Category: recovery | Page 28 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

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.

The Butterfly Circus

The Butterfly Circus, released in August 2009, is an inspiring 22.5 minute short film that is supposed to be made into a full-length motion picture, though I haven’t heard anything about their progress in years. People who have been hurt in unhealthy churches should be able to take home something from this film that will lift their spirits.

“At the height of the Great Depression, the showman of a renowned circus discovers a man without limbs being exploited at a carnival sideshow, but after an intriguing encounter with the showman he becomes driven to hope against everything he has ever believed.”

You may watch the entire film for free on Vimeo.

Why I’ve been a spiritual hobo

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on December 8, 2014.

Maybe I’ll try church again.

Two years ago, I’d been exiled from my church home four months before.

One Sunday, I went to a service at a local megachurch, hiding myself in the crowd. And I asked God why I hadn’t found a spiritual home yet, if I ever would.

And in the dimmed light and slow guitar chords trickling over me like creek water, I thought maybe he answered.

You won’t find a home. Not yet. You’re a hobo for right now. But I am going to show you all the different kinds of people who are part of me, part of my body.

So out I went. New Life Church became my soup kitchen, but I visited the LGBT affirming church, my friend’s mother’s Catholic church in Boulder, the Apostolic Pentecostal church.

I saw chanting and wailing, people speaking in tongues, people reciting the Apostle’s Creed and the sprinkling of holy water. I saw transgender women bustling around a church kitchen, brewing coffee.

And everywhere, I found someone whose heart seemed alive, people who sought Jesus.

For years, I’d been told that our church was part of a remnant holding to sound doctrine, that other churches were to be analyzed and mistrusted.

According to the Barna group, I’m not alone in being spiritually homeless. Their surveys say my generation tends to fall into three groups: nomad (Christian, but not involved in the church), prodigal (once Christian but no longer identifying as Christian), or exile (Christian, lost between the culture and the church).

I’ve written before that something that keeps me from leaving completely, something hopes I can still find light in Christian belief. Stuck somewhere between nomad and exile.

My friend Cynthia B. and I went to see Handel’s Messiah at Village Seven Presbyterian Church last weekend. Poor college students are always up for a free concert.

Churches feel awkward to me now. I don’t feel like I belong, because I’m not hiding my problems anymore. Cynthia and I sat in one of the back rows.

I was skeptical.

But the choir joined with the lead singer the first time, and I was four or five years old again. I know it sounds cliche.

But I forgot the beauty and the light I once found in music and church performances.

I’ve been escaping emotional hypothermia, realizing Jesus didn’t ask for my pain and didn’t need my defense, finding purity beyond the rings. And I let go my original concept of church to grow. To find church outside four walls.

I needed to know that Jesus didn’t label me, that there would be room for my doubts.

And now I cried, let the music and community back in again. I cracked open in the light, soaked my soul in the ethereal sound.

Maybe a hobo can find a home again.

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.

Where do I go from here?

I don’t ever want to go back to where I was, but I’m not sure how to go forward either. It seems that I’m stuck between worlds, sometimes… not fitting in with groups that are talking about the latest movies, fads, and music, yet not having any desire to go back to the group that I’ve left. And not fitting anywhere else either.

I’m not angry, and I refuse to be angry, at a group at large. Individuals, yes, and even churches that allow abuse. But not an organization as a whole. It seems like a lot of people go hunting a battle to fight. Enough battles have found me; I don’t need to go looking for any.

There are some good people in United Pentecostal and Oneness churches. There are some good teachings. There are also some bad people that manipulate others and encourage the kinds of preaching and teaching that hurt others. But the ones who hurt me repeatedly labelled me as “one of those kind” and I will not do the same to them, as a whole. It’s hard not to, sometimes. But I never want to become like the ones I left because I don’t want to repay hurt for hurt or wound for wound. I don’t want to retaliate, I want to heal.

Most people who read that won’t really understand what I’m saying. But I’m glad for those who do. I get tired of hearing negative talk about others. That kind of talk wears me down, it wears me out. But there are so much better things to talk about and to experience.

I have good memories of the last 20 years. They weren’t wasted years; they were learning years. I don’t want them back, but I won’t throw them away, either.

So sometimes I feel like I’m in limbo… and I ask, ‘Where do I go from here?’

Someone from my former church called me tonight. She started asking how I was and where I was going to church and what I would do in the future. The answer is simply, “I don’t know.” Not back. Not back to the UPC or any Pentecostal church. But at the same time, I’m not sure where, yet. At work, I’ve jokingly told employees that the company doesn’t state all the job requirements up front… and then asked if they have a crystal ball and a 28 hour day. Sometimes I need those things, myself. God is the only one who knows the future. I don’t know where I go from here… just that I’m going forward.