The Universe and Me

A girl is homeschooled in a small town in Ohio. There is nothing too strange about the town. When you reach its borders, you can smell dead skunk on the wind. The town is so small it is technically called a, “hamlet.” Yeah. Like the boy who managed to get his entire family killed. Besides its corn fields and the sprawl of houses growing into suburbia around its center and the single Main Street, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from any other tiny Baptist town in Ohio.

It is a dry town, which means, even if people drink alcohol, they cannot buy it in the town’s borders. A mom-and-pop shop sells ice cream and candy to eager, grubby hands in nickels and dimes. A community theatre sits in fading glory. The town matches the brick and mortar ease of the local churches (all but one Baptist). It is a quiet town, with most of the people relying on the income from the small Christian university near its edge (recently renamed to match the number of donations it receives).

The people are kind, self-effacing, happy to share. They believe in the Ten Commandments, abstain from Catholics, and never take the Lord’s name in vain. But to the one little girl in a brick house on Bridge Street, they are to be spoken to carefully.

Because they are sinners and don’t yet know it.

This little girl went to the Baptist Church for a little while, but her father sang too loudly and spoke in rambling words that he shouted to the companionable ceiling and a confused congregation. He raised his hands and stood in the aisle. When, one day, the little girl didn’t have to go to Sunday School, she told her father he shouldn’t do that because no one else was doing it. And they stopped going to the Baptist Church.

By the time the little girl was seven, her father was driving her to a church where women screamed curses down an aisle as men forced her to the front where a pastor thrust his hand against her face and demanded the demons leave her.

The woman thanked him for it, but the little girl just saw her weeping as they dragged her out of the building.

The little girl was told she needed to raise her hands. She was pretty sure she’d asked Jesus to save her at least five times, but she went to the front anyway because it turned out Jesus wasn’t enough. She also needed something that was Jesus but also wasn’t, called, “The Holy Ghost.” She also needed to worship someone called, “The Father.” There were so many more rules in this church. When she was told to play with another little girl from the church, she sat in objectified terror of her, unsure if the girl had demons in her, too.

She was starting to see them everywhere. The world was becoming a very scary place.

The first time she spoke in tongues, she was eight. She had decided to hurt herself so the Holy Ghost would know she really meant it this time, that she really wanted him to take over her body and let her speak the words of the angels. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time she hurt herself, because if she didn’t speak in tongues, it would mean she wasn’t blessed like her father, who could do it constantly. It would mean she wasn’t good enough.

When it worked, the euphoria was overwhelming. She couldn’t stop speaking the language of the angels. She ran through the house, screaming at sinners, forcing them to repent. Telling them the good news. She was going to save the world even if she had to bleed all over it the way Jesus did.

Fast forward through years of pain and self-recrimination. Her parents moved to West Virginia, where she felt the hills close in on her like walls and the strangers grow more frightening. Every two years, the church would change, but her parents always told her the Bible was what was true. Pastors were wrong. Science TV shows were wrong. You couldn’t trust what your friends told you because they would inevitably lead you astray.

(If you had friends.)

There was a soft part of her that wished she could go back before she could speak in tongues and see demons and translate dreams. It was the part that read Harry Potter books, even after her parents threatened to burn them and she had to read them in secret in her closet. It was the part of her that didn’t like the verses of the Bible that said boys were better than girls. It was the part of her that preferred dreaming to eating, especially if she could control the dreams and they weren’t the nightmares that visited her when she closed her eyes or walked outside. It was the part of her that held her friendships closer to her heart than anything the Bible told her, because they made her feel safe and warm and showed her how to be kind. But there was another part, one that was wild and sad and filled with righteous anger, that said the soft part of her was very, very wrong.

(Her addiction to books was wrong. Her insecure feelings towards girls were wrong. The parts of her body that made her female were full of temptation and sin. And, in the places where her heart had been gnawed at by a flame of rage, hate grew.)

So there became two parts to the girl: the dreamer and the penitent.

Let’s stop there. Because so many things have sad endings, and I want to be clear—this story has a happy ending. The little girl got away. It took a little while. She had to grow up first. She had to be told she was a whore by her mother. She had to spend weeks sleeping on other people’s couches. She had to almost die three times.

But she did it.

What they don’t tell you in docuseries about cults is that they can happen in any environment that is isolated from the outside world. It is the narrowing of ideas, a fear of the outside, and a sole reliance on one form of redemption that drives a cult beyond the parameters of religion. Without an allowance for change or growth, adaptation or self-reliance, people who are raised in cults are forced to see their faults as the reason why they need the cult. They have trouble controlling their desires? The Bible tells them to turn away from them. They have trouble with their bodies? It’s a problem of vanity. Don’t worry, God will take it away.

They try to have different opinions? With a soft hand and sorrowful expression, the others persuade them to face their faulty logic and prideful state and return to the passionate embrace of redemption. After all, who are we in the face of perfection?

Answer: We are nothing. Not more than a speck. Our fate is in the hands of God. He has the perfect plan and all our worries are the flaw of our human selves. All our troubles are because of our own imperfect perception of His plan. We just have to have faith.

I don’t have an argument against cults. Every cult will argue that what they did was the best for the people in their care. And the people in them will think that, too. They think there is love there, but all I have to say to that is that the cult I was raised in had very little love to share. All of it went to God.

I found my place in the sinful, secular world because my friends did lead me astray. Love, it turns out, is stronger when it is shared between people. The bonds I found in friendship fostered the soft part of my heart and the books I read opened my fearful mind to the possibilities beyond good and evil, heaven and hell, dreams and nightmares. It has taken years, but I now know the shape of the anger that once ruled most of my life. I know it offers me no comfort.

Perhaps this is a sad ending for some people. They will think, “God is not anger. He is love. He forgives us. We are his children.” And that’s alright, but I found my own type of hope in a small conversation about the universe.

“Did you know the light of the stars we see at night takes billions of years to reach us?” My brother once asked me.

And I looked up at the sky. It was big. It was vast. And, like a child reaching out for his mother’s hand for the first time, I felt connection. A million stars in the sky and they had traveled millions of years to be in that single moment with me. To be seen.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

And that was all it took to look away and never look back.