Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  I lean over to my mom. “She can’t put her hands down now,” I whisper. “She just has to leave them there.”

  “She’s starting to wobble a little bit,” my mom whispers back.

  The song ends and the woman lowers her hands. Leddy returns to the front. “There are no accidents,”149 she says. “Every child chooses to be born.”

  She steps down from the stage.

  She tells the story of her own first child, who was born when she was a teenager. After the delivery, a social worker visited Leddy in her hospital room. She lied to Leddy about the paperwork she was asking her to sign. Leddy’s son was taken from her. He found her again after twenty-five years—he’d been adopted by Mennonites and knew nothing about her. Leddy asked him whether he hated her. “You gave me life,” he told her. “Of course I love you.”

  By now, Leddy is crying.

  A message appears on the screens: “I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness.”

  “You claim your legacy,” Leddy says. “As much as you would like to spare your children any sorrow, they have to claim it for themselves. I do believe in the reincarnation of family problems—but your mission in life is to learn to love them.”

  The audience stirs. “Leddy is keeping it real today,” says my mom.

  Leddy tells the story of her half brother, who collected money from the neighbors when his younger brother was in a motorcycle accident, then spent the money on drugs.

  “Hurt people hurt people,” she concludes, “and free people free people. Freedom is a choice.”

  The ukulele man returns to the front for another song as the life-bringers circulate wicker baskets. We say the Prayer for Abundance and close the service in the Unity-Clearwater tradition with “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” all of us lifting our hands into the air for the final line: “Let it begin with me.” A karaoke version of “House Built on Love” plays over the speakers as we exit the sanctuary.

  Leddy finds my mom and me in the common area. We sit with her on an upholstered bench beneath a gold-framed mirror, sharing news of our families and life changes over the past seventeen years. I ask her when they remodeled the church—I’m excited to see it again, I admit, but it seems a lot has changed. She tells us about the fire that had gutted the original Unity-Clearwater in May 2003, four years after my parents and I left the church. A cable had sparked in the seminary library. The bookshelves ignited and the fire ate through the church’s central corridor, into the prayer chapel, the fellowship hall, the sanctuary, and the youth ministry, through the offices and the meditation garden, narrowly missing a nest of duck eggs that Leddy saved and later hatched in her garage. What wasn’t damaged by fire was damaged by smoke. What wasn’t damaged by fire or smoke was laden with water. Everything except the shell of the building was destroyed.

  They held Sunday services under a tent in the parking lot while the church was being rebuilt. There were two each Sunday: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Both times, the tent was filled. But the church lost two-thirds of its congregation. “We survived in spite of the fire,”150 Leddy says. “And now I want to say, in cooperation with it.”

  It enabled the church to make the leap into new media. They built the loft in the sanctuary and started live-streaming Sunday services on the website. Now online donations fund the majority of the ministry.

  “In New Thought, there are no accidents,” she says. “We pride ourselves on seeing the relationship between cause and effect. That’s the qualifying essential of intelligence.”

  I ask what faith’s role is in that case.

  “I’ll give you the Unity catechism,” she says. “‘Faith is the perceiving power of the mind linked with the power to shape substance.’ Those are the words of Charles Fillmore.”

  Leddy once explained to me the mechanics of the universe. She used the book of Genesis as an example: “‘In the beginning . . . God said let there be light, and there was light,’”151 she told me. “In Hebrew, the better translation would be ‘In beginning anything’: ‘In beginning anything, God said, Come, light.’” He called to the light itself—called to the light’s potential. Not planets, not stars, but their very essence. We first call for the potential of the world, its idea, and then we create it. I still believe this.

  My mom’s favorite New Thought writer is H. Emilie Cady. Cady was a homeopathic physician in New York when Myrtle Fillmore discovered her pamphlet152 “Finding the Christ in Ourselves” and asked her to write a series of articles for Unity. Myrtle and Charles later collected Cady’s writings as Lessons in Truth.153 It was the first book they published on behalf of the Unity movement, and it quickly became the movement’s most important text, second only to the Bible. Organized into twelve chapters—now a hallmark of New Thought books—it lays out the foundations of New Thought philosophy and its methods for healing. At the time of its publication, it was considered radical—unprecedented within the movement. It has since sold millions of copies and been translated into twelve languages. Maya Angelou once called it a revelation on The Oprah Winfrey Show,154 crying as she told Oprah, “God loves me . . . It still humbles me.”

  Cady’s writing is clear and concise, relatable and inspiring, even moving. Reading it now, I find myself underlining and taking marginal notes on almost every page.

  God is principle, she says, as music is principle. To find God, we must simply look within ourselves. We cannot find our Father-Mother in a book—even hers—for books can only give the reader another’s opinion about Truth: “Seek light from the Spirit of Truth within you. Go alone. Think alone,”155 Cady says.

  God is Good and therefore all is Good—that is God’s principle, and therefore nothing can be evil. “The sun does not radiate light and warmth today and darkness and chill tomorrow;156 it cannot, from the nature of its being,” she says. “We do not have to beseech God any more than we have to beseech the sun to shine.”157

  I asked my mom recently whom she believed she was praying to when she still prayed. She said it wasn’t so much that she was praying to a being, but to a life force running through everything. It was really more about how the universe functions, she said. She repeated the same truths that grounded her work as a victim advocate all those years ago: she still doesn’t believe in pure evil; she believes that people can behave in an evil fashion, but that they came by that behavior through their own life experiences.

  Cady says evil is but an error perception of our mortal mind—as separate from our Spiritual mind and as separate from our body, which is itself an expression of God, the least part of Him. To remove the appearance of evil from your life, you must cleanse the mortal mind of error thinking by denying its existence. “If you repeatedly deny a false or unhappy condition, it loses its power to make you unhappy,”158 she says. This is where Cady’s thinking falls apart for me.

  She says, “It is perfectly natural for the human mind to seek to escape from its troubles by running away from present environments or by planning some change on the material plane.159 Such methods of escape are absolutely vain and foolish.” But what if your partner is beating you? Is escape then still vain and foolish? Of course not.

  She says that “victory must be won in the silence of your own being first,” and I think of my mother’s experience of finding the indwelling Christ while Bob was hitting her. She says, “You need take no part in the outer demonstration of relief from conditions.”160 I picture of my mom putting back the knife, hiding in the school yard, curled up in a ball as the blows fall.

  Cady says that “inharmony cannot remain in any home where even one member daily practices [an] hour of the presence of God,161 so surely does the renewed infilling of the heart by peace and harmony result in the continued outgoing of peace and harmony into the entire surroundings,” and I think of a woman named Linda Osmundson.

  My mother worked quite a bit with Linda Osmundson when she was still director of the Spouse Abuse Shelter, and doing advocacy work with the Domestic Viole
nce Task Force and the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Linda was director of a shelter in St. Petersburg called Community Action Stops Abuse, or CASA, until she died in 2016. She was a fierce woman—one of the bravest I’ve ever seen. She went up against powerful opposition to protect victims of domestic violence. She was also a survivor herself and a lifelong Christian Scientist. I asked if I could interview her about her faith and work, and she invited me to her home.

  It was difficult to understand Linda during our interview, and her sister often had to translate for her. A large bandage covered the left side of her face, on which grew a tumor that, I would estimate, weighed five pounds. It significantly impeded her speech. The year before, her dentist had discovered a growth inside her mouth. She sought treatment from a Christian Science practitioner, as she did not believe in conventional medicine. She did not publicly recognize the tumor—neither of us acknowledged it during the interview.

  Linda was a domestic violence advocate for almost three decades. She had already been working at CASA for several years before she felt able to divorce her first husband. Most of the people she worked with didn’t know she was married—her husband was in prison for eight years before she divorced him. And after that, it took her many years to tell people about her experience of abuse. She didn’t want to damage CASA’s credibility.

  “Unfortunately, my faith kept me in the relationship too long,”162 she told me. “I believed I could heal the marriage.”

  I asked her what, in her opinion as a Christian Scientist, the role of language was in domestic violence recovery.

  “I don’t use the word ‘recovery,’” she said. “It’s an addiction word that we have to really disassociate ourselves from. I don’t see battered women as sick or crazy. I see them as, something happened to them. It’s not something you did, it’s not something you caused.”

  True: my mom’s wrong thinking didn’t cause Bob to hit her, and Linda’s wrong thinking didn’t cause her husband to hit her, and Linda’s wrong thinking didn’t give her cancer. But it occurred to me that recovery encompassed more than Linda believed. We don’t only recover from mental sickness, but also from physical illness and injury. Even if we don’t cause our own pain, we still have to recover from it.

  I asked Linda whether she believed a world without violence is possible. “I don’t know if it’s possible,”163 she said. “I go forward with the idea that it’s possible.”

  “That’s Christian Science,” said her sister.

  “If you don’t have hope, you can’t live,” she said. “Without hope, there really isn’t any reason to be. That’s where the faith comes in. Even if I don’t understand it right now, I’ve seen enough proof of it that I know it will be possible.”

  My mom and I went to Linda’s memorial service together in January 2016. It was held in the historic Palladium Theater in downtown St. Petersburg. Hundreds of people attended. People from the community and the shelter gave eulogies, as did her sisters and her second husband, Maurice, a Quaker and fellow bicycle enthusiast Linda met in her riding group just a few years before.

  Near the end of the service, an advocate from CASA read a quote that has been hanging in my mother’s office for as long as I can remember. The version on her wall was printed on a background of Matisse’s Blue Nude, a paper cutout of a woman curled up in a ball with her right arm covering her head. The quote is attributed to an anonymous domestic violence survivor. It says, “So I fight with one hand and love with the other. In some of my dreams though, I love with both hands, and the fighting is over.”

  My mom’s papers from the Emma Curtis Hopkins College and Theological Seminary end in 1999. That year, my dad resigned from the Unity-Progressive Council board over interpersonal conflicts, and we joined Charles and Brent in their storefront satellite church on Madeira Beach as a way of supporting their spread of Truth. Twenty other Unity-Clearwater congregants came with us. Now, instead of theater seats, we sat on folding chairs. Our hymnals were laminated photocopies of Unity songs. It was hard to grow the congregation. After a few months, Charles was forced to shut the doors, unable to pay the rent. We never went back to Unity-Clearwater: the culture had changed—my parents felt there was too much negative thinking in the church, and too many power struggles. As my mom puts it, “We were church homeless.”

  In the years since leaving Unity-Clearwater, my dad has been forced to confront the logical inconsistencies of his faith: why horrible things happen to good, faithful people; why evil, conniving people advance in life; why suffering so often accompanies death; why his own father suffered for years as he died when he was a good man who did good things for other people his whole life. If people thought rightly, and believed rightly, and held positive opinions, and were good to one another, my dad said, then, according to Unity’s tenets, the outcome should be good results.

  “I saw no evidence of that,” he told me. “If the principle is a principle, the principle should perform. I began to say to myself, ‘You know, Eric, if you are a thinking person, you have to accept that there is no guiding spirit, no guiding force, no guiding principle in the universe insofar as it would lead to God, or to a god.’ The belief is nothing more than a subtler form of belief in magic.” Today, my dad is an atheist.

  When I asked my mom how she defines her beliefs, she said, “I don’t know if what I believe in could be called any kind of deity. I believe there’s a spiritual element to all of us, whatever that life force is.”

  We were talking on the phone, something we do more often now. We’ve grown closer as I’ve grown older. She’s become more than a myth. There was a pause as she chose her words carefully.

  “When someone is dead, you can tell it’s gone,” she said. “I think somehow we’re all connected, by being spirit. Our cores. We’re all struggling to find some meaning.”

  Going Diamond

  Sections of this essay are fictionalized composite accounts based on tours in the Bayou Club and Feather Sound communities between July and August 2015.

  I was seven when my parents joined Amway. Our house filled up with Amway products: boxes of Nutrilite vitamins, Toaster Pastries, Glister toothpaste, Artistry makeup. We washed our hair with Satinique shampoo; we washed our floors with L.O.C. cleaner; we washed our dishes with Amway-brand dish soap; we strained our drinking water through Amway’s filter. Our friends were Amway. Our vocabulary was Amway. We were “Directs” going “Diamond.” We showed “The Plan” to anyone who listened.

  We drove to Miami for “functions” at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Thousands of people attended, all packed into the big ballroom with lights turned up and people dancing in the aisles, getting “fired up” to Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich,” which blasted over the speakers. We clapped our hands and sang along.

  A man took the stage with a microphone—a Diamond!—followed by a woman in a ball gown—another Diamond! Another Diamond and another and another, all shining under spotlights, smiling—their success itself a luminous aura engulfing them. “DO YOU WANT YOUR DREAM TO BECOME A REALITY?” the man yelled, strutting and flashing his teeth. “WHO’S GOT A DREAM?”

  We had a dream!

  “I SAID, WHO’S GOT A DREAM?”

  We did!

  We drove our teal ’88 Oldsmobile Delta to the Bayou Club Estates for our requisite “dreambuilding” and toured the brand-new houses: big mansions with tall, echoing ceilings and screened-in pools, shiny state-of-the-art kitchens, garages big enough for three Mercedes, a golf course in the back, vanity mirrors and crystal fixtures in every bathroom. We drove to the yacht dealer and toured the Princesses and the Prestiges, lying on cabin beds and ascending the wooden stairs to stand on pulpits, gazing toward imagined horizons.

  Amway is a multilevel marketing corporation. Some call it a pyramid scheme.1 In 2015, its parent company, Alticor, claimed transglobal sales of $9.5 billion.*2 It is the biggest direct-selling company in the world.4 Distributors make money by signing up other distributors and—somewhere in
the background—“selling” Amway products.5 It’s not exactly clear how Amway products should reach the public. That isn’t part of Amway’s marketing plan; The Plan mostly teaches distributors how to sign up other distributors, to whom they then distribute Amway products, who then distribute Amway products to other distributors they sign up,6 and onward. Amway has been the target, along with its affiliate companies, of multimillion-dollar lawsuits and other legal actions on almost every continent.7

  Four years after joining Amway, my parents came to their senses. There was L.O.C. cleaner in our closet for years while we pretended Amway never happened.

  But every time I drive past the Bayou Club, I can’t help wondering what it would have been like to go Diamond. Once considered the highest Pin Level—above Silver, Gold, Platinum, Ruby, Pearl, Sapphire, and Emerald—Diamond status was what I had craved. It was what I’d believed was success. After all, less than 1 percent of Amway distributors go Diamond.8

  Silverthorn Road, Seminole, FL 33777

  4 bed, 4 bath, 5,144 sq. ft.

  $725,000

  We’ve gone Diamond. “We’re buying a house in the Bayou Club. We’re starting a family,” we tell the Realtor.

  The first we see is in the Estates section. Croton in the front yard, Alexander palms and twisting cypress—all yards are maintained by the Bayou Club’s landscapers,9 she says. Each yard must coordinate with every other yard, to meet color-palette standards that coordinate with every house. You pay $137 a month for this privilege, another $205 for security and maintenance of common areas.

  This house has two stories, an office and a loft, bamboo floors, a three-car garage, a pool.

  “You can see we’re getting the screens fixed,” the Realtor says, pointing to the men working beyond the glass. She has piercing blue eyes. Processed blonde hair. She has French-tipped nails, diamond rings on all fingers, and a gold-and-diamond necklace. She wears a white semisheer shirt and black-and-white-printed leisure pants, black eyeliner and heavy mascara. “We’re just putting some finishing touches on the place.”