When I eventually returned to college after my fourth and final surgery, I was fascinated by tales of Christian mystics, monks, and nuns sleeping with spiked clamps on their legs or wearing an item of clothing that pierced them under their habits. They caused themselves physical harm, one professor explained, in order to feel the pain of the God with whom they had entered into marriage.
The stories captivated me because I knew from personal experience that the ideas behind them were not as outdated as my professor made them sound. I knew that even those of us who do not live cloistered lives, those of us who shop at the Mall of America and take our kids to see Disney on Ice, sometimes silently endure incredible levels of preventable pain for some of the very same reasons.
And when we stop, when we complain, when we expose that whatever isn’t “supposed” to be happening in our church, our school, or our home is happening, too often the response is that whatever’s happening is our “fault.” Be it from a doctor who says your real problem is your acne or your complaining, not your pain, or from a church board who decides to let the pastor who admitted to touching you go, but then quietly moves him on to another church, implying that they don’t think he will do it again there, which means, of course, he isn’t the problem. You are.
* * *
When I got home from the hospital, I was forty pounds lighter. I felt hollowed out, empty like a drum. My body was flat like that of a child again, and yet too big for the girlish daybed I returned home to. My feet stuck out between its footboard’s white wooden slats making me feel more like Alice in Wonderland after having gobbled a piece of “eat me” cake than a grown-up. Looking down at them it suddenly occurred to me, my feet had been sticking out that way for years, all throughout my teens, and yet somehow, I hadn’t noticed until now.
My former youth pastor had been sentenced to nine months in jail, placed on probation for twenty years, and forbidden to work with youths again.
And I was questioning everything.
“Linda?” my mom called from outside my bedroom door.
I quickly pulled my T-shirt back down over my belly.
“Yes?” I called back.
The door opened and my mom’s face appeared through the crack. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure if you were sleeping.” She opened the door the rest of the way.
“No,” I said. “I changed my dressing,” nodding toward my stomach.
“Pastor called,” she said softly.
I turned onto my side and planted my palms firmly on the mattress, releasing my weight onto them to ease the strain on my stomach, and tried to push myself upright. She watched me, her forehead furrowed with concern, before putting her arms on my shoulders and helping me the rest of the way.
“Thank you,” I grimaced.
“He told me they’re going to have live animals in the nativity scene this year,” she continued, helping me straighten my body. “Donkeys, cows, chickens. They’ve even got llamas.”
“Cool,” I said, lowering my head and closing my eyes. I still got dizzy every time I went from lying down to sitting, because I was easily dehydrated after having lost my entire colon and much of my small intestine in the surgeries.
My mom ducked down so she could make eye contact with me. “Linda, in this year’s nativity scene . . . they want you to play Mary.”
“Me?” I said, lifting my head.
“You would even get to hold a real little baby.” She beamed.
Were I not in so much pain, I might have laughed. There was no way I could hold a baby. I couldn’t even hold myself up.
“Mom,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t do that.”
“I know,” she sighed, taking my hand. “I know honey. I told him you were still too sick.” I raised my eyebrows in an implied, yeah. “But I thought you would want to know, they chose you.”
“Mary . . .” I said quietly.
Mom smiled at me. “Mm-hmm.”
I closed my eyes again. Desperate to be counted among the praiseworthy women, I had once been like the foolish king who wished that everything he touched would turn to gold and wound up killing all he loved in the process, as even his daughter turned into a golden statue. I had made a foolish wish, the wish of a child. I had prayed that God would allow me to suffer, and suffer he had allowed me to do.
But that prayer, foolish though it was, was not misinformed. Suffering had transformed me in my community’s eyes. For the first time, I was “good.” Between surgeries, when I gathered up enough energy to go to church, I was no longer chastised for looking too sexual. I was complimented for looking so beautiful. I was given hugs; I was prayed for with tremendous earnestness; I was asked what presents I might like congregants to drop by the house to cheer me up; our head pastor asked me to read Scripture in church; the youth pastor asked me to lead a first-year high school girls’ group; and now this . . . the Virgin Mary! Whereas my sexuality had once hidden my goodness from their view, my suffering seemed to expose it.
And yet, I knew I was the same person now as I had been then. Just as selfish, just as selfless, just as caring, just as careless, and wearing the same little dresses and skirts I’d always worn. My sorrow made me purer in their sinful eyes—stripping me of my sexy vitality, and allowing them to forget my body. But as for me? I was more aware of my body than ever—of how much I missed it. And as I lay in bed I would have traded in the church’s newfound perception of me as good to be able to run and jump and play in a minute.
There were several factors that I imagine went into my illness getting as out of control as it did—the limited medical understanding of diseases like Crohn’s at the time, the healthcare industry and the lack of time doctors are given to assess situations, and gender dynamics that often result in the suffering of women being overlooked. Yet I too must take some responsibility. My need for approval and my fear of being blamed shut me up when I should have been standing and shouting for people to pay attention.
Looking back at the day my mom told me I had been cast as the Virgin Mary, it seems to me to be a kind of strange nativity scene. Only in this birth story, I wasn’t playing Mary, or any mother at all. I was playing a baby—too big for her daybed crib already, and yet just being born. Unformed. Unsure of so many things, but completely sure of one: I was done trying to be who they wanted me to be.
* * *
I. “The only time it really sucks,” my interviewee Biz said, “and is really complicated, is when that feeling is coupled with certain ideas. When your body senses . . .” She struggled to find the words. “When your body is having such a euphoric experience and then you hear, like, that gay people and feminists and women who have sex before marriage are going to Hell. That kind of euphoria becomes associated with those things.”
2
* * *
The Lie
When I met Piper at my first evangelical Christian church retreat, I was thirteen years old. It had been months since I’d been born again at the church altar call and, so far, my life hadn’t changed at all. When my dad suggested that I attend a weekend spring retreat with the youth group that met in the church at the end of our block, I told him it would probably suck. He told me not to say that word. And I asked him what word. Suck?
When my dad’s friend pulled into the church parking lot in a minivan, Dad walked over and shook his hand through the window. I sat in our car protesting being there and watched the man’s daughter emerge from the car yawning. From the second I saw her, I knew Piper was cool. She dropped her backpack onto the pavement and dragged it over to the youth pastor who was loading the bus, cutting through crowds of junior high schoolers hugging and laughing without making eye contact with any of the kids who yelled out to say “Hi!” When my dad finally pulled me out of the car and introduced us, Piper didn’t even smile. She just looked up and said, “I’m not awake yet.”
I laughed. “Me neither!” I said a little too loudly.
T
hough obviously, I was.
When I walked down the center aisle of the bus later, Piper called out to me.
I sauntered over trying to look like I didn’t care.
“Sorry I was so out of it before,” she apologized. “I hadn’t had my coffee yet.” Piper lifted a plastic-capped mug into the air. Then she patted the back of the seat in front of her.
“Sit here,” she said.
“Okay,” I shrugged. I shoved my backpack under the seat in front of me and sat down. Piper introduced me to her friends, Ann and Jessica, before pulling a bag of lime-flavored Tostitos out of her backpack.
“Want some?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, a little taken aback. It couldn’t have been much after seven AM.
The youth pastor stood at the front of the bus. “Ausssh ausssh,” he said, his version of a hushing sound.
“Ausssh ausssh” a couple of the kids repeated back to him good-naturedly.
I smiled.
“We’re going to head out in a minute, so make sure you have everything with you,” the youth pastor said as we quieted down. I turned and looked out the window. My dad waved. I smiled at him, but I didn’t wave back. I didn’t want my new friends to see me do something like that.
I turned back to Piper. “Let’s open those chips.” Piper ripped the bag’s edges as the bus lurched forward and lime-flavored Tostitos flew down the aisle. She immediately fell into uncontrollable laughter. Ann asked me if I’d seen that.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling.
“You saw that?” Ann said again, laughing harder.
“Yeah!” I exclaimed this time, and doubled over. Piper hit me with her hat.
“You try to open these things!” she shouted over the rumble of the bus, now pulling out of the parking lot.
“Next time, I will!” I shouted back. I reached into the bag, grabbed my first-ever lime-flavored Tostito, and loved it. As we pulled out of the parking lot, it was just us. Just us in all the world. No parents. No teachers. I turned and looked out the window at my dad, still waving, as he grew smaller in the distance before asking Piper for another chip. She handed me the bag.
This is my testimony, the moment I became an evangelical Christian—a member of the subculture that would come to shape my adolescent and teenage years. It wasn’t in the church crying and praying with a team of volunteers during the altar call months earlier. Perhaps it was then that I answered God’s call. But the day I answered the church’s call, I was sitting in the back of a bus with a group of awkward junior high girls eating my first lime-flavored Tostito.
That weekend was one of the best of my life. I was high on Jesus. At least that’s what the youth pastor said during his evening sermon, adding: “Hold on to that high, guys. Take it back home with you to your family; take it back to school on Monday; shine the light of Jesus wherever you go.” I nodded with the fervor of a convert.
At my public school, cruelty was currency, but here, it didn’t matter if you sat in the back of the retreat’s rugged sanctuary with your hair hanging over your face in hopes that no one would notice you or if you were the star of the local soccer team and magically maintained a tan through the winter—everyone was welcome, worthy of time, attention, and love. I had never been somewhere where all I had to do to be accepted was walk into the room. Where my mere existence was enough. It was everything that I had thought the world should be up until this point, and nothing of what I had found it actually was. But for the first time in my life, I felt like I could change all that. Here. With these people. Sitting around the campfire with my new friends our last night there, tears came running down my cheeks just as they had when I was born again months ago, and I claimed this faith to be my faith and these people to be my people.
* * *
The last day of the retreat Piper, Ann, Jessica, and I were leaving the cabin at the beginning of our few hours of coveted “free time” when our cabin leader, one of the other girls’ moms, made the abrupt announcement that everyone in our cabin was to find another place to be except thirteen-year-old Piper and me. Sensing anger in her voice, my mind skidded through everything that had happened since we’d arrived at the campground two days ago, searching for something we might have done wrong. I tried to catch Piper’s eye to see if she knew what was up but she was staring at the concrete floor.
As the screen door fluttered shut and the sound of our friends squealing grew distant as they ran toward the lake, the cabin mom turned to me. She smiled. I smiled nervously back. Then she walked over to an empty bunk. She sat on the edge of the plastic-lined mattress and patted the place next to her. I moved slowly toward her and sat.
“Linda,” she said softly. Piper walked across the room, still staring down, and sat down beside me. “Are you happy here?”
“Oh,” I said haltingly. “Yes.”
“Good. Because I want you to be comfortable in our youth group. I want you to be happy here,” she said softly. “Do you understand?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I, uh, thanks,” I stammered.
“And I want to make sure that the other girls are making you feel comfortable.”
“Oh, they are,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
She turned away from me and I exhaled deeply.
Then the cabin mom leaned forward. She rested her elbows on her knees and stared quietly at the cabin door for what seemed like minutes. I started to get uncomfortable again. Suddenly she turned. She looked past me to Piper. Then she said, “Why do you need so much attention?” My eyes bulged. Piper was silent. “You raise your hand every time the pastor asks the group a question,” the cabin mom continued. “Why?”
I glanced quickly over at Piper. Her eyes were on her hands, which sat in her lap. She didn’t look up.
Piper finally broke the silence. “I actually don’t think I raise my hand all the—”
“You do,” the cabin mom interrupted. She paused to allow Piper to take this in before continuing. “Is it insecurity?”
I looked straight up, focused on the wooden planks of the top bunk, tried counting things—knots, lines in the wood. The cabin mom leaned toward me to get closer to Piper. I pulled my chin in and leaned back to make room.
“Is that what makes you feel like you have to be the center of attention? Insecurity?”
“I don’t know,” Piper mumbled at her lap.
“Do you think that the boys like it when you show off like that?”
Piper shrugged.
“Well they don’t,” the mom answered her own question. “And I can tell you right now, they won’t in the future either.”
I don’t remember how the conversation ended. What I do remember is that when the cabin mom finally dismissed us, it was with a hug and a smile for me, and a stern suggestion that Piper reflect on the root of her insecurity. But Piper, reflecting back on it twenty-five years later, remembers more. She remembers the cabin mom telling her she was obnoxious, loud, and couldn’t stand not being the center of attention. She remembers it was all she could do to will herself not to cry so as not to validate the mom’s power over her. She remembers wanting to fight back, but not being able to. She remembers feeling frozen, as though she got the wind knocked out of her, unable to think, talk, or move.
Afterward, Piper and I both remember walking to the lake in silence. We remember finding Jessica and Ann in a cabin that looked out over the water. We remember telling them the story of what had happened, and their listening in stunned silence. And then, we both remember Piper beginning to cry. First softly and then in heaving sobs as Jessica, Ann, and I gathered around her, holding her tightly around the shoulders and telling her that she was awesome—smart, funny, cool, nice, loving. And the thing is, Piper really was all of those things. She was the epitome of the radical acceptance that made me want to be a part of this group. And so, I chalked up what had happened in the cabin as an anomaly. That cabin mom just didn’t get it, I decided
. She didn’t understand what we were all trying to do here.
But in the years to come, I would encounter some version of this scenario again and again. My friends and I were told in one breath we were loved unconditionally, accepted just as we were, and headed for Heaven, and in the next we were warned of the evils of feminists, homosexuals, women who had sex outside of marriage, and other Hell-bound individuals. It didn’t even occur to me then that some people in youth group might already see themselves as fitting into some of these categories that I wouldn’t see myself in for years, and how that must have felt to them then, but what did occur to me was this: That unconditional love that I had fallen for in my early days in the church? It was conditional.
* * *
If the first stumbling block those raised as girls in the purity movement must overcome is the message that if purity culture doesn’t work for you it’s because there is something wrong with you, the second stumbling block is its strict gender role expectations. At a time when many in our society are rejecting the importance of gender distinctions altogether, the religious purity movement is doubling down on them, teaching what is called complementarianism—the idea that there are two distinct genders that have equal worth in God’s eyes, but very different roles, responsibilities, and expectations here on earth: The man is to be undeniably masculine, even as he practices patience and understanding as a leader, whereas the woman is to be irrefutably feminine and to lovingly consent to and support the leadership of the man. They complement one another—hence the name complementarianism—creating the perfect whole. But if either gender strays from his or her designated role, the balance upon which it is said the stability of the family, church, and society rests is in jeopardy.
Growing up, I had learned to loathe the power-hungry women that we were told ruined families, tore apart churches, hated men and children, and wore big, boxy shoulder pads—the kind that went by the f-word: feminist.
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