survivor

Today I had lunch with the gal who served as Assistant Youth Pastor of my high school Youth Group, and who has, in the years since I graduated high school, taken occupation as the head Youth Pastor.

My Youth Group experience was exceedingly difficult -- not just for me but for everyone involved with it; I've posted extensively on the subject on my Hint Half Guessed blog (which, incidentally, fell by the wayside as I stopped caring to delineate between matters of faith and matters "secular" on this blog; everything, from the way I see things, relates to faith, even if, or especially when, not specifically identified; it's all one). J., the Assistant Youth Pastor, was our only buffer in those years. The lot of us who grew up under the legalistic and tyrannical reign of the then-head Youth Pastor have had a lot of recovering to do in the years since. Some of us have kept the faith, but made it different; some of us have continued to cling to the ideas handed down to us from an ill and therefore extraordinarily unstable man; some of us have stopped believing in God altogether. A lot of damage was done in those years to the church's children, in the most impressionable stages of their lives; Eigh Ann and I call ourselves, and the rest of us who passed through that fire, in whatever state of scathed in which we emerged, the Survivors.

But in the intervening years between then and now, the only person with whom I've kept in regular contact is Eigh Ann; I only heard about the others through the grapevine, or saw them briefly on Christmas visits home, and I've had no chance really to take the pulse of the other Survivors, to compare and contrast our experiences then and since.

Talking with J. at lunch today was marvelous. We sat at the Chinese buffet in town and recalled those days under The Regime...and we howled with laughter. We remembered this scene, and that scene, and she told me about a few I didn't know, as things worsened after my graduating class left. And we laughed till the other customers didn't pretend they weren't staring at us.

War stories.

But here's the amazing thing. A lot of us, those who have kept the faith, have come to believe in similar new ways. This shouldn't surprise me, I expect; we grew up in the same unnourishing soil, and it only stands to reason that our healing should be similar as our wounding was similar. We were taught to believe, among other things, that human beings are innately and thoroughly evil; that instead of boasting in grace, a good Christian wallows (pridefully) in his shame as the most wretched of sinners; that we are a burden on God's grace; that salvation comes through works (this would have been denied if spelled out as such, but salvation became identifiable, not by faith or the fruits of the Spirit or a life of love and hope, but by what you did and did not do); that women have no value and are, by their very femaleness, bad, subordinate, weak, sinful, and prone to causing men to sin; that any appreciation for R-rated movies, dancing and alcohol endangered one's standing with God; and that judgmentality, not love, was the rule for relating to the world, to each other, and to ourselves.

But it seems that a number of us, in confronting the profound errors in those teachings, have come to similar conclusions -- that there's something good in almost everyone, however much we might tend toward error and evil; that nothing can change God's loving and intimate regard for us; that grace is always available to us because of that love; that life is freedom, and it's not how we follow or break the rules that matters, but how we live as a whole, in goodness, faith and joy; that everyone, however marginalized and/or outcast, has inherent value; that a full life is to be enjoyed, not rejected; and that love is the password, the truth, the reality underlying all things.

I returned home dizzy with the realization: a number of us are being redeemed, saved and healed from the bitterness of our spiritual abuse in similar ways. I came to a sort of peace with what happened awhile ago (though it took me years to arrive there); but, as I have lived those years in isolated self-sufficiency and island-like independence, I hadn't realized the power of a healing community -- the deep joy of people who are coming, and have come, out of similar traumas, and find their freedom together -- find, too, that their freedom, like their suffering, is almost identical in its form and appearance. And it dizzies, it boggles my mind, to think on the vast hugeness of God's mercy, God's kindness, that we should be able to be consoled and find consolation in each other's healing.

I think this is one of the reasons God has brought me home for a season -- I came as far as I could alone in my recovery, but the time for aloneness has gone, and now is the time for me to go even further, shoulder to shoulder with others. To find true catharsis, real healing, in the love and support and tears and laughter of a group.

It's an elementary concept, the communality of healing. (Hello, support groups.) But for me, schooled and rigidly discplined since early childhood to solitude, solidarity comes like a giddying lungful of pure oxygen, this enormous Eureka! discovery.

And I am excited. A couple of the Survivors are getting together next week at J.'s home, and I'm cooking dinner. (They even drink wine.) Whether we talk about any of that or not doesn't matter to me; the experience, the similarity is still there. For the first time in a long while, I have hope...hope in wholeness, hope in fullness, hope in shedding the scarred skin of long despair to emerge supple and new and full of joy.

Yup. This is The Year. And I am so thankful.