Dear Sieglinde,
please read and tell me what you think.
I wrote this some time ago, but have rewritten and changed some stuff.
Thanks
A Fearful Love
-by Brian Vanderlip
When my father told me that God loved the world so much that he sacrificed his only son to save us, I never understood. Nevertheless, I loved my dad and accepted the truth he told me. As the family sat down to eat dinner together, my father would pray to God and thank him for giving his son for us and for giving us food and every good thing in our lives. I sat and listened to the same true statements again and again and again, at home, at church and sometimes even at school. As a little boy of seven or eight I knew that my friend Earl’s parents were going to hell because they were Roman Catholics. They somehow thought that they could get into heaven by praying to Mary instead of to God himself. They used all kinds of rituals in their church and fancy clothing and spoke in Latin. At even such a tender age, I knew the truth about them and that I had to love them as neighbors even if they were doomed for the time-being: You can never understand the depths of God’s plan. Your kindness to a Catholic might actually lead them out of darkness and into the real light of Christianity in the Fellowship Baptist Church. Now, we Baptists almost always knew we were not the only ones with heavenly assurance but certain practices in other religions revealed their depravity so clearly to us, the use of wine, for instance, an intoxicating poison that has no scriptural foundation. Research has revealed to us that Christ used grape juice and not wine as is improperly surmised. The use of the word wine does not necessarily imply alcoholic wine but Roman Catholic priests drink it anyway.
I have been trying to understand those early days of my life and have been looking at my childhood on and off for some years. I have talked with therapists, psychiatrists, preachers, counselors and friends about childhood issues. I remembered sad and lonely realities of my life then that have left me full of sorrowful tears spilling out. At the same time, I have been able to remember times of childhood joy and carefree, solitary play.
Through the last several years and now at half a century into my life, I have come to understand that I do not believe my father. I have accepted that I was saved in the Baptist fashion several times without it really taking hold forever. And I have been forced to look back, far back, to understand the feelings that have brought me to the place where I say with comfort and acceptance that there is no God, and that religion has often been a harmful influence in my life.
It is the mid 1950’s, and we are gathered at the dinner table for our evening meal. My father is reading from the Bible. It is very important to listen to the Word of God, as it is called, the Holy Bible. My father’s copy is much used. His hands hold it close to his heart. The important message is sacrifice. God’s son got hung up with nails and ropes on a cross and hung there till he was dead. God let people do that so that I could be saved. That is the message I keep hearing. I am afraid and sick inside. I am wrong and need to be made right. I feel horrible inside because I am. This kind of reading of scripture is meant to inform and lead you to the right actions, specifically the right action of becoming a Christian, by admitting what a sinner you are and that you need Christ in your life as your saviour. On Sunday, we would go to The Fellowship Baptist Church on King Street in Cobourg (the church my father helped build with his own hands) and listen again while dad preached to up to a hundred or so in the congregation. It was finally at one of these services that I broke down and walked to the front of the church as a youngster, my eyes full of stinging tears, the weight of oppressive sin so heavy on me. With about ten other children who answered the altar call, I shook my father’s hand of welcome into the fold of the church. The terrible knowledge of my evil heart had been revealed in scripture reading and prayers said over and over. I had committed such awful sins, swear words in my mind, even if I did not say them out loud, and that chocolate too, snatched from the corner store. I was going to hell, I knew it. It was not odd or funny, just a plain and simple fact, a horror of a fact darkening my life. All of us sitting in the church who were not saved were doomed.
Looking back, I am shocked and dismayed by the lengths to which my parents went to indoctrinate me before I was even a teen. I was an open field, plowed by doctrine and planted with the seed of fear. From the very beginning they prayed and read the Bible to me and carefully explained the wages of sin. This was their best-meant love to a child. Nothing else mattered essentially, because without Christ there is no life.
I want to talk about extremes.
“Violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die; like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, consume. They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.” – William Shakespeare
Life. It begins in fullness. I have come to believe that each moment is better than gem-precious and it is full of awareness, so much so that in some sense our whole being is invested in the moment, not just our senses but the very senses of the cells of our bodies; our whole being is brought to the enterprise of life. A baby, newborn, is whole, perhaps not entirely complete as in maturity but whole and alive. They know how to bond with their mother, to take the breast and suckle. They do not have to be taught anything and come equipped with a complete, intact survival instinct, all feelings present. So what happens to that baby, that by the time they have learned some language, they need then to be told that they are sinners and need Christ? Well, nothing… Something has happened to the parents though. The more liberal believers might wait until they are beyond the toddler level before they introduce the doctrine but what is it about parents that makes them want to do this to little child, this peculiar love that is intent on indoctrinating and saving a so-called lost soul. The innocent child is stained with guilt to keep him or her oppressed and obedient, and the natural knowledge of making connection with one’s own feeling self, a natural and unjudged self, is destroyed because of the imprint, the imposed guilt and finally unworthiness, the sinfulness. What pain has been suffered by these parents and then covered over so well that they can willingly expose their child to heaven and hell doctrine as if it is the most sensible and natural course in the world? If parents are unwilling and unable to look honestly at the suffering they experienced in their own childhood, to feel the enormity of it as if they were a child, they may be doomed to repeat the abuse with their own children. Not only that but even call it love.
Pain. Suffering. The story of childhood is full of fantasy and play, monsters and huge struggles among forces that are positively beyond reason. The challenge of growing is like a building up, layer by layer, so that each new layer is wholly something new again, a new view of things.
My father’s memory of childhood is a farm of slavery, lonely field work or barn work, the lonely struggle of the day. My mother grew up in a Baptist preacher’s home. Both my parents would perhaps have some minor criticisms of their beginnings but for the most part are grateful. Then why did they expose me to this indoctrination into conservative Christianity? Because they were exposed. Because when they had children, their childhood feelings were stirred back up in them and rather than face the facts of their abusive histories, they chose Christ. Christ paid the price. Their tears of gratitude to him are full of the grief of their own lives and their own beginnings. Of course, their response to this perspective goes like this: You exaggerate and distort. You are about to have a breakdown. You are like Saul of Tarsus persecuting and we pray you will have a vision.
At their advanced ages, they continue to live as it was begun with them – repressing true human feelings and continuing with indoctrination and control.
A child shivers alone in the face of torturous stories of suffering and hellfire. He has nightmares. They imagine that God’s Word is worth any torture to anybody at any tender age. It is the truth. It must be taught. Memorize the verse, the truth for a lost world.
But not my truth. My truth is an innocent child that is worthy, fully worth love and acceptance. I will never hit that child, not in anger nor in some foolhardy teaching of so-called discipline, and certainly not with horror stories of God and hell. I will not allow terrible stories of horror to be fed into my child. As they mature and become curious they can read all kinds of books, without restriction but as babies, toddlers and young children, I will respect the child’s wishes from birth to adulthood and continue to love and nurture them in trust, not of some spirit or God or written law but trusting in my human feelings, in the love I share with my wife, trusting my own life and the life of my family. The greatest love is simply human. To be more human, more fully human is an exercise of feeling, a willingness to be. It is not a hope. It is possible only right this instant.
My Answer
I just finished reading A Fearful Love. Tears are rolling down my cheeks and anger is rising from every corner of my body. I am experiencing flashbacks. I feel your childlike helplessness and mine, which originated in the fact that our identity was destroyed by people who needed something or someone else to believe in because they could not believe in themselves.
In your childhood it was your father who used a book, written by vengeful and controlling people, to empower an unseen vengeful and controlling god in order to dominate and control you. In my childhood it was Hitler and his idealistic ideas of racial purity quoted nearly daily by my father, that branded and labeled me with worthlessness.
What your childhood has in common with mine is that the people who raised us were themselves broken and needed something—anything—to hold on to, because they had never experienced the liberating feeling of simply being a human being. Indoctrinated and imprinted by disrespect, not knowing the fundamental needs of a human being, they acted out their incapability on us by forcing us into their own incapacity. They controlled us as children so we would remain unaware, dependent, fearful, and within the reach of their control.
What would they have done if they had not had children to control? They would have had to face their own helplessness.
For this reason they needed someone to support their helplessness. And what is easier than pressing a child into submissiveness—someone who carries the guilt they themselves were carrying and who can no longer find a way out of this vicious grip of dependency, or a way back to themselves, to their feelings, and to the human being within them? A human being who was born equipped to feel, to be empathetic, who knows the fundamental needs of others and has the capability to nurture.
It is a human being who destroys another because they no longer know how to preserve their own species and its unique identity.
It is only we, the aware, who suffer because we had the chance to glimpse our uniqueness and to feel who we are. How sad for those who are still held hostage by their childhood imprint. They are the ones who will need children to control—children who may become witnesses to their beliefs and supporters of their repression and pain.
And so the next generation is created in pain—people who need a god or a Hitler to believe in instead of becoming aware and feeling human beings who are interested in preserving the integrity of their own species.