OPEN LETTER TO A FUNDAMENTALIST PREACHER LONG DEAD

salvador dali

Through the late 1940s and the 1950s we were told to be very afraid of nuclear war. The Bomb is gonna getcha. You can't hide from the Bomb. First, it was the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, then the Neutron bomb. I heard an old woman preacher rant about Neutron bombs in the early 1980s, "It'll burn their eyes right outta their sockets." After praising the bomb for its ability not to destroy property. This was the only time I met her. I sure as hell would never have gone to her church. What she told me was that she likes things and dislikes people; that is, the people not dropping dollars in her collection plate. I'd been invited by someone I knew to a "Bible study," one Wednesday evening. This was my early years in the mountains, curious about all aspects of the culture. My mailman of that time was there. He talked about the apocalypse, the rapture and the terrible sufferings at hand for nonbelievers with such zeal for their torment, my respect for him took a downward turn. This was the church mindset I grew up in that set me in motion running for my life away from that mind. It confused me as a kid noticing the church mind was full of derision for the people around them who were not members of the church, a church with attendance seldom more than a dozen, one of them a kid who was present by duress only. I don't know what it was about me that saw the preacher was spreading hate in the name of Jesus, God and the Bible. The contempt toward nonbelievers, the "unsaved," did not mix with my reading of the Bible that said, "God is love." Like Jesus said to his close ones, It's easy for you to love one another. Try loving your neighbor, the people around you, the nonmembers, the people of the world you live in. That's where my fundamentalist upbringing jumped the track. I didn't know of anybody in the church that even liked anybody else in the church. 

salvador dali

I couldn't love indiscriminately, nor could I love the people in the church. I'd been taught about fear and punishment as our relationship with God the judge. I heard about communists that don't believe in God, how they're damned for hell, eternal suffering---they'll get theirs for not being born capitalist Americans. I wanted to talk to the preacher about these issues, but learned early he had no answers. The time the kid brought up the strait and narrow reference in the Bible, noting it is spelled strait, not straight. Same difference. I thought: What? Not according to the dictionary, but the preacher knows better than the dictionary. He knows the Bible. I recall the day at a short-lived bookstore in Sparta an old long-faced preacher stood in the open doorway looking at me. I saw a game about to start and said, "Come on in." He said, "You gonna let me in?" I said, "Sure, it's open to the public." He stepped across the threshold like he was entering the devil's lair and said, "You know, there's only one book." I thought: Oh shit, here we go, and said, "I understand that. But there are a few others." I knew the preacher and he knew me. I was not going to back down from him. I knew him to be a long-faced Bible-thumper with the hawkish eye that kept track of everybody's sins but his own. He was introducing a sermon he had in mind for me: There's only one Book. I wasn't going there and didn't give a shit if I pissed him off. I liberated myself from that mind about three decades before, wasn't going back. And I was not allowing him to control me with his poorly reasoned pontifications. His state of mind was responsible for the worst years of my life. I was not going to humor him. He knew I'd recently left a church and I knew he had heard the gossip around the departure, none of which had to do with what was behind it. He didn't stay long. I have a hard time with a preacher's arrogance; hard time in that I don't honor his role in the masculine hierarchy. I cede nothing of myself to his control. They don't like it. And I say, Good: keeps them away. 

salvador dali

It was bewildering to the kid to be in school learning about the world I lived in, on the one hand, and on the other, church with emphasis on after I'm dead, hell if God won't have me, heaven if I'm lucky. Of course, the preacher is not going to hell for making the people twofold more children for hell than he, himself, but the kid was one heartbeat from hell for thinking about sex. My doctor who diagnosed a heart issue, said in his straightforward minimalism with language, "You're gonna die." I didn't know what to say. I could only think, Duh, and assessed it too disrespectful to say out loud in a place where you say urine instead of piss. I sat thinking, I grew up a fundamentalist, that I will die is one thing I know probably better than anything else. And? By this time in the life, a long time after turning away from church/religion, power of the few over the many, I've found by experience God is love, not a tightrope to walk with hell fire waiting below. I've found what I call raw God, the core, love. The years of religion telling me people of other religions were worshiping the devil, and Satan is everywhere, Halloween forever, took fifteen years of unwinding the burdens of a belief system that kept me in despair. In school, I recall learning the word despair, identifying with it so deeply I got it without having to memorize it. Once I caught on that God is love and love only, it took quite awhile to shed the turtle shell of defense grown from experiences with conditional love as coercion or agenda down through the early years of this lifetime. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Up yours, too, preacher. If God wants me to live my life according to your approval, I don't want anything to do with God. If you want to engage in a constant war with Satan, go for it. I approve. Do what you gotta do. Leave me out of it.  

salvador dali

It was several years after seeing by experience God is love that my heart was able to open. Like a flower, it needed it's time to develop toward opening. The first key I got was that love and understanding are the same. I'd held love as a lofty word and couldn't find my own connection to something so "pure." Upon seeing understanding is love, I thought: I can do that. I started paying attention to understanding others more consciously. I feel like understanding led to, or unveiled, empathy. I have come to a place in the life where I have empathic feelings with everyone I know and everyone I meet. I've come to receive people I am present with aware that this is a soul who passes through many lifetimes, like I am, and this is what they're doing this time around. It does not mean I'm full of charming sweetness. There are some people I really don't like to be around for reasons I don't pet rattlesnakes. Still, they have my empathy. They are souls making it awfully hard on themselves, over and over, never seeming to get it, heads full of blaming others, self-unaware and self-centered. I'm understanding as I'm able and feel empathy for their psychological twist, I have my own, but I get too close, they piss me off, so I stay away. Only one time that I know of have I forgiven somebody. I just dismissed the problem. It went away. The one I held bitter contempt for became in that moment one of my better friends. I'm not saying I'm somebody special because I forgave somebody. We all have our own such experiences. This was mine that taught me how enlightening forgiveness is. I'm not a model of forgiveness. I still carry some bitter resentments difficult to let go of, so I don't worry over them. It's ego. They'll fade into indifference. This new kind of seeing self in relation to others, continual awareness of loving neighbor as self, looking to the good for those around me, has grown out of interpreting God as love. The old one, God as fear, made me want to rebel. God as love is convincing to me by way of experience. By now, my heart is so healed I can cry with donkeys. 

  

salvador dali himself

* 

UP FROM THE MIRE

sophie taeuber-arp

I have a feeling I've found a core issue in how I "believe" now in relation to how I was brought up to believe in the Kansas version of American Fundamentalism. The adults in my world throughout childhood, even unto adulthood, then peers, believe going to church and believing in Jesus you'll go to heaven when you die. I never found in my child's investigative mind any confidence that anything was worth a "reward" after I die. Only after dying is important to my mother's way of thinking, taught repeatedly, relentlessly, that it's all going to be gold and angels when we die. No more sorrows, no more pain. Going up to heaven to be with Jesus when I die. Well, maybe so. What about from now until I die? I have a life to live. I abandoned scriptures as soon as I escaped parents' church that taught the words of Jesus as commandments: you better not or you'll go to hell, Jesus sez. I asked preacher about love your neighbor. Love, he said, has a spiritual meaning. It's about life in heaven, not here on earth. My questions I didn't bother to ask after a certain point when I learned the answer to all my questions was it has a spiritual meaning that we're not meant to understand. Everything to do with love had a spiritual meaning that we're not to understand til we get to heaven where we'll live in idle luxury at #1 Gold Brick Rd, evidently an apartment complex. There, I can love my neighbor, because my neighbor is with Jesus too. Fear is all I ever heard about God and Jesus. God is meant to be worshipped in fear, fear the Lord thy God, forever on alert to be afraid of God. He'll come like a thief in the night, so you better look out. He's gonna getcha and you won't even see it coming. He'll catch you in a sin and condemn you to hell, eternal damnation, so dramatic, burning up in fire for eternity, Eeeek. And it's not even certain I'd go to heaven though I did get saved under duress at age 7. Say no and you go to hell when you die. Ok.  Just say yes that you believe that Jesus is the son of God. Ok. Yes. You're saved. At the time, I felt it awfully hollow. Just say I believe something I don't know anything about and I go to heaven. Logic wasn't really accessible to the 7 year old. It didn't seem to inhibit the preacher, either.

sophie taeuber-arp

And there was God the judge who kept track of every sin I ever thought, let alone did. There was no living without ongoing guilt. God sez NO. Mommy sez You better NOT. Preacher sez You'll go to HELL. All of them saying, You'll be SORRY. Through the time in that belief system, I believed it because adults told me to. It really didn't add up at school. The kids from my church always carried their bible on top of their books they carried between classes. Ever to be alert to win a soul to the Lord. I refused. At school was where I had my life as myself. I was a shy, inward kid, living in total uncertainty about everything. I always had to figure everything out for myself. I'd catch on by watching the other kids. About my senior year I started catching on a little bit. I took up reading novels. Actually read Dr Zhivago senior year on my own; it was new in paperback. I don't think I retained any of it, but got through it. Read Ben Hur senior year on my own after seeing the Charlton Heston movie. Oh I thought it such a great movie. Big Hollywood spectacle with cool chariot race. In the late 1980s I met a granddaughter of Lew Wallace, who had lived her life in the family wealth provided by Ben Hur royalties. She was a wonderful human being. She had a severely retarded son she raised herself, never institutionalized him. He came along very well with a sense of self as valid. In school I saw that most of the other kids were not as repressed by churches. I had a cousin who went to a Congregationalist church and wondered what was wrong with my parents for going to that nutcase cinderblock box church with folding chairs and honky tonk piano and a dramatic preacher. I never figured it out either. I was envious of cousin for getting to go to a sane church. The luck of the draw. When I started reading, my horizon grew until in 1988 I saw the curve of the earth from a plane at sunrise over Germany. It's no big deal visually, the same as a photograph in a book, but mentally it's a gigantic deal. Reading opened up history to me. School history was dates of wars and names of generals. I wanted to find out what happened, how the people lived in those times. I cared nothing for the military mind as history. 

sophie taeuber-arp

The deal about winning souls for the Lord is it will go better for you in heaven, something like the Mary K Cadillac. That's for if you're really zealous and win souls one after the other and never slack. It really broke for me when I discovered the beatniks and Alan Watts. The beatniks were a thumb to the nose at religion and politics. Henry Miller planted seeds and set saplings asprout. It wasn't the sex part about Miller that appealed to me---there is plenty of sex writing to go around---but his attitude toward life. He taught me that the people of my everyday life are every bit as important as celebrities and the famous, even more important. He taught me to pay attention to the people around me and to value them as themselves. This was wholly new to me. The only thing that mattered about somebody else from the church perspective was what kinds of sins they're committing, how best they can be judged. Punishment was the thing. Couldn't let anybody get away with anything without being punished. The French Existentialists gave me a philosophy I resonated with as my own. By the time I started college, five years after high school, I was well educated in Existentialism. There was a time I'd longed to go someplace like Chapel Hill where I could take courses in Existentialism. The existentialist writers got me through my life under martial law by duress, took my mind to another world where it seemed like sane people lived. I learned a great deal about the French Underground during German occupation. I learned about several European writers I read then and later. Those two years I have come to think of as pre-school where I taught myself how to read and thereby how to start thinking for myself. Reading opened me to a world of sanity, knowledge, intelligence, living without fear of God's damnation. I'd been fed so much nonsense about God, especially the guilt, it took fifteen years, two seven-year cycles, attempting to find out what's really the case where God was concerned. I already knew that what I came from was not it. That was the starting point of my search for what really is the case. Something new happened when I discovered writings from the East, Buddhism the most attractive for its clear explanations of matters of the inner self. 

sophie taeuber-arp

Learning to conform to a Japanese, for example, school of Buddhism, it seemed like the religion and the culture were so interwoven that the religion outside the culture would be pretentious. It's the same with Western culture and Christendom, interwoven unto inseparable. I don't mean disciple of Christ Christendom, but religion. It still bothered me that Buddhism was a religion. I thought meditation might be an interesting path, but didn't know how. Thought it had to be taught. There wasn't even a yoga class in Charleston in the 1960s. It was in the Charleston years that I pondered away the nonsense I'd been taught in the earlier years. It was in those years I chopped off all that went before. It was my own inner Dada period, where I chopped off the past and began at a new starting place that had never been attempted before. Looking back from now I can see the Divine hand was with me in that time, putting self in touch with several people who became major influences, not as teachers. The influence of their integrity as intelligent, compassionate human beings without religion freed me even further from religion I knew by then to be a shell found on the beach, the life long gone from it. I came to see that living in this world is what the scriptures are about. The scriptures all around the world, all down through time. They're about living with inner peace in this world. It's done by regarding everyone we come in contact with in the course of a day with an open compassionate heart, a child the same as one's own, a man the same as a brother, a woman the same as a sister. Respect for the self in others. I overlook things I do that aren't quite right and things I don't do that I say I will. I feel like allowing others by overlooking expectation, just allowing the other to be self, is all it's about. Allowing. When I found the self in others, it became automatic for me to feel compassion and understanding. The day I finally broke through to love that had been high hurdle for me came from reading in Meher Baba's discourses that understanding is the same as love. I said, Lo! I can do that. I did have a spirit of understanding. Then love was easy. The simplest thing Jesus said, no parables to mull over, but a straight-forward simple sentence, God is love. 

sophie taeuber-arp herself, 1889-1943

*