Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 4, 2017.
I know it’s been a long time since I’ve really blogged, but I’m doing so, so much better than I was.
I’ve been back in therapy for six months now.
I’ve been moved out for almost five years. I saw three different counselors in Colorado — a Christian psychologist and two counselors at my college off and on between 2011 and 2015.
My parents wanted me to see the Christian one because they thought he would convince me that moving out was a bad idea. He didn’t. He told me to be responsible and don’t go unless I could survive on my own, but he actually encouraged me to leave.
When I told my new counselor this, while reciting my entire History of Therapy (TM) to him, he laughed and said, “backfire!”
My first counselor taught me that I wasn’t responsible for other people’s emotions, like my dad’s outbursts.
He told me that leaving would involve a risk that I wasn’t ready to take yet. I asked him what that was and he said I needed to ask myself that question.
And he showed me that I wasn’t obligated to believe religious dogma that hurt me.
One day he told me that he wanted me to “stop thinking in terms of shoulds and musts and start thinking about wants and your reasonable heart’s desires.”
I asked him if that was wrong.
I recited that Bible verse that says, “But the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?”
But my counselor said, “The former is living under the law and the latter is where freedom is and where Christ wants you to be.”
I didn’t have the faith to believe him yet, but I wanted to. I was still so scared.
My second counselor was secular. I saw him through my college’s mental health services program. He didn’t really understand the pain of trying so hard not to stop believing when everything you were raised with seems like a lie, but he definitely tried.
But he told me to try new things and he asked me what would happen if I carried less in my backpack going to campus every day.
He asked me to put my backpack beside my chair, instead of between me and him. I’d barricaded myself off without realizing it. Not having something between me and him while talking about deep emotions was unexpectedly vulnerable.
My third counselor was through my college again. She happened to be Christian and had been to seminary, so she could feel my faith wounds.
She told me that my flashbacks and nightmares were part of c-PTSD. We started a type of therapy to help my brain process old memories and not freeze up.
I found her after my first breakup, in the lurch of unexpected heartbreak. When I wanted to stop breathing and not exist.
Last summer, I knew I needed to go back.
I knew I wasn’t done yet. But I didn’t know how to begin again, to recount my whole life story all over again for a stranger who I would come to know but who knew nothing about me.
But then unexpectedly — and aren’t the best things so often like this — one of my pastors was starting graduate school for counseling last fall.
He started meeting with me. He knew parts of my story already, so vulnerability was both harder and easier. But there was really no one else I’d rather tell these things to.
It means so much when someone listens with their heart. They are more than just a counselor, then, they become an anchor.
In December, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore.
I have wanted to hurt myself for as long as I can remember. Even as a tiny human, I believed that I deserved punishment and would invent penalties for myself when “getting in trouble” didn’t seem like enough.
I am learning to trust other people. I am trying not to withdraw so sharply when I am anxious.
I am healing.
And I want to start sharing some of what I’ve learned.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 7, 2016 as part of a series.
“i am still learning that i am allowed to be human out here inside it was not allowed those things made a bad thing happen so i still feel that. any tiny mistake… ” ~ anonymous friend
Obsessive guilt is no longer my religion.
But for many years, it was, and the scars left by it still linger for many of us. This post is for my friends whose wounds are still bleeding. This is for everyone who can’t find the words yet.
I’ve written before about my history of self-harm, prompted by years of being told when I was a small child that I murdered Jesus simply by being born, because of original sin.
Every breath I took, every time I threw a tantrum as a toddler, every time I didn’t obey my parents immediately without question, all these things drove nails into Jesus’ hands. Or so I was told.
“You are such a disappointment to God. He is sitting in heaven crying because of your sinfulness. Even if you were the only person who ever lived, Jesus would have had to die because of your sin! Your sin caused Jesus to be tortured and killed. It is just like you were there hammering the nails into him.”
Over and over, I was told that Jesus and the angels were always watching me, that they were disappointed in me when I talked back to my parents. That I made Jesus sad, that I hurt him.
Guilt for Jesus’ pain is why I self-harmed, starting at age 5. And none of the adults in my life then understood why.
We grew up with this mindset, believing that only guilt could dictate ethics. If you didn’t feel bad about yourself, you were prideful. If you weren’t thinking about Jesus’ suffering, you were ungrateful for his sacrifice.
And it’s not just those of us who were homeschooled in Christian fundamentalist households.
One of my Mormon friends told me she obsessively washed her hands when she felt sinful, because it made her feel less dirty. Later she found out it was part of her OCD diagnosis.
I’m also not the only one who thought I had to hurt myself because I caused Jesus pain. I have several friends who also did the same thing, for the same reason. The idea actually goes back to the middle ages and flagellantism, radicals in the Catholic church who beat themselves to mortify the flesh and identify with Christ in his suffering.
I used to dig my fingernails into my hands every time I referred to the divine without capital letters, because I believed I had disrespected the Almighty. Now I no longer believe my God is concerned with misspellings.
Those in the church probably don’t realize that the language they use often gives a very different idea than they are intending to, especially with children who take things literally.
A recent Relevant magazine article explains it like this (link removed as the article is no longer available):
“If you tell a 10-year-old that he should be washed in blood, he’s probably going to imagine something closer to the opening scene of Blade than a loving Jesus who wants him to be happy forever. I pictured Jesus standing next to a giant bathtub that He was bleeding into while trying to make me dive into it like a Steven Curtis Chapman song in ’99.”
We hate ourselves, we struggle with feeling unworthy, and we believe that we are undeserving of love. I have friends who can’t convince themselves to take medicine until their pain becomes unbearable because they believe they deserve suffering.
My friend Ash shared this song with me last year, and I cried because it is me. For so long, I couldn’t accept love because I thought I wasn’t worthy.
Before you came the days just passed But now I so cannot reach seconds Within me thousand suns rise And I’m praying for them to never disappear Tell me what have I done to deserve something this beautiful.
Tell me why I deserve you Tell me why I deserve you Tell me why I deserve you Why is it me you love? – Lafee, Tell Me Why / Wer Bin Ich, Nightcore remix
It’s a process, we can’t just instantly rewire our brains. We don’t magically become healthier.
I’m still wrestling with my own theology, struggling to imagine that my God is pure light and love, a radical idea from a Graham Cooke video I watched years ago:
“You are the beloved. It is your job to be loved outrageously. It is why I chose you. That is why I set My love upon you; that you would live as one who is outrageously loved; that you would receive a radical love, so radical it will blow all your paradigms of what you think love is. I know I will love you outrageously all the days of your life because I don’t know how to be any different. This is who I am, and this is who I will always be. This is the “I am” that I promised you. I am He that loves you outrageously. And you may love Me back with the love that I give you.
“You may love Me back outrageously with the outrageous love that I bestow upon you. And know this, you can only love Me as much as you love yourself. So My love comes this evening to set you free from yourself. To set you free from how you see yourself. To set you free from the smallness of your own thinking about yourself. My love comes to set you free from rejection and from shame and from low self-esteem and from despair and from abuse because when I look at you, I see something that I love. I see someone that I can love outrageously.
[….]
“There is no fear where I am present because My love casts out fear.
“Beloved, you are My beloved. You are My beloved. And in my love, I want you to feel good about yourself.”
Unraveling all the gnarly threads woven through our souls takes months, years.
It’s like recovering from addiction or learning to drive a car. We’re learning how to love and be loved. Remembering that we are all made of stardust.
So when you meet a former box-dweller, please be gentle and patient with us. We’re still recovering. It takes time.
I hope you guys enjoyed this series and a glimpse into the souls of these lovely guest writers.
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Disability rights activist Cynthia Barram with her cat Dita in 2014. | Photo: James Sibert
Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 14, 2015 as part of a series.
Cynthia Barram was the first friend I met in college who helped me start my own moving out process before helping our other friends leave Christian fundamentalist, Quiverfull households.
Here’s her perspective on what happened, in her own words.
Lesson Number One: You can’t help anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself.
When several homeschool girls came to me, oppressed by churches and controlling parents, I helped them realize that sneezing would not condemn them to hell. They could kiss boys, get their ears pierced, and maybe even listen to some decent music without fear of the ground opening up beneath them.
But I didn’t realize I was trapped in my own cage, despite my involvement in disability activism. As the revelation hit me, I felt as though I’d been cut down from a whipping post.
My body sunk. My face went numb—unsure whether to react with joy or rage or some unholy spawn of the two. The revelation was the first of many from my support group. Long story short, the cage I had been living in due to the restrictions of my disability accommodations for the past ten years no longer existed, if it ever really existed in the first place.
The iron bars that burned when I touched them, the iron bars that held me fast to a life of poverty and escapism now crumbled and snapped in the hands of my mentors like dried reeds. One support group meeting did that, and afterwards I wandered the streets disoriented and moaning—drunk with the wine of freedom in all its bold bittersweet, soon to be very real possibilities.
But what was I to do without my chains? Like Jacob Marley on parole, I was now confronted with the equally real problem of how to get on without them.
So I understand the ones I’ve helped move out, the ones who have looked to me. Because I, too, don’t know how to handle so much sudden freedom.
Cut to support group a few weeks later.
“I love my friends,” I told them, “But rescuing two of them called me out of a final exam. I took an incomplete in a class last semester because we had a suicide attempt and dealing with it messed with my head, and now this.”
“No wonder you haven’t been yourself,” they said. “That’s way too much for anyone to carry, but we’ll help you.”
They then proceeded to divvy up my business as if it was their own.
I made a promise to the rest of the group members to keep our meeting days clear from other appointments, free from stress, and when I figure out who I am without my chains and graduate from college, I promised to let everyone know.
That’s the trouble with “witch work” as I often call it.
If you were born a witch (and I mean the green nasty one from the 1943 Wizard of Oz film, not Wiccans) like I was, you get used to that icky-sticky-kind-of-cool-but-on-your-own feeling.
On the one hand, you swear you must have three breasts, and are understandably and almost perpetually embarrassed.
On the other hand, you get used to hearing things like “Ever try to put a jet engine on that power wheelchair?” and “I’ve never been friends with a black person before,” and “You never wear feminine clothes.”
(Never mind of course that dresses get caught in my wheelchair!)
I heard many of these statements repeated again in college from formerly homeschooled people I met at college, like my friend Eleanor and the people she was helping.
When I first met Eleanor, she told me her homeschool textbooks taught her to sit or kneel when talking to people in wheelchairs, but I found the action too intimate for a casual conversation.
The only people who had done that to me without it being offensive were my first boyfriend and my childhood hero.
In other words, what the hell?
You laugh as if the jokes are funny, and offer up starters to the almost obligatory culturally informative conversations that follow.
You get so good at doing this on a small level that eventually you take on bigger game like formerly Christian homeschooled LGBT folks trying to move out when their parents have guns and women self-harming and ending up in the ER.
I didn’t seek out these people who asked for my help.
No, these homeschooled girls with braids and glasses, dressed like they were going to the Little House on the Prairie fan convention from hell, found me out on campus, at Bible studies, after church services. And I couldn’t scare them away, either.
You become so brilliant at this in fact that you tie yourself with chains to the greater good and wait for this or that friend with this or that crisis to—effectively becoming more worn out than any of your mentees are.
That is, until the cross disability support group at the Independence Center on Fridays, until the smashing of chains and the breaking of cages, until a group of people who swear on their lives to keep your secrets, and who feed you as you feed others.
Sometimes you need to crash on somebody else’s couch, figuratively, after you’ve hosted several refugees, or you lose yourself.
And that support group has got to be there before during and after anyone is even considering doing this work.
It has to be there, or the psychological slavery that you work so hard to liberate everybody else from will find a much better mark in you than it ever did in your charges, and this slavery comes customized complete with your own set of flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, and mood swings, trust me.
The support group has to be there or you will contemplate crazy shit—drinking bleach, stepping in front of a car, shooting yourself in the head, and when a woman in trouble holds your hand and begs you to tell her why you are alive, you will not be able to answer her.
I cannot stress this enough. The support group in some shape or form has to, has to, has to be there.
And no matter the strength of the freedom fighter, no matter the clarity of his or her vision or the strength and purity of the intentions behind it—anybody, anybody, anybody can find themselves worn out by the difficult and delicate process of freeing people to follow their dreams.
Cynthia Barram graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and she is the former president of the Disabled Student Union on campus. She petitioned for the Colorado Springs City Council to not cut funding for bus routes in 2008, which was covered by The Gazette and the Colorado Springs Independent. Cynthia is involved with the community at the Independence Center, which sponsors disability access and justice in the city.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 9, 2015 as part of a series.
Editorial Note: Although Ashley is a survivor of a Christian fundamentalist cult, unfortunately she became abusive herself. She has been reported to several law enforcement agencies for human trafficking others from 2017-2019. She is the abusive partner mentioned in this post from 2022.
I keep Ashley’s story on the blog as a reminder that those who do not heal from their own trauma can and often do end up harming others. If you see online fundraisers for Ashley or her current partners, please know that anything you donate may enable her to continue to cause harm, and we would caution anyone against donating to her. If you know where she is, please report her to the authorities since she has been avoiding speaking to investigators for several years.
Ashley grew up attending the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs, now known as Heritage Pentecostal Church. This is Ashley’s story, told in her own words.
Do you know what it’s like when You’re scared to see yourself? Do you know what it’s like when You wish it were someone else Who didn’t need your help to get by? Do you know what it’s like To wanna surrender? I don’t wanna feel like this tomorrow I don’t wanna live like this today Make me feel better, I wanna feel better Stay with me here now and never surrender Never surrender. – Surrender, Skillet
“Mama! Mama! Look at the butterfly!” I squealed in delight at the wonder perched on my shoulder.
“Don’t move, Lovey! It’ll fly away.”
I stood as still as possible as my mom snapped a picture of this beautiful creature, and watched as it flew away. I remember thinking as I watched the butterfly float into a beautiful, summer day, how amazing it would be to be able to just whisk yourself away whenever you chose.
I had no idea how much I would pine for that fantasy to become a reality.
I always remember my parents being there, no matter what the occasion was. Pajama day at school, grown-up day, job day, doctor’s appointments, they were always present. I can’t remember an important event they were not there for.
I went to them with everything, no matter how strange, and they were always brutally honest with me. I liked it that way. Being a straightforward person, I needed that to grow. Things were always so comfortable — and then 2001 came and everything changed. Drastically.
My mom had gotten involved with a church when she was 15, and the experience had always stayed with her. She had visited a Pentecostal holiness church and had received what they call the Holy Ghost, which to them is the basis of salvation. You cannot attain Heaven without it, and once you have received it, even if you walk away from God, you are marked and you will be a target for Satan.
My dad, on the other hand, is Irish/German and was raised Catholic. He was actually an altar boy growing up and wanted to become a priest. However, he grew out of that sometime in high school.
While living in Louisiana, my mom met a girl named Billie Jo, and they went to a Pentecostal church together. My mom converted all the way this time (lost the pants, threw away the jewelry, chucked the TV and music) and as soon as my dad joined, we essentially became Amish with microwaves.
Ashley (center) at a church outreach and evangelism event called Youth with Truth at Acacia Park in downtown Colorado Springs on June 29, 2013. | Photo: First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs
But even then, my parents broke me in slowly.
As an only child, I had practically every Disney movie known to man, and they allowed me to hand over my Disney movies in exchange for Veggie Tales. From there, it was my Veggie Tales traded in for either a trampoline or a puppy. My daddy bought me both.
They introduced me into that world slowly, and with ease. I appreciated that, even then. I knew they could have completely ripped everything away from me and made the transition harder than it already was. But they didn’t.
I never thanked them for that. I guess it kind of got buried under everything other emotion that surfaced after.
At first, things weren’t so bad. The family environment was great. Having no family in Colorado, the church appeared to be exactly what we needed. I started going to the church school which consisted of about 50 kids. I made friends quickly, and it seemed so easy at first. We were accepted as new converts and everything was cool.
My parents also made friends, and were treated like family by the pastor. They were like their kids.
I believe this is what started the depth of my parents’ relationship with the ministry. Around 2006, the pastor decided he wanted to evangelize and ended up electing a man from Mississippi to pastor the church.
I’ve never seen a man so hell bent on changing people for the worst.
Brother and Sister Burgess at Ashley’s high school graduation. | Photo: Ashley Kavanaugh
To my parents, this couple took the place of God. I have literally heard my dad say that if John Burgess asked him to stand on his head for 6 hours a day, in the middle of Interstate 25, that he would do it without hesitation.
They believe that he is the voice of God, that even if he is wrong, and they sin because of his advice, that God would honor their obedience and look past their own wrongdoing.
The church services are filled with hype and the sermons are mostly guilt, especially directed at young people. They warn us of the wrath of God if we choose to walk away and almost every service we are reminded of the horrors that have happened to backsliders all through Pentecostal history, including those from our own youth group.
One of the stories of backsliders was one of my close friends Sharonda.
She grew up with me, my mom babysat her and her older sister, and I looked up to this girl. She was my idol for a long time. She was my piano inspiration, she was cool, and she loved people.
I’ve never met a heart as big as Sharonda’s.
She was shot and killed late summer 2012. The case was never solved, and the Burgesses made not only her death, but also her funeral, an omen and message to all of us, that we should not run from God, for he is a jealous God, and his vengeance is strong.
She is seldom mentioned among the young people. It just hurts too much.
Brother John Burgess leading prayer during church outreach event called Youth With Truth at Acacia Park in downtown Colorado Springs on June 29, 2013. | Photo: First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs
The Burgesses continued to push their way into the minds of the church, and more and more young people have been driven away from God.
Most of the “backsliders” that I know don’t even believe in a benevolent God anymore.
This started to become my opinion very young. I couldn’t see how any of this made sense. I thought the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was just and honorable? Not malicious and manipulative.
After my parents began to blindly follow the pastor, I started to lose control. I shut off all emotions because I just couldn’t handle them anymore. I began to get more and more reclusive, and eventually began to blame myself for the guilt and pain that my parents were dealing with due to the controlling ways of the church.
I didn’t know how to get help, and I began to fall into a deeper depression. I began to self-harm. This was done in so many ways, I can’t even begin to explain it all. Eventually, the self-harm wasn’t enough. I attempted suicide six times, starting at the age of 11.
I tried everything. Nothing worked.
My mom caught me cutting once and literally dragged me in to Shanna Burgess (the pastor’s wife), who promptly told me as I lay on the floor, bleeding, that it was all in my head, and I needed to stop being so angry at God.
She told me I was the one to blame.
After coming to her weeks before with my heart wide open and breaking in pieces, I explained one reason why I felt so alone. I was sexually assaulted when I was 6 years old and had no way to express my feelings. She, of course, immediately took this information to my mother, who denied it.
My parents have never believed me. Sister Burgess told me I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself because come on, it never happened!
I hated them before but after this? I could never forgive them.
Brother and Sister Burgess had and still have a hold on my parents like nothing I’ve ever seen.
(Left to right) Brother John Burgess, Ashley Kavanaugh, and Kevin Kavanaugh at Heritage Christian Academy’s 2012 high school graduation. Heritage Christian Academy is a private, unaccredited school operated by the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs. | Photo: Ashley Kavanaugh
When I turned 18, things started to look up. I was finally allowed to have a phone because I had turned 18 (pastor’s rules for youth), I was finally granted rights to a car (that I bought, of course), and everything was going good.
I had been in good graces with the Burgesses and my family. I was following the rules to perfection.
And then after a falling out with my best friend at the time, I started to become close friends with a girl named Racquel. We began to grow closer and closer as the months went on, and before you knew it, we were opening up to each other. I told her things I had never told anyone ever.
Eventually, our concerns about the church and their doctrines, the Burgesses and all sorts of other questions came to the forefront of our conversations and we began to discuss them.
We grew even closer after learning about some of the abuse that the other one had endured.
We got caught discussing these topics, and we were separated and forbidden to speak to one another. This happened four times.
Each time we grew closer and closer and eventually, we started to go to extreme lengths to see each other. My parents and the Burgesses resorted to lying to both of us, trying to force us to hate each other.
After another six months of not speaking, we once again rebelled and talked about what had happened. We realized they had lied to both of us, obtaining information by hacking email and bank accounts. My parents forced me to stop attending my college classes because Racquel might try to visit me there.
We communicated to each other through Eleanor for about three weeks, and then we started to sneak out again.
We had contemplated running away many times before, but something was different this time.
When two adults aren’t allowed to talk because they get caught listening to One Direction, there’s some serious malfunction going on. It had reached an all-time idiocy and we had enough.
We both left home, and the night I did that was the hardest decision of my life.
Three days later, my dad was going to throw my stuff on the sidewalk. My mom, who was out of town at the time, convinced him to let me come pack my stuff, so he left for a few hours.
Racquel and Eleanor went with me. The first thing I noticed when I came in was that all my pictures were taken off the walls and lay facing down. Some sat in piles on the floor. I almost lost it then.
I just remember feeling like my parents died, and I was cleaning out their house.
A little later, Cynthia Jeub and another friend also came over. I’ll never forget the look on Cynthia’s face when I saw her. I walked outside to greet them, and she just looked so disturbed. But there was also pride in her eyes.
She hugged me for a good ten minutes. I’ve never expressed how much that hug meant to me.
They helped me pack up, and I decided last minute to check my mom’s car. I went to look for any remaining items, and when I opened the door, I saw that the inside of the car was destroyed.
I can only assume my dad went crazy and trashed the car. It was really scary.
Everyone was panicking because we didn’t know when he was coming back, and he had guns, so people were starting to freak out. We left not long after.
It didn’t really hit me until then, how drastic the change was going to be.
Since then, I have gone through a lot. I’ve put myself through an abusive relationship, made myself be something I wasn’t, lost connection with my family for months at a time because of “religious differences,” moved around a lot, found out I was adopted by my dad, been through a ton of counseling, self-harmed, ran from my home state, even shut my humanity off a few times.
But one thing I can say I haven’t, nor will I ever do, is forget who I am and where I came from.
I can’t express how hard it has been. The sleepless nights, the thousands of times I’ve cried myself to sleep, and woke up screaming. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
But you know what? I don’t regret it. I can’t. I’ve invested too much into this decision to fault it.
To those of you trying to escape, it’s not impossible. It’s not easy, but I promise its worth it.
We have helped more people come out since my decision to leave, and the feeling is so liberating, knowing you are a voice and a model for them.
To those of you who have siblings that are still in captivity, don’t give up hope. They will make it. YOU are their light, no matter how dark you feel sometimes.Because sometimes the darkest shadows have been cast by the brightest lights.
And no matter what bad choices you make long the way, I’ve found that I don’t have to be ashamed of them. Because they are finally my decisions.
So while wading through your red river of screams just as we have, remember you do not fight alone. You can make it.
And never surrender…. the battle will be worth it, and we will win the war. I don’t wanna feel like this tomorrow I don’t wanna live like this today Make me feel better, I wanna feel better Stay with me here now and never surrender Never surrender
Ashley Kavanaugh attended public school during her elementary school years, but her parents later chose to homeschool her online when they joined the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs. She finished her senior year of high school at Heritage Christian Academy, the private school operated by that church. Her adopted father is an attorney, but she was the first person on her mother’s side of the family to finish high school and attend college. She is interested in studying psychology, forensics, and criminal justice.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 17, 2015.
I have problems with Easter.
My church attendance has been irregular since I left fundamentalism, which I’ve been told is normal for people who have suffered spiritual abuse.
This year, I tried to go to church on Easter Sunday. I drove to the parking lot. Panic rose in my stomach until I thought I might vomit. I left for Starbucks.
This is the beginning of realizing that my spiritual life never has to be an obligation, nor should it. I don’t have to try to show Jesus I love him through ritual, because now I believe Jesus would want us to love others and even Him by our own choice.
I’ve had a love / hate relationship with Easter since I was a small child, because of the intense guilt I had about the story.
One of my friends was obsessed with revisiting the death of Jesus. She watched films and plays depicting his torture and death over and over, and I asked her why the resurrection got so little time in such plays. The resurrection was short and the crucifixion was long in every story. She admitted to the problem, but didn’t have a solution for it.
I thought the only way to honor Jesus for his sacrifice, to love him, was to be a witness to his suffering.
After moving out, I watched movies like the Passion of the Christ and the Stoning of Soraya M., because the torture of my fellow humans troubled me and I didn’t know how else to show that I cared but to watch.
That’s how I demonstrate that my love and compassion is real, right?
I made a new friend this last fall. She’s had her own church trauma–she was at New Life Church when Ted Haggard left in 2006 and during the shooting in 2007 and later another pastor who turned out to be a con man.
We were discussing violence in media and how we deal with it one day. She said that she looks away during the scourging and crucifixion scenes in movies and reenactments.
I had an epiphany. I’ve never been able to look away, to choose not to watch.
I remembered what a high school pen pal once told me: “I think there’s a reason we weren’t there when Jesus died.”
At the time, I vehemently disagreed with her, believing extreme forms of remembrance to be a religious duty, something any lover of Jesus would desire. I understood, even identified with the flagellants of the medieval period.
I was in the Thorn cast again like last year, but that was my only church-related Easter activity. I’d thought, It’s Lent season, do you want to watch the Passion? No, not really. It hurts too much. And maybe it should. After all, I can feel my emotions now.
So I rested over spring break, hung out with friends.
I stopped reopening my old scars.
On Good Friday, a fellow blogger in the Homeschoolers Anonymous community, posted on Facebook:
What passes as Christianity here in America often bears no resemblance to the humble, gentle Nazarene rabbi…. When I look around at the faith so often proposing to be Christianity these days, that Jesus seems gone.
Jesus isn’t just dead, but he’s had his identity stolen posthumously, too…. So yes, for far too many of his people, this is a eulogy for Jesus within Christianity.
Yes, we grieve a religion that often seems dead, and yet still cling to the slimmest of hopes, that an Easter Sunday is still within reach.
On the one hand, you swear you must have three breasts, and are understandably and almost perpetually embarrassed.
Do you know what it’s like when
