WEST VIRGINIA PRESBYTERIAN (1952)

The tired old Presbyterian Church at the top of the dirt road is the only church here. A girl of four, neat as a pin, sets off from her house at the opposite end of the road to walk the 200 yards or so to the church. Her mother stands in the middle of the road watching her, until she is greeted on the porch steps by an elderly woman. The mother feels that, since the priest comes only once every two months to say Mass, it’s all right to send her daughter to Presbyterian Sunday School. God is God, after all.

The girl listens with rapt attention to the Bible stories. She gets along well with the other children and likes seeing them because she doesn’t usually get to play with them. Mama won’t let her run barefoot, or wade in the coal mine run-off creek, or catch insects and pull their wings off. And she isn’t allowed to say words like “piss” and “shit,” which are everyday words to the other kids.

At the end of the lesson today, the minister comes in. They have been learning the Lord’s Prayer, and he wants to check on their progress. The children stand up and all recite together: “Our Father, which art in heaven…”

The little girl knows it by heart already; she learned it long before she began coming to this Sunday school. “… but deliver us from evil. Amen,” she finishes. But the other kids say more.

The minister glares at her and says, “Why didn’t you learn it, like you were told?”

“Oh,” she says. “I already learned it.”

“But, you didn’t learn it all.”

“Oh, yes,” she smiles. “I know the whole thing.” She repeats it.

“No, that’s wrong,” the minister insists, “you must say the whole prayer. Now, say it the right way.”

She says the prayer again, exactly as she was taught it by her Catholic parents.

The minister raises his right hand all the way back, above his head, and slaps the child hard on the left side of her face. “Now,” he says, “say it again, the right way.”

“I don’t know the way they say it.” She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of her tears, and she won’t be pushed by any means to say something she doesn’t think is right.

“Daddy says some people say extra words that people added a long time after Jesus said it first. I know it the way Mama and Daddy taught me. I know ‘Hail Mary,’ too,” she added proudly, “And ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear’.”

The minister begins to mutter words she doesn’t understand. He closes his huge hands around her upper arms and plucks her out of the group of children. Still muttering, he drops her on the church steps. “Go on, get yourself home,” he thunders.

“Mama said to wait for her to come and get me. Ten o’clock she said. I have to wait for her.” By now she is not only in pain; she is getting mad, very mad, at the minister. But she controls herself. She knows Mama will fix it.

As soon as the man slams the door, the girl allows herself to cry. She sees blood drops on her front and cries harder because this is a new dress.

Her mother, walking up the road to get her, sees tears and blood and breaks into a run.

The girl is bleeding from her mouth, because the blow forced her teeth into the inside cheek. Her eye will swell shut by the end of the day. She has marks on her face and her arms which will finally fade after two days, to be replaced by bruises in the shape of the minister’s fingers.
As the girl sobs broken sentences into her shoulder, Mama gets madder and madder.

The girl has seen Mama like this before, when things happened to her or her brother. Mama always says, “Ignorance never excuses brutality.” The girl doesn’t know exactly what the words mean, but she does know they mean Mama’s gonna do something about it.

The service is going on, but Mama doesn’t care. She takes the girl’s hand and marches right up the middle aisle to the minister, who, astonished, stops his speech mid-sentence.

She turns the girl around to face the congregation, bloody rivulet down her chin, welts rising on her face and arms.

Mama is brief: “That man did this to my daughter.” She stops for breath.  “And you call him a Christian.”

Mama whispers to her, “Stand up straight.”

Embarrassed coughs and shuffles follow them as they walk away.

Mama never sent me to Sunday School again.

©2008, Ramona K. Silipo. All rights reserved. (Note:  Earlier  versions of this story have appeared online.)

Who is “Christian?” What is “Mystical?”

A discussion among Quakers about de-emphasizing the Christian foundation of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers),  and its Christian principles got me thinking about the definition of  “Christian.”  People shy away from the word because of  the negative and repressive connotations connected with fringe elements.  Fundmentalists,  Evangelicals and similar sects have hijacked the word and given it a narrow, often angry and aggressive, generally hateful meaning; they have made Christianity repugnant to many people.

The discussion about Christianity has been going on in Quaker circles here in England for years.  In the last revision of  Faith and Practice (the book of queries and testimonies) pretty much all the references to Christianity were removed. When I first went to Strawberry Creek Meeting in Berkeley, the meeting described itself as Christ-centered rather than Christian.

Friends accept anyone into meeting for worship, and woe betide any meeting that offends the one single Bah’ai or atheist who might wander in one day. The issue is serious; that is, that Friends in general do not believe there is one exclusive path to God, and so do not judge other religions. But it is carried to silly extremes lately.

My definition of Chrisitian is pretty simple and broad: A Christian is someone who reveres Jesus Christ as a teacher or leader, someone whose life is an example to follow. Doctrines such as redemption, sin and all the rest are not so important to me as the principles Jesus taught. If you follow Jesus’s example, you’re a Christian– living the teachings, not just believing them.

That’s part 1. Part 2 is, I love all the Jesus stories. They are whacking good yarns, in my book. Raising people from the dead, walking on water, making wine from water, accepting people as they are (i.e tax collectors and whores, etc.) — all of those are great stories, every bit as good as anything the Grimms or Anderson or Lewis came up with. Plus, in my view, it doesn’t matter whether he was “truly the Son of God” or not. If we do nothing more than follow his example we’re making an effort. As it happens, I do believe in his divinity. Whether he was more divine than Krishna or Buddha is another question, and, again, I don’t think it matters.

Oddly enough, the Christian mystics I know about are the Catholic ones, especially Theresa of Avila, who apparently had orgasmic experiences of Jesus (although we won’t find that word in any of the stories of her). I’ve always been fascinated that descriptions of Christian mystical experience so often sound like sex as described in borderline pornographic novels. Is it the Catholic Church’s  preoccupations with sex and masochism? Is it all in their heads? Is it truly a physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit entering their bodies? Is it delusional– and if it’s all delusions, are they the result of fasting or lack of sleep or other explainable reasons?

More seriously, mystical experiences are by definition unique and personal. No two people experience God in the same way. We are all imperfect humans, and we bring to any experience of God all the intellectual and emotional baggage we carry, no matter how genuine our intentions. Being open to being taken over by God is a pretty big order. Quaker meeting started the process for me; Tantra moved it forward very, very fast. Being able to surrender completely, even if only for a few seconds at a time, is an incredible grace. And the more you can do it, the more exciting and wondrous it becomes.

Have you seen Scorcese’s Jesus movie– The Last Temptation of Christ– the one with Willem Dafoe as Jesus and Harvey Keitel as Judas? It’s my favourite of all of the Jesus movies. Dafoe plays Jesus as a real man, with doubts and needs and secrets, not as a perfect godlike creature. I mean, he obviously likes women (which none of the other Jesus actors seemed to do). And the relationship between Judas and Jesus is close and loving (and interpreted by some hopefuls as homosexual, but I don’t see it). The apostles are very real too, bickering among themselves, all trying to impress Jesus. To me, showing these “holy” people as human, with the fears,  needs and quirks we all have, makes them MORE holy, not less. They were able to overcome those things and follow this guy for three years. That’s a big sacrifice if you were making money, sleeping with women and living a life before he turned up.

For me, that is the point: the mystical takes you out of the physical world and into the inexplicable, but even more real, world of pure spirit. Even if we  have it only for a few seconds, or once or twice in a lifetime, what a gift! That some of us manage to have these experiences at length or repeatedly, then actually to communicate them in human language, and to have people hear and understand and follow— well, that’s a great grace.

Violent Anger: Is it “in a Normal Range of Emotions?”

©2008, RK Silipo. All rights reserved.

Recently I happened to meet a psychiatrist who believes that violent anger and violent behaviour are  “in a normal range of emotions.” Her view was that people who do not lash out violently are actually somehow lacking in their range of emotional responses; that the absence of violence is abnormal. As usual in this kind of unexpected encounter, I thought of half a dozen things to say in reply afterward.

I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot since then. I’ve been thinking what an unlivable world we would live in, if what she says were true. People who lash out, hit and kick and stab and shoot and carry out countless angry violent acts would be acceptable. If her assertion were correct, it would be those of us who eschew violence, who try to find other ways of expressing and dissipating anger, who were considered odd, and the wanton bullies who were considered normal. I wonder, would murder be considered normal in this world?

I think she is wrong. I completely reject her premise. To me, any violence is an unacceptable way to express anger. Violence is not only physical, but also verbal and emotional. In fact, the latter are potentially more psychologically damaging, and often have longer-term and more debilitating effects than physical violence.

I felt this way long before I became a Quaker, and it is one of the reasons that Quakerism appealed to me. Quaker faith and practice have become the core of the way I choose to live. My husband isn’t a member of a Quaker meeting, but he learned Quaker ethics when he lived in Friends International Centre (London) while he was a student. In fact, even earlier, in his teens, he had learned the yogic ethical code and chosen to live by it. The yogic code holds the view that violence in any form, physical or otherwise, is proscribed. The Quaker Testimony is that we work to remove all occasion of violence, including anger. So my husband and I put these precepts into practice.

If you know anything about the Religious Society of Friends (doubtful in itself as we do not proselytize much), it would most likely be something about the Testimony of Peace. People generally understand this to be opposition to war. But it is much broader than that. It also encompasses more than the well known passive resistance taught and practiced by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. (although both were aware of Quaker thought and practice).

The Peace Testimony is an all-enveloping concept which imbues all aspects of ethical living. It means that we choose in daily life, in every instance, to try to avoid violence. Since Quakerism is a non creedal religion, individuals commit to various levels of living the testimonies, but virtually all Friends commit themselves to live the Peace Testimony.

So screaming matches, door slamming, threats, withdrawal of affection, the silent treatment and other fairly common acts of emotional/psychological manipulation and domestic violence are rare in Quaker homes. Quakers avoid confrontational behavior and instead try to make a habit of simply expressing anger, then moving on to ways to dissipate it.

Expressing anger, that is, saying outright, “This makes me angry,” and then letting go of it, is completely in the spirit of a non violent life choice. It is the way we try to handle anger. Of course we don’t always completely succeed, but neither do we commit frequent acts of violence–verbal, emotional or physical.

Several years ago I learned a method of dealing with anger called the Peace Empowerment Process© (PEP), including the Blueprint of Emotional Wisdom© and can now teach these techniques. This process reveals that anger is virtually always a mask or an outward manifestation of a deeper, hidden emotion. People learn the techniques to look under the anger and identify the underlying emotions: fear, disappointment, grief or guilt. By finding the true emotion and dealing with it, we remove the reason for the anger.

When the process is learned, it can become almost automatic in moments of anger. The PEP demonstrably reduced violence (including bullying) levels in classrooms where it was taught to children, especially ages nine to fourteen, but also through high school age. I practice the PEP whenever I need to deal with anger. (See Creativity in the Lion’s Den: Releasing Our Children from Violence, by Carolyna Marks, and go to www.wwfp.org for more details.)

I have also been interested in forgiveness studies for many years, and before I left  California I completed the intensive forgiveness seminars at Stanford University.  Dr. Fred Luskin, founder of Stanford’s Forgiveness Project, gave me permission to teach Forgive for Good© workshops in the UK.

The catch phrase for his seminars is  “Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.” That is, we cannot change the past, and in order to move forward and grow emotionally, we must let go of it. His research shows that holding on to resentment, pain or anger is literally bad for physical as well as psychological and emotional health. (See www.learningtoforgive.com.)

My personal feeling is that anger is wasted energy; and stewing in anger, resentment or revenge fantasies only serves to make people unhappy.