Jesus.”

We’d left Colorado Springs around 11pm Friday night, arrived in Dallas around 1pm, napped and visited friends, and now I was in the 4th hour of the 6 hour drive that Saturday night stretching into Sunday. The remaining itinerary involved church, a 9 hour drive to Lubbock to see Skillet at the Rock and Worship Roadshow, then 7 hours back home.

Despite the Monster drinks and beef jerky, I knew I was nearing my limits. I turned up the speakers and scrolled for Switchfoot’s Beautiful Letdown on my iPod.

Don’t close your eyes, don’t close your eyes / This is your life and today is all you’ve got now / Yeah, and today is all you’ll ever have…

The rhythmic, deep buzz of the opening notes blended with my thoughts. Don’t stop feeling this semester. Don’t forget how you learned to be alive, I reminded myself.

This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be? / When the world was younger and you had everything to lose…

I imagined my 5-year-old self. What would she think of adult me? She’d be slightly ecstatic, I decided. I was finally going on adventures my heart longed for, and at last I had friends.

– – – – – – – –

Since recovering from repression, emotional honesty has been crucial.

My counselor told me summer 2013 that other people, including my parents, wouldn’t understand me unless I told them how I felt.

And I’ve found abundant, vibrant life in community and artistic expression.

Late nights driving around town with my friend MangyCat and the Midnight Muse writers and making miniatures in my friend Kim’s cozy basement were staples of my first year living outside the box.

But last spring, I took an entire semester of courses for pure enjoyment: Acting, 2D Art, Koine Greek, Poetry Workshop, and Choir.

My heart is in theater, both inside the church and beyond it, which I admitted to my friend Cynthia Barram last month when I volunteered to act for Haunted Mines, a local haunted house.

“Honey, everybody uses theater to work out their emotional problems,” she replied.

Slam poetry, which I discovered 6 months before moving out, became my catharsis, a safe place for open and honest expression. Almost like a new form of church.

My two favorite slam poems are Confession: For the Christian part of me (Joel McKerrow) and Letter to my 10 year old self (Susan Peiffer, of Hear Here, the Colorado Springs local slam team).

I heard Joel perform his poem live at an open mic in the campus pub one Friday night in October 2012. He said he felt privileged to perform it in Colorado Springs, among all the religious tension. He begins:

For the Christian part of me,
not for the Christ, but for the Christian,
I am sorry.
For when I look at the book and look at my life,
when I look at the Christ and look at the church,
the two are as black and white.
So for the way I have silenced you,
with words that I thought were the only truth,
for every preacher that has yelled at you
every Bible that has been quoted at you,
every megaphone that has damned you,
every friend that has judged you,
every parent that has guilted you,
I am sorry.

And Susan’s poem sparks new beginnings for me through my old scars. I love how she ends:

And Susan, one day, occupy your body again.
Realize and understand the gentleness of touch.
And let this realization convince you
that you are much, much more than a product of your past.
You are the manifestation of some dream whom destiny means to last
and you will always have words.
Words will never leave you.
I don’t have much else to tell you, Sue,
because it gets better, yeah, but it gets worse, too.
Remember, beloved, you are made of poetry.
Stardust, wanderlust.
[….]
You will fall in love, and you will be partially fixed.
And if you miss your youth one day,
You are secure enough to say
You feel twelve again
All over like it should have been
Even if it takes ’til 36.

One day, I want to shout out my story as they have, unashamed and no longer silenced. But for now, I am learning how to feel every day until it’s like breathing.