Beware of False Prophecy

Before our parish got a new priest we all ended up taking turns giving a sermon on the scripture reading for that Sunday.  When it was my turn I couldn't immediately tell which cycle of scripture readings the sermon would be about, so I wrote two of them, one for each set of readings that I thought might be involved.  Going through old files I thought it would be worth posting the one I didn't end up using.

 Beware of False Prophecy

Dark times and people who want reassurances seem to bring out society’s desire for prophets.  As a society we seem to be especially hungry for charismatic individuals who can cut through the uncertainty with rays of divine truth.  On February 12th 2021 the NY Times discussed the phenomenon:

“In my lifetime — 49 years as a follower of Jesus — I’ve never seen this level of interest in prophecy,” said Michael Brown, an evangelical radio host and commentator, who believes in prophecy but has called for greater accountability when prophecies prove false. “And it’s unfortunate, because it’s an embarrassment to the movement.”

Trying to decide what to do with prophets has always been a problem.  In the Old Testament kings of Israel would employ guilds of prophets who they could consult, or as the situation demanded, provide a gloss of divine approval for royal policy by acts of symbolic theater.  A amusing tale is recorded in 1 Kings 22 when the kings of Judah and Israel assemble 400 prophets to support a coming military campaign.  One of them is even described as bringing a pair of iron horns as props to make his point.  Then the prophet Micaiah ben Imlah arrives and prophecies doom on the military campaign and gets into an argument with the other assembled prophets about whether god is intentionally deceiving their company to trick the kings into a disastrous military campaign.  Many prophets, notably Jeremiah seem to be remembered because their were willing to contradict the official prophetic guilds.  While it may have been easy to predict good times when things are going good or to predict disaster when things are going poorly, it seems that when great periods of change were either in progress or hoped for true prophecy became quite a lot harder and the prophets who actually had something useful to say during these times are remembered and honored.  John Collins, the author of a introductory textbook on the Hebrew Bible, suggests Zechariah 13 reference to prophets hiding the self inflicted wounds of their ecstatic trances may actually be intended as a criticism of repeated disappointing prophecies that the Judean monarchy would be restored after the Babylonian exile. 

In this context Jesus’s saying that prophets should be judged by their fruits doesn’t just seem to refer to how we should treat new prophets who come along, but instead places anyone who claims the gift of prophecy within a long tradition of teachers whose claims had to be judged by history.  Jesus doesn’t suggest any test that prophets can be judged by membership in a specific group, be particularly charismatic, or make us feel good or bad about the things we value.  Instead he argues that prophets should be judged on their fruits, a process that based on the Old Testament record would often be difficult to judge within any one person’s lifetime.  Jesus includes prophecy among the “Many works of power” that people might claim to do in Jesus name by those whom he never knew.  Instead of trusting in the excitement of observing or publicly performing Charismatic gifts where it can be difficult to judge of what spirit they are, Jesus calls on us to hear his words and act on them, so that we will be built upon a rock.

My Name is Legion - Reimagining Mark 5:1-20

Several weeks ago at our church's morning prayer service we read the story of Jesus casting out the demons from the man at the tombs into the pigs and the story caught my imagination.  There was so much going on in this little story that it seemed almost impossible to capture it all.  How did the man end up living among the tombs?  How did he as a Jew end up living in a gentile town?  Where were his family members?  How did he become so mentally deranged?  Symbolically what would it have meant for the demons to be described as a Roman military unit?  Why were the townsmen, who didn't really seem to care about him, trying to chain him?  Certainly not to help him.  What were the pigs doing there?  What was Jesus doing there?  How would it have felt?  I figured there was a chance in real life that if someone was in such desperate circumstances it was because the support groups that could have lifted him up chose to throw him down instead.  I decided to write a fiction short story trying to capture the way this story moved in my imagination, and this is what came out.

My Name is Legion

"And never come back!"  The scream echoes in your mind as you walk away.  The noises, the screams... They were always so overwhelming.  Unfortunately dad knew just how overwhelming and liked to do it on purpose as if to prove that that made him better than his mentally crippled son.  Not that anyone else really cared.  You've never gotten the story, but it seems as if you remind mom of someone unpleasant and she's always taken it out on you as well.  The beatings, the screaming, the horrible fear of never being certain anyone would really care if you died.  The laughter and scorn the times you got hurt...  The odd and terrified way you act when people look at you or when loud noises startle you make everyone pretend you’re possessed.  It's even become a public sport, scaring the "demon kid".  Maybe in the next town there will be someone who will be safe.  Stupid thing to hope for, it's not as if that isn't a lie you've told yourself thousands of times with other people in the town you came from, not as if they ever cared.  But the desperate sense of hope just won't quite go away.

The next town, unfortunately, is no better.  You show up, starving and bedraggled, begging for food.  The way you flinch away from their eyes fearing and attack at any moment is hard to disguise.  You try to hold still, not moving in ways that seem "odd" or "demon possessed" as your your family and neighbors back home always called it.  The people of this town belong to a different religion, so perhaps things will be different.  But it's hard to hide and ask for food at the same time, and next thing you know, you've been driven out of town.  The old cemetery is the only place they don't try to run you off, since they figure a demon kid, yes the name followed you, belongs there hanging out with the ghouls in the cemetery.  Everything that goes bump in the night terrifies you, worrying that the ghouls might really be there.  Perhaps this is a fitting place to end, the demon kid devoured by demons in the cemetery where only the unclean would go willingly, scavenging unclean food offerings left for the dead in unholy ceremonies.

Of course that is the one sure way of pissing off the local priests and Mystics who lead the ceremonies where the offerings are left, or who wander through the cemetery boosting their reputation by performing exorcisms of the cemetery grounds.  Since you've been declared to be the most visible demon of the cemetery grounds, these exorcisms turn into being chased around the grounds and along the cliff side while the holy men whip up crowds to chase you around with chains, claiming that their dead won't rest until the living demon returns to the underworld, preferably by leaving you tied up to starve to death.  Mostly the local swineherds join in, since watching their filthy charges apparently leaves them with too much time on their hands.  So far you've been lucky, the black out rage and fear that comes when they gang up on you is simply too terrifying for them to gather enough townsfolk to be able to catch you.  Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't happen soon.  Every sound leaves you cowering in fear, running from place to place trying to find enough food to simply survive before they catch you.  Because someday, they will catch you...  Maybe it would be a fitting end, everyone in your life has seemed to agree on this point, everything they hate in the world seems to reside in you.

Today there was a new mystic wandering through town.  He is a Jew and so isn’t going to try to sic the local pig boys on you, not that that is much comfort, given that your own people have essentially thrown you out.  What exactly he is doing here… well its unclear, but they leave food behind which is all that you care about.

Eventually you get brave enough to try to see what he is doing.  Its as if he and his followers are having a picnic.  The mystic sees you and waves you over.  You panic and run.  You have no illusions about your smell or the state of your clothes which are little more than rags at this point.  Hiding from a safe place further away, you are shocked to see one of his followers gather up some food, walk half way to you, and leave it on the ground just like the piles of food that have been left every time they visit.  They’ve been leaving it for you on purpose!  Maybe you were wrong to run.  Terrified, you inch over to the food.  They smile at you encouragingly when you begin to eat and motion that they have more.  Slowly, you walk over and sit at the very edge of the group.  This must be the craziest Jewish mystic you’ve ever heard of, hanging out near pagan cemeteries to have picnics and intentionally feeding crazy demon beggars like yourself.  It’s as if he’s proving how many ways he can be unclean at once, eating food near a cursed place and sharing table with like you whose been living among the tombs. 

As you finish eating, he asks “What’s been ailing you, I mean aside from being starving?”. 

“I’m demonically possessed,” you reply, “or at least everybody always has said so and they’ve got to be right.  So what’s it to you, you’re just an ordinary person like anybody else, other than that you’re crazy enough to be near me.” 

The mystic, looking saddened, answers “What’s your name?” 

You start to shout back “I don’t have a name, all I have is a legion of demons occupying my soul just as sure as the Roman legion controls this country, and coming to a place like this you’re probably too unclean to cast them out anyways so what is it to you?  There’s no more chance of me being free than of the Roman’s being driven away”. 

The shouting was a mistake. The local pig boys have heard and come running, driving their pigs before them, shouting that they’ve got you now and you’ll pay for desecrating their cemetery.  The mystic flies into a rage and starts shouting as well, leaving you cowering in a ball.  After a few moments without being attacked, you calm just enough to understand what is being said.  He isn’t shouting at you.  He’s demanding to know why you deserve to die for desecrating a cemetery, when if the town would feed you and take care of you, instead of driving you to the edge of town you wouldn’t disturb their offerings in the first place.  And that their hatred of you is what desecrates the cemetery, and not as if he cares because cemeteries are full of the unclean bodies of the dead anyways as far as he is concerned and the least they can do is to not attempt murder of a sick man on top of their ancestors’ bones. 

You’re in shock.  No one has defended you since… well you aren’t sure.  Whoever did it last must have been just as crazy as this mystic.  A hand touches your shoulder, one of his followers trying to soothe your terror.  You get up just in time to see the pigs, terrified at their keepers’ distress, run right off the side of the cliff.  The pig boys are running in terror back to the city.  This won’t be good tomorrow, but for now you start crying and laughing hysterically with relief.  At least today, you won’t die.  As you calm down, they offer you more food and some of their spare clothes.  With relief you start explaining how you were driven from your home by your family that hates you, how no one in your home town would even feed you, how you ran away to this Godforsaken place and have been living on the edge between life and death in this place of death.  “Please please, let me come with you,” you beg.  This is the first time you’ve felt safe in years and the fog is lifted from your mind just being around him. 

Meanwhile, representatives of the town arrive, demanding to know what right this stranger has to drive their pigs off the cliff.  Seeing you looking calm and dressed well, they look at you in shock, demanding to know if the demons were cast out of you into the pigs.  Which, as far as you are concerned, is just about true and you grin at the townsmen, knowing what will happen if they try to attack you again.  This smile and your direct gaze unnerves them and they start to beg the mystic, Jesus, to leave before more ill omens arrive to terrorize the town.  Looking at them directly is still hard, but now that you feel safe, it doesn’t seem to matter as much, especially since they’re the ones squirming instead of you for once.  Jesus, apparently deciding this town has had enough of him, agrees to leave.  You ask again if you can come with them.  Instead, he tells you that God is love and God loves everyone including you, just as Jesus has loved you in feeding and clothing you, saving you from this place of death.  He challenges you to tell your family and friends what God has done for you, inviting them to the Love of God instead of the hate that they’ve been living on for all this years.  A sly grin comes over your face, imagining casting the hatred out of their hearts just like the pigs leaped over the cliff in fear of love.  Maybe nobody will believe you about God being love, but a story about a mad mystic who channels the love of God so passionately that its as if God himself as touched you when he does and loves with such power that pigs go jumping off cliffs…  Everyone will want to hear about this.  With fresh clothes on your back and food in your stomach, you head back to Decapolis to face the demons that have been driven from your heart by this act of love, but still reside in your family…  Probably they won’t listen and will scream out more abuse to drive you off.  That’s a terrifying thought, loud sounds are always hard.  But your family, well… its worth a try…  If pigs can jump off cliffs maybe their demons might run away too.

Keating's Death

I was saddened to hear of Thomas Keating's death yesterday.  I first ran into his writings some years ago when his work was referenced in a book I was reading for a class.  At the time it seemed kind of exotic and compelling but not something I felt I could make as much time for.  Then as time passed it became more and more clear that my stress and anxiety levels were getting to be very intense and I needed to do something about them for my health's sake.  As long as I needed a meditation practice to help me deal with stress it seemed eminently practical to combine worship with meditation, so I was more interested in Keating's teachings than in secular meditation practices.  Meditation has made a big contribution to my mental well being and I've been grateful to Keating for his beautiful writing on the subject.  As I've grown interested in other angles of spiritual practice and thought I've kept running into Keating again and again.  It seems his impact on the world was large enough that I couldn't quite get away from him.

Keating's writings have helped me not only with meditation but also in helping me understand my overall spiritual life path.  There have been special moments where I realize there are names and traditions that help to explain my experiences and that help me know mentally what to do with them and recognize the good parts of them that I couldn't have found as easily without his help.  I've been very greatful for everything he has offered in life and am saddened to realize he is gone on to be with God.  I hope the afterlife is as delightful as he imagined it.

The Candle in the Silence

We were some of the last people to leave church today and my six year old ran into the chapel just before we left.  I had a moment to contemplate the sanctuary lamp before we left.  For context, this is the candle always kept burning before the reserved Eucharist elements to commemorate the presence of god in the sanctuary.  Enjoying that sacred moment while being aware of the condescending attitude towards Ex Mormons that is routinely expressed in General Conference led to me writing a poem to explore the beauty of that moment along with the the pain I always feel around this time of year knowing people I care about are being taught to think ill of me.

The Candle in the Silence

The candle is in the silence,
The ghost of incense remains.
The music has all gone quiet.
Outside, the words of fear persist.

The candle is in the presence,
The Spirit of prayer remains.
The music of soul is silent.
Outside, the words of fear persist.

The candle is in the silence,
The Spirit of God remains.
The music of silence is ardent.
Outside, the words of fear persist.

The candle of silence is brilliant,
The Spirit of Love invades.
Life’s music and joy is fervent.
Outside, the words of fear persist.

Sam Young's pending Excommunication

It made me sad to learn today that Sam Young is being excommunicated from the LDS church for protesting the LDS church's children interview policies.   I was totally sympathetic to his desire to change how the system worked.  My own interviews as a child weren't abusive but they were within an abusive system that had a dramatic effect negative effect on me and on my siblings.  If you trace how they contributed to a major family tragedy that happened when I was quite young, the worthiness interview system and the ideas that are used to justify that system are probably one of the worst things that ever happened to me and my family with consequences that will probably never fully heal.  I am very glad to have left that behind, knowing that my children can mostly escape a recurrence of that kind of psychological abuse.

I never really expected Sam's protest to achieve much and I've been impressed by the amount he did achieve.  He had more faith in his leaders than I did.  It seemed just a matter of time till he would be excommunicated.  He very much was taking up the role of a prophet calling his people to repentance.  Its part of being human that nobody really likes being on the receiving end of a prophetic call to repentance.  It makes the way this story is ending unsurprising.  But that doesn't make it any less sad.  We could always hope for better.

Maundy Thursday and Feet Washing

For the last several years we have tried to attend a few additional services during the week before Easter than the year before.  There are so many beautiful traditions and experiences to explore that even after having been an Episcopalian for several years I still sometimes feel like a religious tourist, trying out new things for the first time.  For perspective, our Parish typically hosts or participates in at least eight worship events between the Sunday before Easter and Easter day.  One new event for us this year was attending Maundy Thursday church services.

Maundy Thursday is a unique worship service celebrating the last Supper, the institution of the sacrament of the Eucharist, Jesus washing the feet of the apostles, and looks forwards to the events at the Garden of Gethsemane.  Probably the most meaningful part of the service for me was encountering the foot washing ceremony.  As a Mormon, I had always been taught to view Jesus’s washing of the disciples feet as being a part of the LDS temple ceremonies.  Jesus’s statement that the apostles didn’t know what He had done to them but would understand it in the future was supposed to mean that Jesus had performed a special priesthood cleansing ceremony on the Apostles without explaining it to them.  The ceremony in essence becomes a sort of supplemental or elite baptism, washing away the sins missed the first time around and blessing many parts of the body in preparation for a glorified resurrection.  The LDS temple ceremony itself identifies the washing ceremony as being a reinterpretation of the consecration of priests in Exodus 29-4-7 and fails to mention Jesus’s teachings at all.

It is not uncommon to meet Mormon’s (or ex Mormon’s who are often more willing to talk about it) who found the LDS washing ceremony to be a traumatic or disturbing experience, especially if they went through the temple like I did before 2005 when the LDS church changed the ceremony to be less disturbing.  Being repeatedly and somewhat intimately touched by strangers who don’t ask permission or give warning first while you are inadequately dressed just doesn’t always come across as a sacred experience.  While I sympathize with these concerns I did not personally find the LDS washing ceremony to be personally disturbing, perhaps because someone (in violation of Mormon social taboos) told me partially what to expect and the officiator didn’t accidentally touch or see more than they meant to.  However, even without that sense of trauma the washing was a bit of an empty place for me because the temple ceremony had lost its sense of meaning.  I could hardly even think about the last supper and Jesus washing the disciples without thinking about the temple.  It feels sad when a scripture passage is only associated with memories that no longer have a sense of purpose.

So it was a special occasion for me to hear the story again of Jesus acting as a humble servant or perhaps even in the role of a slave, washing the feet of his disciples to put an end to their arguments about which disciple was more important by showing them with his own example that leading in the church is about serving those underneath you, not by being served.  This is what the apostles hadn’t realized but would realize afterwards, that Jesus had taken their expectation of what it meant to be important and turned it upside down.  The very greatest of all was insisting on taking on the role of a servant to prove to them that they needed to be servants as well.  Being important in the church should be about serving others, not yourself.  After recounting the story the priest proclaimed that in their position of as priesthood leaders they needed a special reminder to live the kind of humility that Jesus taught and so invited us to allow them as our priests to wash our feet.  There was no command, no mandatory participation, no surprises.  I joined the line and had the intimate and consent governed experience of having a priest wash my foot, with its surgery scars still clearly visible, and tell me God be with you as she dried me.  Another of the priests told everyone he washed to go and serve everyone as Christ served them.  After the foot washing was over we were reminded that if the priests of God’s church served us in this way that we were to serve each other with humility just as we had been served.  Just like the apostles we had submitted to being humbly served by our religious leaders, so like the Apostles we needed to learn to serve everyone else in our lives with humility.

While there is a powerful symbolism in letting Christ serve us by cleansing us from sin, foot washing was and is in itself an act of humbly offering hospitality that helps counteract the sin of pride.  I didn’t come away from the foot washing feeling that I had experienced an elite cleansing from sin in a ceremony whose design (at least till 2005) didn’t fully take into account whether the cleansed felt violated.  Instead, I felt humbled, having intimately experienced a priest humbly wash me and then tell me to serve and love those around me with the same kind of humility.

My Journey with the Bible

I received my first set of scriptures at 8 years old as a baptism present.  They consisted of a bonded leather brown King James bible with a matching “triple combination” containing the other Mormon scriptures.  I was expected to read from them regularly as well as bring them to church in a grey vinyl carrying case that came with them.  Telling an eight year old to read a King James Bible might seem a tall order, especially since I only learned to read in 3rd grade. 

My First Scriptures

However, I am one of the autistics who has the mixed blessing of hyperlexia.  That means my anxiety level about reading things I don’t fully understand is very low and I love to read, so where other kids would have given up in frustration I dove eagerly into authors like Tolkien and Asimov.  I promptly read both the entirety of the Bible and the Book of Mormon when I was too young to understand them thoroughly but that didn’t matter much to me, I liked reading and could often get the gist of what was happening.  I remember reading the Book of Daniel as a youngster and proudly discovering that unlike the version I was taught in Sunday school the evil wise men got fed to the lions.  I kept it up and became very familiar with the Book of Mormon and passingly familiar with the Bible.  While the LDS version of the scriptures leave much to be desired in terms of the commentary and footnotes they provide I made thorough use of what they had.  One of my childhood Sunday school teachers taught us how to make color coded marks to help us identify what category of assistance each footnote represented and before entering my teens I read through the almost of the LDS scriptures to mark all of the footnotes using the system she taught.

As I approached my teenage years I became aware that daily scripture reading wasn’t just a good habit, in the LDS worldview it is a commandment from God.  I was afraid if I didn’t read my scriptures daily I was rebelling against God’s command so I became very strict in performing my daily reading no matter how late I was getting to bed.  This need to be reading was reinforced by the popular and repetitive challenge from LDS leaders to read the Book of Mormon from start to finish within certain time frames.  You could barely finish reading the Book of Mormon due to the challenge of one leader before some other leader would reissue the challenge.  Scripture study was viewed as synonymous with reading the Book of Mormon.  I felt that the Book of Mormon was true because I had always assumed it was true and felt that God pointed that out to me when I prayed about it in the classic Mormon fashion.  Always assuming something isn’t the same thing as it being so, but I was satisfied enough to keep enjoying it the way I always had before.

As I entered my teens I had read the Book of Mormon so many times that it became less meaningful through sheer repetition and reading from the bible felt much more meaningful.  I still felt I had to follow my leaders command to read the Book of Mormon daily so I doubled my scripture reading time so I could start to read both from the Bible and Book of Mormon regularly.  My scriptures became so well used that the vinyl carrying case fell apart and was replaced by a black canvas bag with a special compartment for extra study materials.

My Seminary copy and Black Canvas Case

Starting around age 14 I started attending a daily Sunday School class in Mormonism called “early morning seminary” and received my second copy of the LDS scriptures, an all in one volume (or Quad) in a Burgundy cover.  The purpose of this second set was to allow me to have a copy in the Sunday school room to be used there and virtually nowhere else, so I never became very attached to this copy.  I never succeeded in memorizing the scripture passages expected in this Sunday School class but I took pride that I didn’t just read the assigned selections but I read the entire text while keeping up with the class.  I was able to keep this up until in the year we were studying the bible we got to the book of Isaiah.  Mormon’s put a special emphasis on Isaiah being important but most of the Mormons I have talked to are positively terrified of it.  It is common to hear people say they only read the parts from Isaiah that are copied into the Book of Mormon and even some skip those parts.  When our class reached the Book of Isaiah we spent one day talking about how to read Isaiah and then skipped the entire book.  That wouldn’t do for me, I wanted to read everything.  Isaiah scared me too, but I took it slowly and prayerfully, reading the same passages over and over again until I felt I had some level of understanding.  I became passionately involved with the text and would get into a zone of contemplative worshipful reading.  I could only zone in like that if I had a quiet place to study, so I often found myself staying up late at night after the rest of my family had gone to bed to have time to study without any distractions.  This drove my family a bit crazy, especially when I suggested they should hurry to bed so I could get on with my night of scripture study and journal writing.  No one thought to buy me ear plugs or noise isolating headphones to help me study earlier in the evening, so I just stayed up late, sometimes very late. 

This was a very dark time in my life and emotionally these late night study sessions became extremely important to me.  I learned to write from practicing in my journal.  I learned that even if I was afraid to trust anyone else in life I could still trust God.  I had a sense of spiritual rebirth and developed a sense of a personal relationship with Jesus while contemplating the suffering servant passages in Isaiah, particularly chapter 53.  The spiritual practices of scripture study and journal writing are probably the main reasons why I survived my teenage years without attempting suicide.  In fact, I directly used them  as a tool to escape from a cycle of child abuse that intensified after I started homeschooling.

My mother hated not being in control.  I loved being obedient but hated being strictly controlled and could never really function well trying to do anything exactly like other people did them.  My mental anatomy as an autistic is different enough that I often need to find my own ways and times to learn things.  Unfortunately my mother had a strong need to believe she was perfect and she was very sensitive to other people questioning or acting outside of her perfect ideas and needed me to learn things on her time table instead of mine.  She often yelled at me demanding to know if I thought she was stupid because I wouldn’t or couldn’t do things exactly her way without having a prolonged discussion about why and how.  I recall one memorable incident when I washed some dishes in a different order than she thought was correct and she came into the room screaming at me, asking how dare I rebel against her when she had never even specified the order in which to wash them and had no reason to need them done in a specific order.  Everything was black and white, good or evil.  If you really wanted to be good you would do everything she expected right the first time.  If you failed to be her version of perfect on the first try it was because you weren’t really trying because you were a bad person.  My assumed evil personality justified whatever she found necessary to force compliance.  At this point in my life I was larger and stronger than she was so she virtually always resorted to emotional manipulation and abuse.  She moved quickly from offering rewards to offering punishments to trying to damage or even crush your sense of self esteem in hopes that you would start performing the task at hand correctly to prove her wrong about how worthless you were.  Once when I begged for time to learn my daily chores without dramatic punishments because I wasn't trying to be lazy or rebellious but simply needed more time to learn how to remember everything and my parents told me that they felt if they didn’t take me strictly in hand I’d end up just like my brother, by which I think they meant a college dropout with no job and no girlfriend living in the basement.  Due to my unique circumstances, I took it worse than that and became very scared of myself.

Among the many things she didn’t like, my staying up late to read my scriptures and write in my journal weren’t on her approved list.  She didn’t like that I was sleep deprived.  She hated that I used my journal writing to emotionally cope with life instead of pouring out my soul to her as if that idea made any sense at all.  She didn’t understand why I needed peace and quiet to enter into intense contemplative scripture study.  I don’t think she saw my scripture study as any different from doing my math homework which she expected me to be able to do while she indulged in screaming matches or worse against my little sister who she treated in the much same way as she treated me except with differences resulting from my being so much larger and stronger.  In any case my mother started a campaign to try to stop me from writing in my journal or reading my scriptures at night.  I decided that thought there was no chance I could defend my dignity when it case to the normal chores or school work, there was a real chance I might undermine her opinion of me when it came to my scripture study.  I determined to make a point to fight her on this one issue where winning might mean something.

So the fight was on.  She’d prowl into the basement where I would study at night or look to see if I had lights on in my bedroom.  She tried to monitor and punish me more and more strictly until my father found out what was going on.  Suddenly something clicked.  Their evil rebel son wasn’t rebelling to sneak off to be promiscuous or use drugs or hang out with gangs or any other notorious evil.  He was rebelling… to worship…  in the tradition of the family faith.  I intentionally used my worship behaviors to create a situation that made the emotional abuse look and feel absurd.  It broke me out of the cycle of abuse and created a space where they respected me and became almost willing to bend over backwards to accommodate my life and needs.  Things were still black and white but now I was considered to be good instead of bad.  Unfortunately my victory didn’t apply to my little sister who they generally still viewed as deserving what she got even when I tried to explain otherwise.  Life worked best when I depended on my parents for as little of my emotional or physical needs as possible since my mother still had trouble with things she didn’t control and was not above hurting me in dramatic ways just to get revenge for some annoyance years gone by without stopping to think about what she was doing.  Like killing my pet hamster by pretending to forget to buy clean bedding for it until it died of infection to get revenge for the way my ADD had been really horrible before I started medication for it in third grade.  She explained that she had always needed me to know what it felt like to raise an obnoxious person like me but hadn’t realized that her actions would result in its death.  Overall though, my gamble had paid off.

Unfortunately it also felt like the most cynical thing I had ever done.  I intentionally used a pious behavior that had been an honest act of worship to manipulate someone into doing what I wanted.  I felt intensely ashamed of my actions and stopped being able to enter the intense contemplative mindset I had enjoyed before while doing scripture reading.  It felt more like I was just reading words rather than communing with God, though I still needed peace and quiet for even what I had left.  It wasn’t until the last few years that it occurred to me that since the scriptures are supposed to be for our benefit, why would God feel I had betrayed a trust by using them to escape from child abuse? 

One way or another I kept reading that brown bonded leather set of scriptures until grime from my hands accumulated on the cover, the binding broke, and the pages started to fall out. 

My original scriptures were loved to death.  Click to see my footnote highlighting.

Many pages are crumpled from falling asleep while reading.  My wife and I read the Book of Mormon one last time together and started to feel distinctly uncomfortable with it.  Some of the doctrines preached in it simply felt overly black and white and the development of culture described in the text felt unreal.  We decided to try out reading the apocrypha next which was a very satisfying experience, if I recall we made it though maybe the Book of Tobit before we ran out of time to work on it.  Our faith lives went into a tailspin over the next few years.  In my personal reading I tried reading the Book of Mormon one last time to ground my faith again and found I couldn’t stomach it, at least not while trying to maintain a belief that it was literally and fully what it was supposed to be.  I wasn’t able to enjoy reading the scriptures again until we were settled in the Episcopal church and started to read the bible in the tradition of the Daily Office Lectionary.  Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to read my tattered brown king James bible.  The translation problems in the King James are now obvious to me and the study aids in the LDS version of the King James bible aren’t spectacular.  We tried reading from my wife’s study NRSV bible but found we had trouble navigating the unfamiliar book abbreviations, especially when apocryphal readings came up.  I bought an ESV translation pocket new testament to read from on occasion at work but it didn’t fill the void that was left by my old tattered brown bonded leather scripture set.  I wanted a study edition that I could learn from easily and a feeling that I could place my bookmarks where ever I wanted to because the book was mine.

Example of the study aids in a modern study bible

After all this time I have finally replaced my copy of the scriptures.  I purchased a fifth 5th edition of Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard edition of the bible that was just recently released, the thumb indexed version so I can quickly find passages even when the book abbreviations are unfamiliar.

   I have started to learn about the meditation practice of lectio divina where bible passages are read repeatedly creating a contemplative sense of communion and conversation with God.  It reminds me of contemplative experience of the bible I had the year that I read Isaiah until I broke through into my parent’s respect.  Perhaps that wasn’t some kind of unique peak experience but something I could learn to do again.  I probably only lost my hold on the experience because of my needless shame and because I didn’t really understand what I was doing.  While I appreciate that all the flaws of humanity are on display in the Bible, it is still where I met God and where I gained the strength to emotionally survive from day to day.  I hope to spend years yet enjoying its pages.

My new bible