How Much is Too Much?

This is what I wonder as I sit beneath the noble, beautiful redwood in the southwest section of my back yard, allowing its steadfast peace to soothe the tumult in my soul.

My last post was largely about my parents and the people I grew up with in the confines of an abusive fundamentalist christian cult. This one brings me to the next step: wondering how much abuse is too much. Is it time to draw the line, to cut ties, as so many of them have done to me? I do not want to be in any way like them; my moral code does not include rejection of living creatures for the sake of ideas. Yet I am now considering that perhaps there is a time and a place for rejecting people who continue to be unrepentant abusers, even as they claim to love me.

Given today’s political climate, the misogynists fighting to retain patriarchal authority in this supposedly free nation and throw women back to the 1950’s, it is not surprising that women who have been abused in the name of patriarchal religion or politics are feeling especially incendiary over these issues. I am no different.

When a woman is raped, it has long been very common to blame her for it. This may be accomplished in a variety of psychologically and emotionally devastating ways. Even worse, this is also true when the victim is a child. Here is what happened to me:

When I was perhaps eight years old, my parents left a community church of a fair size, with an active Sunday School program I still remember, to join a small cult calling itself a church in a bad neighborhood. One of the first displays of real insanity that I recall was the pastor’s inexplicable antipathy to children’s toys of all sorts. He believed that for too many of us children, our toys became idols that we worshiped rather than worshiping the ‘true god’.

For evidence, he cited a book called ‘Turmoil in the Toybox’ [see the author interviewed here; it’s part 1 of 10, for those with strong stomachs and a healthy sense of humor –> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc1plbNqTFE] which contained anecdotes of supposed demonic attacks that came through toys such as Cabbage Patch Dolls, My Little Ponies, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and so on and so forth.

I never liked Cabbage Patch dolls as a kid; I thought they were ugly. After I heard the pastor’s sermon, embellished with an incident or two from the book involving bloodthirsty CPKs that attacked their owners, I was terrified of them. I told my friends who had them that they were in danger, that these toys were demon-possessed and really scary; please recall, I was eight and believed everything authority figures said.

What I did love were My Little Ponies. I had a collection of 72 ponies, including the Dream Castle and the Show Stable; I loved brushing their hair and making up stories with my best friend and my little brother. My little brother loved He-Man, and I will never forget the fight we had when I discovered one of my pastel-colored ponies being used as a warhorse for Skeletor. That’s hilarious, healthy, normal childhood behavior; but in the eyes of the authority figures around us, it was an indication of demon worship.

The paranoia about children worshiping demons steadily worsened, until my brother and I one day watched in tears as all of our beloved toys were thrown out into the trash as tools of the devil. The fact that I fought it so hard marked me ‘rebellious’ in the eyes of the church authorities, who have since that time *never stopped* demonizing me.

I had a stuffed panda bear with whom I had slept since I was nine months old; my mother claimed she had seen a demon in its eyes, and threw it out. We spent a large part of every week stuck in church being brainwashed with this sort of fearmongering condemnation of everything we were as children and everything we loved that was not Jesus. We were beaten (their word for it was ‘spanked’) for talking back to our parents or any adult in the church about anything, or for any infraction of the prison-like rules set in place to ‘protect’ us from demonic influence, worldly friends, or our own sinful imaginations. I was beaten, for instance, because I drew pictures of unicorns. All my unicorn toys had been thrown out, and I missed them, so I drew them. This was no less than an act of rebellion against God, where I grew up; the equivalent of treason.

Even books by Christians were condemned as demonic and thrown into the trash – my favorite books, all of them: Narnia Chronicles by C.S. Lewis, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien – taken and thrown away.

Women were verbally abused and condemned from the pulpit almost as much as children; inherently twisted and given to demonic influence, since Eve had spoken to the serpent. I distinctly recall the pastor telling one of my friends  on one occasion to go home and change her clothes before church because he could see her pantyline. No one asked him why he was looking. This is the environment in which we lived.

The church opened a Drug Crisis Center for male drug addicts; they took these men in off the street and “cured” them of their addictions, using nothing but Jesus, of course. Nothing but Jesus would *really* work, after all. Some of these men were dangerous criminals, but none of our parents thought twice about exposing children to their unbridled influence.

So when I was somewhere right around puberty – 11, I think, perhaps 12 – one of the habitual drug addicts who had risen to the level of being a deacon in the church found me alone and raped me. He was very large, and I was very small; it was extremely painful. There was blood.

I was immediately ashamed and terrified, knowing I could not tell my parents. I got rid of my bloody clothes and tried to sleep that night without much success, crying into my pillow over the pain and fear that now seemed as if it would never, ever end.

My mother suspected me of some wrongdoing, because I was acting abnormally over the next week or month, I no longer recall, if I ever really knew. Finally, to avoid punishment for something I had not done, I told her that this deacon had ‘touched’ me. Her reaction was to bring me before the pastor immediately, who insisted on seeing me privately to discuss the incident. When we were alone, he had me re-enact the incident for him. I was shaking and crying; he never spoke to me afterward, just called my mother back in and informed her that I needed more modest clothing so that I could no longer seduce men of God.

And that was her solution; get rid of my jeans and buy me baggy pants and long skirts from thrift stores.

The fear and the shame of living this way for years damaged my mind and emotions for a very long time. I was forced to marry very young, to a man who was close enough to my parents in his theology to please them. I ran away, but was defeated by an early pregnancy which later ended in violence, and returned to the only home I knew. I tried very hard to be ‘good’, always feeling the shame and degradation of my gender and my inherently ‘rebellious’ spirit. I bore three children over the years, and tried to be the best parent I could without tainting them with my evil nature.

But finally, one of my patronesses (or, if you like, one of my Jungian archetypal constructs who stands for self-protection) spoke clearly into my mind and warned me that if I did not get out and start living my own life, I would completely die inside. So I told my then-husband I needed freedom to follow my own path. This resulted directly in an incident of physical abuse, not of myself, but of my daughter, who was standing up for me due to his verbal nastiness in front of the children.

I was willing to tolerate abuse of myself, since it was what I had known for so long; but seeing my child abused brought all my latent fury to the surface. It gave me the strength to break out of the cage at last, taking my children with  me so I could protect them as a parent should.

So that was how I left the second prison I had lived in, and began my true life. As a result of my de-conversion from Christianity, and perhaps even more my come-out as a pagan Druid, I have been confirmed in all the narrow, hateful minds with whom I grew up and later lived as a demon incarnate.

I have found deep healing as a Druid, studying old myths as an archetypal path; tearing down the old structures built on fear and hate, learning to live under the eye of the sun without that fear and hate. It has been a dark, often painful journey out of that prison of abuse into the light and beauty of the world, and I have lashed out during some of my worst moments at people I love – family I have been given to replace the blood family that never protected me. They love me anyway, like a real family, without judgment and with honesty about all our flaws.

I even learned to truly love and forgive my parents for the first time, as a Druid. Christianity taught me nothing but hatred and fear, and I could never forgive them while I tried to follow their religion, ironically; it’s only as a pagan that I found strength for that.

Since that time, about a year and a half ago, I have been trying to open communication with them. They are not well off, and getting older. I wanted to be able to offer them somewhere to retire comfortably, but I knew that could not happen without first trying to work through the past and have an open, honest dialogue. Over the years, they have offered me apologies for throwing out my toys and books – though the more serious abuses were never discussed.

Today I received an email from my father in response to my latest attempts at honest, open dialogue. He informed me that I was a pathological liar as a child, and therefore nothing I said could be trusted. This, among many other insults, misquotes, and borderline insane ranting, peppered with assertions of loving me very much which – despite myself – I must admit touched me.

This completes the picture of abuse; other women who have suffered from ‘Blame-the-Victim’ paradigms can attest that calling the victim a liar is as popular as blaming her for what was done to her. They will do this insidiously as well as cruelly, assuring you that they are sure you actually believe your own lies, but they know The Truth, and they have Divine Vision, and can see right through your lies.

When someone does this to you long enough, you start to question your own sanity. Your own memories and pain; you wonder if you have actually done this to yourself, if none of it happened and it’s you who suffers from paranoid delusions. Fortunately, I am not under their influence any longer to the extent that I lose my certainty; but I’m still close enough to that confused, wounded child to remember how it felt to go spiraling down that path of self-hatred and the inability to trust my own mind.

I really believed my parents had changed; that they were progressing at least minimally on their own path. This tells me that if it all began again, they would do nothing different. And how do I accept that, as a person who loves and respects herself, who has finally learned to be proud instead of ashamed to be a woman? I really am not certain that I either can or should.

And so I come to another crossroads.

The Christian Hate Club

Lately I’ve noticed some pagans ‘sticking up for’ Christians when other pagans say anything negative about them. I think this makes them feel good, like they’re building bridges of peace between two groups long at odds, accomplishing something worthwhile in the universe.

In some cases, I think they might be right. There are certainly Christians who are awesome people, and they are not part of the Christian Hate Club; on the contrary, they are arguably the foremost targets of the Christian Hate Club – after people like me, who have tried their faith and rejected it for reasons of conscience. Pagan druids are by nature inclusive and welcoming, and as such I feel we should be among the first to embrace this type of Christian; not as ‘one of us’, but as part of Oneness. The fact that this type of Christian and we pagan Druids diverge sharply in our beliefs and practice, yet know how to respect and tolerate each other, is part of making the vital point to humanity that unity in diversity is truly possible. And quite beautiful, when it works.

However, there are also still many, many very extensive pockets of the Christian Hate Club. Some pagans do not know about this, although it’s gotten very difficult to avoid knowing it given the recent political climate here in the USA. What I find these pagans lack is firsthand experience. They’ve been sheltered from the harsh reality of blistering hate poured out on Outsiders by the Christian Hate Club, and so they have a naive expectation of being able to create bridges these people won’t burn (preferably with as many pagans still on said bridges as possible).

I, and many other pagans, do have that firsthand experiential knowledge of the Christian Hate Club. Sadly, after having publicly come out of the Pagan Druid closet four years ago, I am still experiencing what in Amish circles is called ‘The Shunning’. I’m not shunned by every Christian friend I ever had – and I’m very grateful for the ones I still have; they’re precious to me. In part because they give me hope for a future that is not only free of hate, but free of Clubs – in the negative, exclusionary sense – as well.

However, the vast majority of people I grew up with and spent most of my life considering my friends have partaken in The Shunning.

I grew up in an abusive authoritarian Christian fundamentalist cult. It was horrible, and those years did a lot of damage that is still now being undone. Part of that damage was marrying the one guy my parents found acceptable when I was far too young; he was not as fundamentalist as they were, so at first it felt like relative freedom. Over 15 years of marriage and three children, however, he became in some ways even worse than my parents had been. He could never stay in any church, because he always knew better than the leadership what god *really* wanted. I supported that, because I was going through my own constant questioning of this book that was supposed to be holy, finding more and more that was impossible to reconcile with either itself or my conscience; so I agreed when he took issue with church leadership. Then I would get a respite from church for a while, until he found a new one to try.

I made what I thought were very close friendships in some of the later churches; I began to feel secure in myself enough to try new ways of testing Christianity, trying to understand how it was OK to believe it, to preach a god of love who sent people to hell for breaking the Sabbath (Old Testament) or for not believing in his one and only True Message (i.e., traditional fundamentalist Christianity). I tried to believe this was a perfect book, that there were good reasons that god told Joshua to stone the old man to death for gathering kindling on the Sabbath or mandated that a woman be given to her rapist in marriage as long as she wasn’t previously claimed property of some other man; in which case the rapist was to be stoned.

Finally I realized, No. There is no excuse. There are too many obvious contradictions, too many ways this book reflects the hate I have too often seen from the Christians around me toward all Outsiders. There were debates in Sunday School classes about who is more detestable: atheists or pagans? And are there degrees of Hell so that some will burn hotter forever [gays, pagans, atheists, dark-skinned people, etc.] than others [friendly, useful, helpful people like the Buddhist who offers more food than he can afford to the food bank, and donates his skill as a gardener, but still burns in hell forever].

So I went back to the faith of my ancestors, my true heritage: Druidry – Celtic polytheistic nature spirituality. I have never regretted it, and my path is more beautiful and fulfilling than I ever could have imagined five years ago, mired in the Christian Hate Club and looking desperately for the Exit door.

What did shock me, though, and still continues to in some ways, was the outright rejection and hatred from people I once considered friends. Some of them I’ve known most of my life, since I was a child. These people cannot tolerate my Otherness, and my refusal to be ashamed of it. They have a vested interest in presenting themselves as ‘loving’, and their “Love”, it turns out, is just like their god’s: conditional upon absolute obedience and conformity.

So I am told I’m hateful, and because I show hatred toward a system of religion that abused me for most of my life, and has caused untold bloodshed and pain for much of the world over millennia, they have to ‘unfriend’ me (to use Facebook terminology). So they put themselves in the righteous position of “Love”, slamming the door in another person’s face – even someone they’ve known for many years, and/or to whom they have told sweet-sounding lies of unconditional love and friendship – for being Other than they are; for being Different. For telling the truth, instead of perpetuating their pet lies. For being courageous, going out and forging a new life instead of pretending the old one is all right just because it’s safer.

Others are even more extreme in their hatred: they consider me dead. I am not even acknowledged as a living person; they showered sympathy on my abusive ex-husband when I left after he hurt our daughter, and offered him hospitality and all the “privileges” of friendship I once enjoyed. They join my ex in saying that I am a walking corpse, because I have rejected their faith.

These same people who have treated me with such abuse, hatred, and infamy, are still ‘Friends’ with my children. Some don’t know my children except through me, yet they include my children in their exclusive Hate club because my children are still christian. Still young, and to be pitied, with such a reprobate for a mother.

How insidious is it, to befriend a woman’s children while spitting in her face and rejecting her? How abhorrent, to pretend to love while displaying such ignorance and hatred? How should I react to this hypocrisy, this continual disgusting display of blind loyalty to a corrupt and hateful religion? Do I want your ‘love’ being showered on my children? Absolutely not. It revolts me to see these people leaving happy little ‘buddy-buddy’ messages for my children, having cut off all contact and ties with me because I am somehow a Lesser woman because I’m not ashamed of who I really am.

More than that, perhaps, it frightens me; I don’t want my kids to join that club, or any hate club – but I know how seductive and heady a thing acceptance can be, especially to adolescents. I know my children are very smart, wise beyond their years, and full of real love. I also know that these people – at least some of them – want to ‘teach’ my kids how to be ‘real’ Christians. The idea makes my stomach roil.

The Christian Hate Club does more every day to prove to me that I am more than justified in calling them a Hate Club, and in finding them morally disgusting.

So, I think my fellow pagans must wake up. Realize that the Christian Hate Club will not thank you for defending them; they take it as their god-given right, and they thank him for making you go against your natural inclinations to continual evil and sin. Learn to distinguish between worthwhile Christians and the Hate Club members, and learn to have some courage and integrity in the face of their constant hypocrisy and habitual manner of calling hatred love and love hatred.

Their own Bible ironically says it best, while embodying the ideas it herein condemns: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.” [Isaiah 5:20]

Yes, woe to you, false friends and liars, hypocrites and haters. Woe to you, because that is the crop you are sowing for yourselves – and no, the sowing of the seed that will later be reaped in the harvest is not a metaphor that belongs solely to the Church. It has been a pagan metaphor for thousands of years, and is more rightfully ours than yours. Your seeds of hatred born of fear will give birth to deeper fear and greater hate, and so you are caught in an endless spiral of what you’ve created: Fear and Hate under the false name of Love.

The rest of us are well rid of the Christian Hate Club – and all the Hate Clubs. We would be better occupied creating that world we sometimes glimpse, the one without hatred or fear of anything Different, the one built on love that is truly unconditional, compassion not limited to what we can understand; the world we have to build ourselves by belonging to it. Then we can give the refugees from the Hate Clubs a place to go for healing and help, without ever bowing or bending to the hate ourselves.

Halloween, Druids, Ignorance, and Satan Worship – All for One Low Price!

As October approaches this year, I am reminded of several things I have long wanted to express. There is a TON of misinformation out there – not only among Christians, but in the secular media – about Halloween, pagans, and Druids. It has caused more pain and spread wider than falsehoods ever should. I am writing this out of love, not only for my own faith and those who share it, but love for my Christian family and friends, and for those close to me who have other beliefs entirely. If you are worthy of my love or respect or friendship, you’ll care about the truth.

Two years ago, my ex-husband sent my children home to me with this pamphlet: http://voiceofthelordaudio.org/OCTOBER06.pdf

This is the best example of half-truth mixed with complete lies and shaken together with hysterical fearmongering that I have ever seen in my life – and I’ve seen plenty. I have found that many people sadly do not care what the truth actually is; they would rather vilify people who believe things different from what they believe, than make any attempt to get their facts right.

This is harder to take from Christians, because Christianity claims to be all about Christ, whom we are told is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). But we are slandered by people who claim to love the truth, and lied about by those who look down on us for not sharing their ‘Truth’. When evangelicals do ‘reach out’, most only do so only in a desire to convert the other person, not to reach a real mutual respect or understanding.

This in itself can explain why people like me neither trust nor like most of Christianity and its sub-culture in the West. It is impossible for me to respect anyone who writes, publishes, reads, and/or believes the despicable things written in pamphlets like these and widely publicized, because they are so unfounded, unfair, and deceptive.

My children are [so far] Christians. I am a pagan Druid. This has caused a lot of grief to all of us over the past few years, most of it unnecessary. The best thing about it is that we are all learning to respect one another’s beliefs and trust each other without having to agree on everything.

I have admitted to my kids, and I’ll admit here also, that because of horrific personal experience with Christianity, I am not always able to be fair or rational when discussing it. I do not like the Christian god, I do not like most of the Bible, and although I love and/or respect many individual Christians, I detest most of Christianity – both historically and in modern times. I base this not only on my personal experience, but also on the heartfelt years of research I spent trying to justify the dogmatic interpretation of this religion to myself so that I did not have to cause uproar in my strictly fundamentalist family and circle of ‘friends’.

In exchange for that admission, I expect Christians with whom I interact to respect my beliefs as I do theirs. This does not mean you must like my beliefs or agree with them in any way, just as I do not like or agree with yours in any way. Respectful tolerance, however, is a must; and that includes taking the trouble to know fact from fiction.

Many Christians I’ve known have failed to understand that I know FAR more about their beliefs than they will probably ever know about mine. If you’re one of them, please: do me the honor of at least giving me a fair listen (or read) before you judge. Stop talking for once, and listen; I have heard it all before about Christianity. I really have. But you have clearly never heard Fact One about Druids or pagans, though you choose to judge us so harshly.

My children are wise and strong beyond their years. They have earned my respect by living with real integrity, young as they are.

Living through the confrontation that resulted when they brought this pamphlet home (and many others at various other times) taught us all a lot about heartache, fear, injustice, lies, and pain. I wish I could have spared them – and myself – that experience, but we are all wiser for it.

I will give what to me is the biggest example of a glaring lie from this particular pamphlet, because it is one I found in several other sources, secular as well as religious:

The claim is made that our Halloween holiday, called ‘Samhuinn’ [also spelled ‘Samhain’, and pronounced ‘Sah-win’ or ‘Sah-ween’], is named after and held in honor of a fictitious ‘Druid Lord of Death’, and that blood sacrifices are a tradition at this time when Death – and Satan – are supposedly worshiped. This pamphlet actually goes so far as to make a ridiculous etymological ‘link’ between the word ‘Halloween’ and the word ‘Samhuinn’, claiming that the last syllable of ‘Halloween’ is taken from the second syllable of this supposed Druid Death Lord’s name.

The absurdity of the etymology, if of nothing else here, should be obvious to any English speaker: ‘Halloween’ is known to be derived from ‘All Hallow’s Evening’, contracted down to ‘Hallow e’en’. As for ‘Samhuinn’, that is a word which simply means ‘Summer’s End’; it is not the name of any person or entity, it is simply a seasonal term akin to ‘Autumn’. It is for many of us a celebration of the New Year, which marks the end of harvest and the beginning of the long, cold, dark winter.

Is it associated with death? Yes, in the same sense that a memorial service or a wake for a loved one is about death. We honor our ancestors at Samhuinn, and we have different ways of doing that as Druids – through meditation, ceremony, artistic expression, or simply bringing to the celebration things that are special to the memory of our loved ones who have died; a favorite food of theirs, perhaps, or a photograph, or a souvenir of a trip taken together. We share our memories of the people we love who have died; we acknowledge our grief, we comfort each other, and we celebrate hope.

The Druid view of death is connected to Winter, which is a time of seasonal death in the land. Druids do not view death as an enemy, the way many Christians do; it is not something to be conquered or feared, it is merely a transition between life and rebirth – a pattern we see in the seasons of our year. We do not worship death, but we do not encourage unhealthy obsession over it in a life of fear either.

In no way is there a blood sacrifice connected with our celebration of Samhuinn. It is a monstrous slander to take our celebration, which we carefully fill with tenderness, love, and wisdom, ignore the truth of it, and instead publish ugly lies about bloodthirsty or sex-obsessed rituals we’ve never even dreamt of. We have no ‘lord of death’; we have no satan; we certainly do not worship any such being.

It was unspeakably horrifying to me to read this thing that was supposed to ‘expose the truth’ of Druidry, which had terrified at least one of my children and built a wall of separation between them and me, made of slander originating in some perverse desire for sensationalism. My youngest son was scared out of his wits, afraid that I would burst into flames and drag them all to Hell with me. I did not even know, at first, where to begin to try to explain to him – or my older children – what Druids really do, how we really believe, and why we celebrate the coming of winter with hope as well as with the knowledge that death does indeed come to all living things.

In the end I dismantled that separating wall brick by brick, with my children’s help; and we still find a few bricks left here and there every so often. Fortunately, they are fair-minded, intelligent beings who are not given to hysteria for long, if at all. But it appalled me to know that this horror was what my Christian loved ones were being told about me, my beliefs and my practice. If you have never been truly slandered, you cannot know how violated it leaves you on an intimate, internal level.

There is so much beauty and dignity in the Druid way of life, so much comfort and love and tenderness in what we do, say, and believe, yet all of that is lost in this labyrinth of lies and paranoia that is so unfairly built around us. We are not even truly seen at all; instead, a false image of what we are is presented by liars, then viewed through a dark prism of ignorance with horror, distrust, and even hate. Those of you in the majority who are and believe what is ‘acceptable’ to society cannot know how hurtful this is; we have done nothing to deserve it. We are judged without ever being heard or known for who we really are.

This is why it is ludicrous to us when Christians cry about being ‘persecuted’; this is why we are often impatient, annoyed, even angry when preached at. Too many of you do not care enough to learn the truth about us, nor do you care when we are slandered outrageously and persecuted for your beliefs about us – yet we are expected nonetheless to hear your sermons with gratitude, to instantly throw away our beliefs for yours. Put yourselves in our place; be like my wise, honest, beautifully mature children, and grow up a little.

If you want to know what we believe, ask. If you hear something horrible about us, talk to us before you spread it. If you want to know what we do at our celebrations or our rituals, come to one – you’ll be very welcome, you’ll leave in one piece, and perhaps you’ll be a little wiser.

And please, Christians – please stop preaching. We already know what you believe, and we’re not impressed; we would welcome a discussion, perhaps, because we love and care about you – but we don’t need your condescension. We’ve had enough of being proselytized by people who persecute and slander us, and can’t be bothered to really know us.

So this October, perhaps instead of creating a morbid, inaccurate picture of death-obsessed pagans, you could think over what we really do as we celebrate our New Year, and put yourself in some small way in our place – as many of us have done at least once for many of you:

You could remember those you love who have passed on, and celebrate their memories in whatever ways seem best to you. You could enjoy the sweetness of the harvest with the knowledge that although the long, dark days of winter lie ahead, you and those you love will not starve or freeze. You could consider and prepare for the dark, cold, empty winter of your life, even as you face the descent of the year into its own Winter – with courage, and the bright hope that rebirth always follows death.

Perhaps in observing our holiday in your own particular way, you can finally begin to erase the lying image of bloodthirsty, death-worshiping pagans, and learn a little about who we really are; people like you, neither better nor worse, following our own path in the best way we can.

Thank you for reading this; may all your winters end in Spring.