Patriarchy | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Patriarchy

Cherry Tree Creed

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 10 Comments

I’ve hinted on here before about my rather extreme religious upbringing, but I’m hesitant to say much more about it. One part of me goes a little giddy at Anne Lamott’s quote, “If my family didn’t want me to write about them, they should’ve behaved better.” Yes, yes, yes! I cheer, until it comes to actually putting the ragged parts of my story into words and I inevitably whisper No. I can’t tell whom exactly my people-pleasing brain is trying to protect, but it balks when my honesty tries to reach back more than a decade. Some details are too ugly for the light of day.

Nevertheless, the way I was raised is relevant to who I am today. Painfully relevant. After all, the frequent religious apologetics classes and brainwashing camps were my introduction to doubting God’s existence. The behavior I saw in the churches and cults our family was involved with taught me about the tight-lipped smiling delusion so many people define as Christianity. The forced hours of Old Testament reading every week took me beyond disbelief in God into the dark territory of hatred. You get the idea, at least in part.

I spent most of my life under such a heavy religious terror that my sense of logic had to be locked up along with my emotions and honesty. The most redeeming thing that could have happened was when I gave up caring and let my doubts and anger tumble out of hiding. Depression helped, oddly enough. I already felt so low that keeping up my pretense of believing God no longer mattered. Deal with it, I told him. I may have tried punching him a time or two as well.

I see now that it had to be completely destroyed, that old belief system with its blackened stone walls and bloody gouge marks. I had to lose enough hope to operate the wrecking ball myself. And slowly—slowly enough to be revolutionary in the we-could-die-and-face-judgment-any-minute mindset I had been taught—a new belief system is being reconstructed in my heart. It has floor-to-ceiling windows and an indoor cherry tree, and I suspect it will be some kind of spa once it is finished. There are no longer any shadowy nooks for shame, eternal damnation, party politics, or generational curses to hang out in.

A friend lent me The Shack to read a couple of months ago (the amount of time I’ve spent “forgetting” to return it makes me think I should probably just buy my own copy already). Reading it felt very much like having my rib cage pried open and all of my struggles with God exposed to the operating room lights… and then gently re-formed into such an expansive hope that my body has trouble accommodating it. Between the fresh perspective offered in that book (I can’t tell you how much I love that God reveals herself as an African-American woman) and the radical kindness of Jesus’s words, many of my questions are finally finding their perfect fit in answers — ones that don’t traumatize me or require me to suspend logic or darken my soul atmosphere. I don’t have everything figured out yet—for instance, I’m still searching for an explanation for the contradictory, violent God depicted in the Old Testament—but I am so relieved to finally have a creed that lets my heart breathe deep:

(I refer to God with female pronouns because in that way I can comprehend her differentness from the patriarchal judge of my childhood.)

I believe that:

The Bible…
is a picture of who God is and what a relationship with her is like,
not a comprehensive encyclopedia for all the facets of existence,
and not a textbook,
and not a list of rules
(as if we could follow the rules anyway).

Free will…
means God values humans enough to give us the freedom of choice
and limits herself by not overriding those choices,
even the bad ones
(which hurt her too),
but always providing opportunities even through the bad choices
for us to clearly see her love.

God…
does not instigate tragedy, only works through and beyond it
as the life-force of the universe,
the energy, the concept of light, the goodness,
merciful enough to do away with justice
because she is love
(and not gender specific ☺).

Jesus…
is God in human form,
not a human with divine superpowers but human-human,
with emotions and needs and frustrations,
whose life flowed from his relationship with God
(who neither orchestrated his death nor abandoned him,
only worked incredible good through it).

The Holy Spirit…
is their divine presence—undiluted love—
landscaping the beautiful mess of our hearts,
the piercing loveliness we feel during a certain song
or a beautiful day or moments of profound peace,
always here and never finished.

Prayer…
is simply the ongoing dialogue
as the four of us live together,
acknowledging that the unseen is real
and that relationship is all that truly matters,
and that God cares…
which could probably be called faith.

Life on earth…
is a process that won’t culminate until all is made new,
blessedly temporary
(which I know when I agonize over the too-few hours each day),
but a good time for the element of choice to get worked out—
a messy and necessary step for a God who respects us
and who continues to participate in our stories
outside the bounds of time and breath.

Then heaven…
will be all this as it was meant to be
without the violation of a single free will,
every heart finally connected to God’s,
finally capable of channeling her extravagant love
and enjoying complete creativity and fulfillment along with her,
seeing the beautiful face of our planet unscarred—
life on earth, redeemed.

And I…
am not a convert or a heretic
or a warrior or a one-size-fits-all
or a guest of honor on the doorman’s list
or a project to be finished
but one member of a completely unique relationship with the Divine
who values me enough not to impose rules or limitations
and promises a never-ending process
toward fullest life,
beautiful change accomplished hand-in-hand,
and a love I am just beginning to absorb.

4Apr

The Story

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

This story starts like a mystery.

A long, green-brown river snakes across Texas. Early Spanish explorers named it “Los Brazos de Dios”–the arms of God–but God’s reach only extends into the Great Plains, forgotten. Along its banks, stubby trees twist out of the clay, staking their claim in the eternal flatness of the Southwest. The river is quiet. Lonely. Uninhabited. Except for them. The 510-acre compound is a dense patch of green in the dusty fields north of Waco. Nestling among the shrubbery are a gristmill, a blacksmith shop, a communal farm. Work horses shuffle wearily in their stables. Small green lizards scurry under rows of sunflowers. Her face is dappled by the early morning light filtering through the church windows. She could have been one of the women in their floor-length dresses with each strand of hair obediently pinned out of sight. She could have been one of the close-cropped men sweating submissively in their long sleeves. But she was just a child, and not just a child but an outsider, cowering under a pew while hundreds of plain-dressed men and women simultaneously screamed in tongues.

This story almost ended a mystery as well. My memories flutter in confetti bits like young children’s often do… Chigger bites at the stained-glass shop. Pecan pie made with some healthy alternative to sugar. Six lanky brothers playing bluegrass on homemade banjoes. A gray-haired grandmother’s pregnant belly. Group songs about a man whose limbs were cut off for praising God. Moonlit rides home after the adults’ hushed meetings. The point is that I remember. When I finally got up the courage to ask about this group, several years ago, I was told I was never there. We both knew it was a lie–the forced shrug, the too-casual change of subject, the thin hope my questions would go away. But some questions can’t be shrugged away. I desperately needed to understand the first fourteen years of my life and why they were kept so far from my grasp. I’ve asked questions, I’ve scoured my memory, I’ve Googled every term I could think of. And finally, today, I found the answers. The group has taken a new name and is under investigation, but nothing has really changed. This part of the story is a history text, the factual treatment of shocking information that you expect to culminate in disaster.

It started with a group of disillusioned New Yorkers and a mishmash of Pentecostal and Anabaptist beliefs, but mostly with a man. He claimed he was the voice of God. He promised to simplify their lives if only they packed up, moved across the country with him, and promised to pool their future resources for “the church.”Most of his followers enjoy the chance to play Little House on the Prairie in isolation from the secular world. They carve their own furniture and bake their own bread. They plow their fields à la Pa Ingalls and sing together instead of watching television in the evenings. But not all their beliefs are so innocuous. Wedding rings are banned for being a “pagan” custom, as are Christmas trees and makeup. Members are discouraged from visiting doctors, treating sickness instead with herbal remedies and prayer. They do not get Social Security numbers or college degrees, trying so hard to disassociate themselves from the outside world that they even cut off family ties. They are advised to use severe physical punishment on their children, including infants. Any member who disagrees with the leadership’s spiritual “revelations” is publicly humiliated and kicked out of the group. People are free to leave, of course, but they are reigned in by the terrible fear of lost salvation. The leader’s interpretation of theology says that no one’s place in heaven is secure, and his followers live a desperate existence of trying to adequately please God. Children who don’t speak “in tongues” (supposedly a special language that God understands though it sounds like gibberish) are told they aren’t saved. Families are told that their relatives living elsewhere in the world are not true Christians. Women are required to home school their children, men are required to work on the compound, and everyone is required to follow strict dress and conduct codes–all to earn their daily salvation at the word of the leader.

Maybe this story is really a John Grisham thriller and I’m the witness that escaped… names lodged in the recesses of my memory, faces peeking out like magazine scraps. However, I feel much more like a character in a psychological tragedy. Emotions broadside me in quick succession, each hit heavier than the last–shock, repugnance, comprehension, affirmation, pain. I’ve heard of support groups for cult survivors; what about those of us who were never officially part of the cult, but didn’t escape either? This kind of thing is only supposed to happen between book pages, snapped shut on a shelf in quiet disregard… Not in the real stories, the ones that are still being written and rewritten and survived.

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