Recently, I've been embroiled in a very personal journey in my heart, my faith, and my definition of myself. Looking at my past, I have two diametrically opposite experiences. Each lasted several years. They occurred back to back. And they made me who I am.
I took a wide-arc journey from religious fundamentalism and legalism to far outside-the-box free thinking. I filled out the majority of my pre-college education at a small private school. From the outside, it looked great. Hell, from pretty close, it looked fine, too. My parents searched hard to find a school that allowed independent learning while fostering good values. And we landed at Cornerstone Christian School in Fort Collins with Randy Whitten at the helm. I attended this school for 8 years beginning in 1990 in first grade.
Myself and my early classmates adhered to a strict uniform code. We had routine checks to make sure our uniform jumper dresses were decent, we were wearing shorts under our skirts in case, heaven help us, someone's skirt flew up and the world saw our cable knit (and I mean KNIT, like very thick and itchy) tights. We wore starched shirts under our jumpers and undershirts under that. Every day when I got dressed, my clothes reminded me that my body was an innately sinful thing. Boys had haircut checks and misguided moral compass interventions. And spankings were doled out frequently. We were taught to absolutely fear any appearance of evil. The opinions of others were the primary motive for doing anything. If someone could possibly make an inappropriate supposition based on something innocuous, then that innocuous thing was wrong and it was my job to keep people from ever thinking inappropriate things about me. There was even a special rule to prevent the evil of sexuality...well, there were many, actually, but the six-inch rule supposedly prevented boys and girls from touching each other. Because that's a gateway to sin, apparently, even for first graders.
This bred all kinds of fear-based legalism from the highly impossible six-inch tag (only possible if everyone runs around with a ruler, and then that gets a bit legalistic itself...even playing was legalistic) to a school-wide ban on dating of any sort, public destruction of secular music and shaming for individual thought. And sex? From what I could tell, it was the worst sin you could commit. Sex was a cardinal sin. No, not lust, not adultery, just sex itself was so bad, you weren't even allowed to think of it, let alone be a sexual being. It's a wonder we were even allowed to be male and female. The strictest rules were to stamp out any shred of sexuality. Because if you shame people for it, then it won't happen, I guess? Mixed into that, I memorized Bible verses and history classes consisted solely of learning about missionaries. Science was all about rocks and Christian discoveries. I kid you not. It was geared at teaching us to fear free thought.
Some school staff literally threatened kids and bullied them for questioning what they were taught. Those kids were held up as public examples of sin and we were taught to fear our own thoughts. School staff did much worse than threaten some kids, and the most fearsome monsters were the ones in charge. Worse than latent sexuality were the predators that kept watch.
"Education" was conducted individually. So I read for hours every day and then answered regurgitated questions in a little booklet and then graded myself. I literally never had a traditional class, except one semester of Colorado History after the church split and the iron curtain began to lift. I had no idea what a real learning environment would look like. I knew I was bored to death, but that's what school meant, right?
Bullying left me with physical and emotional scars that ran really deep. I was falling apart, but I was terrified to leave. I'd been assured that if I ever stepped toenail in a public school, my soul would be eternally damned. I begged my parents to let me stay. If a private school with Christian kids was so bad, I didn't want to know what a public school would be like.
I was your perfect picture of a broken little kid with disfigured social skills and a very small, closed, and fearful world.
My parents didn't realize what was going on at the school. The entire program was designed to keep the parents from knowing. I'm sure they can't have known because if they had known and were okay with it all, they never would've done what they did next.
After 8 years, the most extraordinary thing happened. I was somehow accepted into the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Poudre High School starting in 9th grade. I was terrified. Other kids from Cornerstone told me I'd be eaten alive. Some teachers and other staff at the school told me I'd compromise my eternal salvation if I went to public high school.
Let's just say that moving from a school of 35 people K-12 to a school of 2000 teenagers was an adjustment. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I flourished and struggled. I transferred from fundamentalism, legalism, control, and fear to a program known for expanding kids' horizons and encouraging them to look beyond their preconceived notions. And I had a lot of preconceived opinions and rhetoric. I was like that place in the political spectrum where the two ends are so far apart, they almost meet.
I read books with swear words in them. I sat next to boys. I even had crushes. I made friends. I listened hungrily to some of my first non-Christian music: Blink 182 and Backstreet Boys. And I was totally shocked to find that the people of public school were better reflections of love than the Christian environment I came from.
My teachers unlocked my mind and helped me in ways I'm still discovering. My high school classes were college-preparatory classes. And I struggled hard. I was dropped into Biology and had no idea what a cell was. I didn't even know what biology meant. I brought this terrible looking mess to class with me the day we made marshmallow and toothpick models of double-helix DNA. I had to redo every single assignment for almost a year. I cried when I was assigned to write my first essay because I had to look up the definition to even know where to begin.
So I stuck with that program because I had literally no idea what a colossal undertaking it was. I didn't realize it til I was out of college. I'd received a year's worth of college credits due to my work in that program. And I began to understand how far behind I'd been when I began high school. The only skill I had to my name at the end of 8th grade was sentence diagramming. I can break down a sentence with the best of them.
IB challenged every norm I had. I was defensive. But classes like Theory of Knowledge kept me on my toes. It cracked the door to a new world. A free-thinking utopia of the mind.
And this year, that door has blown off its hinges for me. Things I thought I knew have blown up in my face. I've had to press the restart button...again...and again. To be honest, when I embarked on IB, I basically just put everything in my past on a hard stop. I didn't think about it. I basically never talked about it. I pretended with all my being that it wasn't there. A couple of other total "sinners" from my elementary school also went to my high school. We behaved like perfect strangers when we saw each other in the halls. It was almost like we were afraid that other people might know how insane our background was if we associated.
This year, someone from that early school experience has gone looking for truth in all that mess. She's brave, and she's also rallied 160 brave souls who are slowly sifting the wreckage together. We're finding that we have a lot of preconceived ideas that we can get rid of. There's more to toss than to keep.
I, for one, have become a child again in my spiritual journey. I've decided that there's so much wreckage, I need to toss what I can and start to rebuild. If you've never been through this, you won't understand. And I'm glad for you. If you have been through it, I'm sorry. And I know you'll get what it means to be an adult who's not sure of anything. I'm believing that I can rebuild. And some days are harder than others. I'm finding the things that resonate are the ways I learned to challenge truth. IB was the exact medicine my soul and mind needed after such a painful encounter. Given my starting point, I needed the jolt of being forced to look for myself. And it's still rolling in. The jolt comes in waves, just as the waves of realization of what I've actually come out of.
Recently, I've begun to allow myself to roll around the "C" word: cult. The realization of a cult is painful. It's like waking up to find that everything inside you is suddenly filled with venom and sickness. It's vile and it's impossible to expel it quickly enough. When someone is lucky enough to get out of a cult, they find themselves blinking in the sunlight, not even noticing the world going by. It's like being spit out of a time machine in the wrong era.
My IB community was understanding in ways I now am stunned to realize. I can't have seemed even remotely normal, but people befriended me and I was accepted. Teachers worked with me despite all the things I didn't know. My rhetoric wasn't my own. People also have to have known that. But no one treated me like they knew my past. I tried to hide it, but no doubt, it's been written all over me all along. The difference is now I get to punctuate that reality with the strength to overcome it. I can't say "Thank you" enough to my friends and teachers from high school. Thank you for challenging my beliefs, for accepting me as I was, and for letting me change over the years.
To my brave Cornerstone community of former kids, I'm thankful. I'm glad we're all on this side of the rot. And I'm glad to be able to begin to reconnect with you. I know we were all terrified of each other for a long time. And it makes sense. But there's healing when we get together.
As for me today, I'm wading through it. I have been for a while, and I don't expect to wake up with it resolved at any point soon. I've made progress. I'm using the tools and skills I learned in IB for evaluating information to find reality and truth. With those tools, I'm able to tackle this and feel like I somehow have a sort of guide to lead me out of the confusion. This blog post is a sign that I've moved beyond letting this sit inside me like an intangible ball of sickness. Perhaps it's a bit stream-of-consciousness. But it's here.
Each time I find something nasty lurking in my own ideology, I take it apart and do everything I can to shed it. It's been a painful experience. But I'm not holding on to the "god" that was created by a small man with too much power. I'm not clinging to some cruel and strange patriarch who despises the people he created. I'm working right now to wrench those horrible versions of god and some of the endemic Christian culture away from the God who's actually touched my life. My understanding of who God is has shifted radically, and I'm sure that shifting isn't done.
Today I made dandelion wine. I read a book by that name during my first year of IB in high school and it opened up my world somehow. I hadn't realized the craziness of the polarity in my past until I made this wine. At first I was worried someone would think I'm a terrible heathen for making wine. Then dawned the comforting thought: I don't care what any person thinks of the things I do, say, think, or create. I care about integrity and truth. And making wine doesn't impact that a bit. In a way, this wine is my link to safety; to mental and spiritual healing. This is my water at Cana. And that water is wine.
I took a wide-arc journey from religious fundamentalism and legalism to far outside-the-box free thinking. I filled out the majority of my pre-college education at a small private school. From the outside, it looked great. Hell, from pretty close, it looked fine, too. My parents searched hard to find a school that allowed independent learning while fostering good values. And we landed at Cornerstone Christian School in Fort Collins with Randy Whitten at the helm. I attended this school for 8 years beginning in 1990 in first grade.
Myself and my early classmates adhered to a strict uniform code. We had routine checks to make sure our uniform jumper dresses were decent, we were wearing shorts under our skirts in case, heaven help us, someone's skirt flew up and the world saw our cable knit (and I mean KNIT, like very thick and itchy) tights. We wore starched shirts under our jumpers and undershirts under that. Every day when I got dressed, my clothes reminded me that my body was an innately sinful thing. Boys had haircut checks and misguided moral compass interventions. And spankings were doled out frequently. We were taught to absolutely fear any appearance of evil. The opinions of others were the primary motive for doing anything. If someone could possibly make an inappropriate supposition based on something innocuous, then that innocuous thing was wrong and it was my job to keep people from ever thinking inappropriate things about me. There was even a special rule to prevent the evil of sexuality...well, there were many, actually, but the six-inch rule supposedly prevented boys and girls from touching each other. Because that's a gateway to sin, apparently, even for first graders.
This bred all kinds of fear-based legalism from the highly impossible six-inch tag (only possible if everyone runs around with a ruler, and then that gets a bit legalistic itself...even playing was legalistic) to a school-wide ban on dating of any sort, public destruction of secular music and shaming for individual thought. And sex? From what I could tell, it was the worst sin you could commit. Sex was a cardinal sin. No, not lust, not adultery, just sex itself was so bad, you weren't even allowed to think of it, let alone be a sexual being. It's a wonder we were even allowed to be male and female. The strictest rules were to stamp out any shred of sexuality. Because if you shame people for it, then it won't happen, I guess? Mixed into that, I memorized Bible verses and history classes consisted solely of learning about missionaries. Science was all about rocks and Christian discoveries. I kid you not. It was geared at teaching us to fear free thought.
Some school staff literally threatened kids and bullied them for questioning what they were taught. Those kids were held up as public examples of sin and we were taught to fear our own thoughts. School staff did much worse than threaten some kids, and the most fearsome monsters were the ones in charge. Worse than latent sexuality were the predators that kept watch.
"Education" was conducted individually. So I read for hours every day and then answered regurgitated questions in a little booklet and then graded myself. I literally never had a traditional class, except one semester of Colorado History after the church split and the iron curtain began to lift. I had no idea what a real learning environment would look like. I knew I was bored to death, but that's what school meant, right?
Bullying left me with physical and emotional scars that ran really deep. I was falling apart, but I was terrified to leave. I'd been assured that if I ever stepped toenail in a public school, my soul would be eternally damned. I begged my parents to let me stay. If a private school with Christian kids was so bad, I didn't want to know what a public school would be like.
I was your perfect picture of a broken little kid with disfigured social skills and a very small, closed, and fearful world.
My parents didn't realize what was going on at the school. The entire program was designed to keep the parents from knowing. I'm sure they can't have known because if they had known and were okay with it all, they never would've done what they did next.
After 8 years, the most extraordinary thing happened. I was somehow accepted into the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Poudre High School starting in 9th grade. I was terrified. Other kids from Cornerstone told me I'd be eaten alive. Some teachers and other staff at the school told me I'd compromise my eternal salvation if I went to public high school.
Let's just say that moving from a school of 35 people K-12 to a school of 2000 teenagers was an adjustment. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I flourished and struggled. I transferred from fundamentalism, legalism, control, and fear to a program known for expanding kids' horizons and encouraging them to look beyond their preconceived notions. And I had a lot of preconceived opinions and rhetoric. I was like that place in the political spectrum where the two ends are so far apart, they almost meet.
I read books with swear words in them. I sat next to boys. I even had crushes. I made friends. I listened hungrily to some of my first non-Christian music: Blink 182 and Backstreet Boys. And I was totally shocked to find that the people of public school were better reflections of love than the Christian environment I came from.
My teachers unlocked my mind and helped me in ways I'm still discovering. My high school classes were college-preparatory classes. And I struggled hard. I was dropped into Biology and had no idea what a cell was. I didn't even know what biology meant. I brought this terrible looking mess to class with me the day we made marshmallow and toothpick models of double-helix DNA. I had to redo every single assignment for almost a year. I cried when I was assigned to write my first essay because I had to look up the definition to even know where to begin.
So I stuck with that program because I had literally no idea what a colossal undertaking it was. I didn't realize it til I was out of college. I'd received a year's worth of college credits due to my work in that program. And I began to understand how far behind I'd been when I began high school. The only skill I had to my name at the end of 8th grade was sentence diagramming. I can break down a sentence with the best of them.
IB challenged every norm I had. I was defensive. But classes like Theory of Knowledge kept me on my toes. It cracked the door to a new world. A free-thinking utopia of the mind.
And this year, that door has blown off its hinges for me. Things I thought I knew have blown up in my face. I've had to press the restart button...again...and again. To be honest, when I embarked on IB, I basically just put everything in my past on a hard stop. I didn't think about it. I basically never talked about it. I pretended with all my being that it wasn't there. A couple of other total "sinners" from my elementary school also went to my high school. We behaved like perfect strangers when we saw each other in the halls. It was almost like we were afraid that other people might know how insane our background was if we associated.
This year, someone from that early school experience has gone looking for truth in all that mess. She's brave, and she's also rallied 160 brave souls who are slowly sifting the wreckage together. We're finding that we have a lot of preconceived ideas that we can get rid of. There's more to toss than to keep.
I, for one, have become a child again in my spiritual journey. I've decided that there's so much wreckage, I need to toss what I can and start to rebuild. If you've never been through this, you won't understand. And I'm glad for you. If you have been through it, I'm sorry. And I know you'll get what it means to be an adult who's not sure of anything. I'm believing that I can rebuild. And some days are harder than others. I'm finding the things that resonate are the ways I learned to challenge truth. IB was the exact medicine my soul and mind needed after such a painful encounter. Given my starting point, I needed the jolt of being forced to look for myself. And it's still rolling in. The jolt comes in waves, just as the waves of realization of what I've actually come out of.
Recently, I've begun to allow myself to roll around the "C" word: cult. The realization of a cult is painful. It's like waking up to find that everything inside you is suddenly filled with venom and sickness. It's vile and it's impossible to expel it quickly enough. When someone is lucky enough to get out of a cult, they find themselves blinking in the sunlight, not even noticing the world going by. It's like being spit out of a time machine in the wrong era.
My IB community was understanding in ways I now am stunned to realize. I can't have seemed even remotely normal, but people befriended me and I was accepted. Teachers worked with me despite all the things I didn't know. My rhetoric wasn't my own. People also have to have known that. But no one treated me like they knew my past. I tried to hide it, but no doubt, it's been written all over me all along. The difference is now I get to punctuate that reality with the strength to overcome it. I can't say "Thank you" enough to my friends and teachers from high school. Thank you for challenging my beliefs, for accepting me as I was, and for letting me change over the years.
To my brave Cornerstone community of former kids, I'm thankful. I'm glad we're all on this side of the rot. And I'm glad to be able to begin to reconnect with you. I know we were all terrified of each other for a long time. And it makes sense. But there's healing when we get together.
As for me today, I'm wading through it. I have been for a while, and I don't expect to wake up with it resolved at any point soon. I've made progress. I'm using the tools and skills I learned in IB for evaluating information to find reality and truth. With those tools, I'm able to tackle this and feel like I somehow have a sort of guide to lead me out of the confusion. This blog post is a sign that I've moved beyond letting this sit inside me like an intangible ball of sickness. Perhaps it's a bit stream-of-consciousness. But it's here.
Each time I find something nasty lurking in my own ideology, I take it apart and do everything I can to shed it. It's been a painful experience. But I'm not holding on to the "god" that was created by a small man with too much power. I'm not clinging to some cruel and strange patriarch who despises the people he created. I'm working right now to wrench those horrible versions of god and some of the endemic Christian culture away from the God who's actually touched my life. My understanding of who God is has shifted radically, and I'm sure that shifting isn't done.
Today I made dandelion wine. I read a book by that name during my first year of IB in high school and it opened up my world somehow. I hadn't realized the craziness of the polarity in my past until I made this wine. At first I was worried someone would think I'm a terrible heathen for making wine. Then dawned the comforting thought: I don't care what any person thinks of the things I do, say, think, or create. I care about integrity and truth. And making wine doesn't impact that a bit. In a way, this wine is my link to safety; to mental and spiritual healing. This is my water at Cana. And that water is wine.
No comments:
Post a Comment