The Sneer: It's Not Getting Better

Two things have me thinking.  One is a pair of recent email-back-and-forths, one with someone still "in" my old group and one with a "happy Christian" preacher guy.  The other is me digitizing old music recordings I made when I was in my early 20s, and still "in" that same group.

   One of the things I'm thinking about is how the parody Sunday School paper I wrote wasn't the actual reason I was kicked out and shunned for life, really.  The guys who kicked me out were threatened by something else it was just a symptom of.  Something about me.  And what was it?  This has got me coming to some conclusions about myself, and who I was back then, and what the real problems were/are.
   The Sunday School paper parody was indeed a pretext for those guys.  It was something concrete that could be used to kind of "prove" where my heart and mind were at, the state of soul which repulsed them and made them want to banish and punish it.  That's all it was.

    I think they wanted to "explain" what I was any way they could.  They felt I was "wrong" somehow, and needed to go.  I'm certain they didn't feel they understood what was up with me at all, and just needed me gone.  They said as much.  They tried to prove that I was a drunk, or that I partied, or that I didn't believe important stuff in the bible, or that I experimented with Satanism or the occult.  They fished after that and fished and fished.  And when they came up empty, out came the pamphlet.  Because they saw something in me, and they were getting rid of it the only way they know how.   They even had a second thing I'd written (about how Jesus dealt with Pharisees) and said that, as it was "almost entirely [me] quoting scripture, [they] couldn't really find fault with it," so long as I assured them I wasn't talking about them.

    They were determined to "fix" the problem they saw as me.  By amputation.  But what did they see?  What caused all this?

Not Taking Things Seriously

They were kicking people out left and right, so it wasn't just me they had a problem with.  They were looking to get, and eventually succeeded in getting, some of my friends kicked out of other assemblies.  Phone calls were flying. The gossip mills were spinning.  But they were gunning for me.  What was it they saw, exactly?

   Several interactions by email this weekend really got me thinking about this too.  I use interactions like these as a mirror.  What's in my teeth today?  This "in" person I've been talking to is a good person.  Doing his best to understand and communicate, from what still looks to me fairly like an old-school Brethren vantage-point, all his protestations of growth and freedom and change aside.  He said he always thinks it's funny when people like me assume that nothing has changed in our culture.  I said "Ok, I am showing up on Sunday morning then, because I want to see if I get treated any differently, now that things have all changed."  Oops. Touché.  I was jokingly told them's were fightin' words.  But the discussion continued in a friendly way.  The one with the preacher guy, too.  We coudn't agree, any of us, but we couldn't help but want to get along anyway.  It was all educational, too. 
  Needless to say, I view interactions like these as very valuable.  They're rare.  Pretty much no one "in" my culture will talk to me at all, nowadays.  So I pay attention when someone will.  See if things have changed.  See what perspective I can get.  Look at it like the mirror it can be on me and my inability to do anything but get shut out when I try to connect.  And anyone who will talk to me?  I realize suddenly that I love that person.  For breaking rank.  For not being scared.  For being human and real at me.

  So I paid close attention to exactly how these people view me.  Who they think I am, in Christian circles.  What they think the truth is.
  The Brethren one said it was 'mental,' conversing with me.  I'm sure it is.  That I am someone who rocks the boat.  Yup.  Pushes "the wrong people." Guilty.  I was contrasted with "decent, God-honouring Christians who are understandably horrified at [my] language and Internet mockings and verbal tirades."  This guy also told me that it took years of reading my mountains of mockery and spite before he saw evidence of love for Jesus. But that now he could see it.
   I was told all of this kindly, and with concern.  It was honesty.  The proviso was added that these observations were mere observations, and not meant as put-downs.  And I know that's the spirit in which they were given.  Observations.  And it all let me see what he was seeing.
   I'm not saying talking to "in" people is good for me and makes me feel better.  But it is invariably educational.  Might make me a better person, one way or other.  It sure made me think. And feel.
    And later that day, listening to my often silly, satirical recordings from my early 20s, I felt a bit of the response a middle-aged person has to any disrespectful, clueless, brash young mocker.  I saw the mocking as gauche and immature.  Why was I so driven to mock church stuff?

   But what was really going on with me back then?  What fuelled all of this?  What was happening?  Not everyone does all this mocking, in their early 20s.  Some don't dare.  Most don't feel the need. So why?

   I think it was this: we were required to take a whole lot of traditions, people and things terribly seriously in my church.  And I really used to.   Took them deathly seriously.  Gave up almost anything that normally gives a childhood any joy, all in service of them.  The Lord's Things.
   And you have to help that stuff be serious.  You really do.  You have to know exactly what the sacred cows are, deny that there are any sacred cows at all, but punish people who don't worship them.  You have to pay no attention to the brothers behind the curtain of the Great and Powerful Oz.  The Lord's Things.  You have to not look into what other Christians are doing in your community, lest you lose sight of how superior what we're doing is.  You might be tempted, after all, to make the mistake of taking them seriously, too.  You have to deny that anything your church does is ineffectual, hypocritical, nonsensical, empty or outmodedly traditional for no good reason.  You have to believe that certain things people have written are so bad that you shouldn't even look at them.  Not even to see if you will really be as appalled as you have been instructed to be.  That's how it was for me, anyway.  Perhaps now everything and everything's changed.
  Growing up, I never read a single pamphlet or listened to a single taped talk by anyone our church men decided was doctrinally "wrong" and then kicked out.  I did not read a single letter from the "wrong side" of the division.  Had to keep my mind one-sided.  Especially about people I was tacitly supporting the expulsion of.
  When people get kicked out, you have to edit them out of your life.  Past, present and future. That's the point of kicking them out.  To entirely remove them as an influence. That won't work if you remember them, or let them be in your life ever again. It won't work if you care.
   You have to help so much. Otherwise it's all meaningless.  All a joke.  You have to make it serious. That's where I ran into trouble.

Retro 90s

In the 80s as a teen, I'd drank the Brethren Koolaid weekly, with its mysterious bitter aftertaste.  But now, by the 90s, I'd grown up a wee bit.  And the division that had just happened had utterly robbed me of any ability to unthinkingly believe, to take seriously much of what went on in my church group, and many of the people in it.  What they had done in front of me in those years had dealt a permanent, fatal blow to my ability to respect their honesty, their openness, their courage, their decency, their love, their honour, their integrity and their willingness to do anything the bible said.  I couldn't believe how important they thought their group was, though it didn't ever really do anything much I could see besides kick out people it deemed unworthy.  Most of all, I couldn't take their claims seriously anymore.  Their pretty speeches rang ridiculous and empty in my ears now.
  And when asked to listen to endless talks about how blessed we were to be in our special position of gathered calledness, at how special Christians are (us being especially special), and how we love one another and look after one another in ways This Wicked World would never understand (at least in our church we looked after one another, anyway), eventually I was nothing but one big sneer inside.
  My face doesn't really do many facial expressions, nor does my voice do emotions much, so I write things.  Sometimes I do songs.  That's how I sneer.  As I said, I just re-listened to some of those, this weekend.  And what a brash young ignoramus I was.  Afflicted by that ubiquitous failing of older adolescents:

-an almost adult perspective on everything everyone's doing wrong,
-all the time in the world to ponder it,
-and not a hot clue about how hard it would actually be to do anything any differently.

I was going out to bible conferences and special meetings and the regular weeknight meetings.  I was hearing the puritan warnings about This evil, tempting, magically delicious World, intoned by people who knew not a thing about it except that their kids were into it up to their eyeballs, and that they really wished the little rascals would quit all that.  People who'd never set foot inside a movie theatre, and who had no televisions, telling us what indulging in those toxic activities would inevitably make us.  They would tell us what God felt about going Places He Would Not Have Us Be.  About His removed protection upon us in those Places.  (God can't cross the threshold of a movie theatre, you know.) I listened sneeringly to this, knowing that they themselves were a bunch of back room ecclesiastical backstabbers.  I knew exactly what they'd said and written and done.   I knew about all the lies.  I knew what they did to cover them.  I knew about their childish fits of rage.  I'd been there when what they were now pretending had never happened, had happened.
  But I had to listen.  At the conferences.  When they came through to speak in our area and be tape recorded.  When they came to visit and were asked to preach the gospel.  When quashed rumours of child molestation, financial irregularities, wife abuse, incest, child abuse, infidelity and secret homosexuality trailed after various of these men like sour, squeaky old farts, the whole time.

   It all began to look like bad theatre to me.  Fake.  I couldn't take them or their talks seriously.  Old men who'd just screwed over their own brothers were standing up and reading self-affirming King James verses about brotherly love in quavery, melodramatic voices it was impossible not to snicker at.  They'd kicked out more than half of their people, leaving the rest of us with an assembly almost entirely stripped of people in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties, yet they left a giant verse up on the wall. It's still shamelessly up there this week.  You can go to the irony-free zone on Falaise Road and see it.  It reads "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! Psalm 133:1"

   And I had a sneering internal smirk about all this stuff.  It was that or cry.  My very dreams painted the whole situation in garish, horror-movie/funhouse snark nightly.  It was clear that much of what I'd believed in (the part that involved other human beings, anyway) was utter nonsense.  We Christians didn't love each other.  Not even if you only took into account the small percentage of the Church who were affiliated with our little church group.  Not enough to change our actual behaviour, anyway.  All "decisions" involved us not acting, rather than acting.  We didn't dwell together in unity.  Our assembly wasn't an inn, where the Good Samaritan could bring wounded souls left in the ditch.  It was a place that had left more than half of its own people, many of them blood relatives, bleeding in the ditch and it then required everyone to walk by on the other side and not look at or mention what had happened.  It wasn't supportive and nurturing.   It was a competitive piety battle royale.  
   And many of us knew all this right well.  You just weren't supposed to say it out loud.  So it showed up in my songs and little cartoons.  I did those in fear, knowing if they fell into the hands of The Lord's Things, that I'd be kicked out for good.  Of course this eventually happened.  And suddenly I was free to tell the truth without fear of reprisal, for the first time in my Christian life.  They had nothing left to take from me that they hadn't already taken away.  But back then we sat in our seats and kept our mouths closed, lest we lose said seats.

  

We Knew We Were Next

But the signs were clear.  Having kicked out 60% of us, they were now gunning for people like me and my friends. We all knew.  People stood back from us and waited for The Axe to fall.  When I moved out from my folks' house and got my own place, and started attending the city church, instead of the small town church, they had me "signed over" into their 'care' and shunned me for a few years, and then kicked me out.  Like an oversight.  Like an error that needed to be deleted.  It took them about four years.

   During all this, I went out to bible conferences, and "assembly meetings," though my attendance at the latter was dropping off, especially when I began working a lot of evening shifts and weekends.
  I felt discouraged and torn up by what had gone on.  I desperately needed to talk to someone about it, and there was no one at all.  They told me I had grown cold toward the Lord and His Things.  That my uncaring unwillingness to show up Where The Lord Is every week proved this.  The fact is, I couldn't stand to look at most of them.  I sneered inside and inwardly called the guys who said stuff like that to me "The Lord's Things."
  I couldn't go see one concert or movie or hockey game without fearing that The Lord's Things were going to get me and disappear me, and then no one would ever see me again. 

  Because I wasn't only going out to all of these church meetings.  I was also going out to live music.  I was going and seeing movies.  Shrek.  Star Trek.  All this was enriching my life with emotion, emptying my heart of seemingly inescapable, obviously not worth it, dark, tarry church crap.  It was uplifting for my soul in a way that listening to hypocrites reading endless verses about loving one another had simply never, ever been.  People in bars and music clubs were nice to me and helped me with my music, which music I never dared let any church person know I was creating.
   I was "making friends of The World."  "The World" had Jehovah's Witnesses and Jews, Baptists and Catholics, Methodists (free and otherwise) and Mormons in it, it turned out.  And The World was beating my church.  At almost every supposedly Christian virtue one could name.

   I'd been raised with the idea that we Brethren Christians had a higher order of virtues than worldly folk would ever understand.  Love, joy, peace, compassion, honour, forgiveness, acceptance, duty, sacrifice, purity and all the others.  We had supernaturally, divinely high-quality virtues.  Things the Children of Darkness knew nothing about, we were told. It was all foolishness to them, with their blind flight into depravity and eventual damnation.  My friends' dad called them "rank unbelievers."  He would mutter "Oh, he was positively the rankest of unbelievers before he found Jesus..."  
   'Rank' as in 'stinky.'

   I'd been raised to believe that The World hated Jesus and would hate us too, if we were brave and owned up to the fact that were were his people (peeps).  Something Peter famously failed to do for his Lord, we loved to repeatedly go over, time and time again.  The World hated us.  There would be persecution.
  But I'd gone into small clubs and sang my songs about all of my personal, often church-related, Christian wrestlings.  And worldly people had related somehow, complimented me, played drums for me, sang with me, and asked me about my stuff.  Even my church stuff.  Many had some kind of religious stuff of their own they were sorting through.  (If it was actually Brethren religious stuff they hadn't been dealing with, they normally walked very carefully away from me, though.)  I sat in clubs and talked with any number of people about God as an open question. It wasn't preaching.  We were just talking.  It was warm and real.
  At church, no one would talk to me about Him at all.  They didn't like the taste of my thoughts.  Or even that I walked around with brain turned on all the time.  A few times at church I saw a couple of guys, head bent over an open bible, afterward.  If I took a step in their direction, the bible snapped shut and the two separated.
   The Lord's Things were snooping around, trying to catch us going into a music club, or playing music onstage somewhere.  Ears to the ground.  Gossip milling.  They were angling for a reason to kick me out.  Not for the fun, only, though that wasn't allowed, of course.  Lots of kids were doing that stuff and worse, and they weren't all getting the same attention I was, though few are "in fellowship" today.  I guess their lying showed they were properly, dutifully aware of the wrongitude of their actions? Mitigated the guilt of what they were doing?
  I didn't lie. But I realize now that it was the sneer that really spurred The Things of the Lord on.  The sneer at the idea that watching Shrek was going to eventually destroy my life and bring total shipwreck. The sneer that didn't take their supposed virtues or "loving concerns" at face value anymore.  There was not only hurt, but growing contempt in that sneer.  It said "I don't believe you. I don't believe anything about you."  Also, frequently, "I know what you did to your kids." Because people were confiding things.

  And these experiences with This World gave me a real conundrum: the flawed, natural, not Spirit-indwelt, not scripturally-taught impulses of regular Canadian people in bars and music clubs and cafes, as I said above, were effortlessly outdistancing the supposedly superior, God-grade church virtues.  When it came to being useful, helpful, insightful, supportive, wise and warm, my own church's virtues couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, especially when compared to these regular artsy folk.  
   And of course I wasn't a bit better than any other church specimen.  I had stuff to learn in dealing with Worldly people.  From Worldly people.  I still do.  We are all virtue-challenged.  We generally can only be good from a lofty position of "helping" or "serving."  Preferably outside our own postal code.  Limited engagement only.
   When we're not in that lofty position, when we're supposed to connect, person-to-person, showing we like them, we get them, respect them and don't think they're yucky, we generally suck.
   My church was very right to feel threatened by the kindness of artsy folk entering my young life.  The church people could not compete with that kindness on any level.  Weren't trying, either.  And I was about to learn more about my own personal church heritage of social and psychological shortcomings than I ever would have otherwise.  By hanging out with Worldlies and coming up short by comparison. In terms of human decency, generosity, openness  and kindness.

   So, the conundrum. I decided that either all this meant that:

a) there were no "higher" virtues available, really, and that people didn't actually need Christ or the bible to attain what were merely the normal, human forms of them, which was as good as it got,

  
 or else this meant that 

b) the people in my church didn't really have these virtues, Christian or Worldly, at all.  Despite all of their claims, and their ruthless punishing of people who questioned them for clearly not having them.  Despite claiming to be put in this world to share these virtues.

I didn't spend long over this conundrum.  I went with my upbringing.  I went with the latter conclusion.  b) Rather like Plato, I decided that there just must be a higher, divinely intended, Spirit-inspired order of virtues (love, joy, peace, longsufferingness and so on) alright.  That it was real.  Maybe even attainable.  Through Jesus.  No matter what I saw at my church.  And that I'd better get cracking on finding out about all that.  Or at least have a long hard look at how very traditional certain of the fruits of the flesh clearly were among my church peeps (idolatry, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions and envy). Because we were "losing" to regular artsy folk in bars, both at manifesting the virtues, and at not manifesting the vices. And to me, that needed explaining.  My head works like that, and only like that.  I don't anymore have in my head the "two rooms" you can use to separate pairs of facts that don't get along
  The children of the Creator were manifestly, tyrannically against creativity and spiritual expression, while those the Creator had created, who made no claims to special spiritual insight, were beautifully, thoughtlessly creative and expressive in ways I will never be.  They read poems or sang songs in cafes that had their art on the walls.  I was more like the thought police at my church than I was like these gentle folk, with their songs and poems and paintings, and their concern about the world not being nice enough for people to live in.  I was pharisee of the pharisees.
  Oh sure, I met scary, cold people in bars too, sometimes.  Not often.  But just like in my classroom, what quickly came to light was that I was scarier and colder still, when pushed to it. 
  I'd learned to wear that dead-eyed, soulless expression Sunday mornings since birth. To this day I can't go into a church or funeral home without my face seizing piously up.  Not a facial muscle continues to work in those settings, usually. One November 11th school assembly or attendance at a church, and when there's laughing (because there often is, nowadays, at events like that) and my fact shuts down when I walk in and the laughing irritates me.  Training.

  Back in the 90s, in the middle of all of this self-discovery and God-talk over coffee or beer in bars and cafés, as we took turns taking the stage, I could still never forget that these demonstrably cold, calculating, dishonest, manipulative church folk with ecclesiastical precedents set for bureaucratic ruthlessness were after me and my friends. A small cafe with live music was a safe haven, so long as it didn't have big glass windows at the front, so people driving by in cars could see me in there.

Wounded Idealism Bleeds Mockery

In these cozy, arty climes I was increasingly at home, excited, challenged and welcome.  At church, I was wounded and hunted, frazzled, worn out and frozen, about to be cornered.  Soon to be summoned for judgment.  And so mocking was happening.  It was a way of whistling in the dark.  Sneering, distrustful, disgusted, disappointed, disillusioned, hurting, fearful mocking.  I knew what was coming.  I could feel it.  It built steadily for four years.  I'd wake up Sunday mornings and try to fight the growing urge to not go expose myself to their gazes.  And the more Sundays I missed, the more naked I felt when I went.
  And one time I was sitting there, and I said to God "Well, I showed up once this month.  I only let three weeks go without going.  Are we good?"  And I didn't hear a voice, but the thought that was suddenly there in my head was "Don't even pretend to care about what I think.  You are here to appease them, and not Me. You serve them."
   And that was very, very true.
  I'd sit in a meeting or bible conference or something, and there'd be nothing but earnest men sincerely, favourably contrasting we fortunate, blessed, gathered folk, with mere regular human beings, and even with all the other poor ungathered Christians who didn't even know where to go on Sunday morning.  We needed to remember not to forget how blessed we were.  We loved each other.
    I knew I wasn't loved.  No one was ever going to ask me to preach the gospel.  No one was going to let their daughter date me.  People were drawing away in shock and dismay.  People were standing clear, waiting for The Axe to fall.  If they spoke to me, they'd put out extremely Brethren thoughts or feelings to see if I responded correctly to the Shibboleth/password.  Wasn't it lovely to be where the Lord was, and not at some other church? Hm?  Wasn't that lovely?
  They looked at me like I had an angry snake for a brain. I didn't feel scary.  It all became pretty hard to take seriously.  If I was such a threat, exactly how weak was a thing threatened by a silly, moody twenty-something with a bit of existential angst?
   So increasingly I didn't take what was going on seriously anymore.  I had a shockingly dark attitude.  And it all made me laugh bitterly in my heart of hearts.  Like Sarah.  Only I never got a son.  (Not that I was ever promised one.  And I wasn't laughing at God Himself, of course, but only the self-professed Lord's Things.)

   So this sneering spilled out, and not only in the songs and poems and paintings.  My responses when people enthused over how Brother "Screwed over all of his own brothers in the division" had spoken so movingly on forgiveness?  My responses when people wondered how excited I was about the upcoming Easter conference?  My responses when people spoke excitedly and disparagingly of other Christian groups?  My responses when people spoke with thinly disguised joy over rumours that someone they'd kicked out of our church had been overtaken in some kind of fault?  My responses weren't the required ones.  They marked me as different.  And different was not okay.

   Because I couldn't return the enthusing over dear old Brother Backstabber's homey homilies. I was not excited about the decimated "mostly seniors and grandkids" Easter Conference, with its smug talks, and its "Isn't it nice to be where the Lord would have us be, with others of like precious faith, and not out in System!?"  (so hard to find others of like precious faith.  The guys in those churches just have that common, crappy old K-Mart Blue Light Special faith... How sad.)
   My experience is that almost every Christian, met on neutral ground, away from the pack, may well be able to be a person.  A real, decent person.  But give that person some status and a church audience, and you'd best back away slowly.
   I liked many of those Christians who'd left.  Missed some of them.  Would have dated a number of them.  Wished many of them all the best and didn't want to hear bad stuff about them.  Didn't know who was left for me to marry, among this frightened, colourless, toxic, imprisoned mass. (no one)

   I didn't fit.  And worse than that, I was nakedly exuding disbelief, mistrust and contempt. Contempt which was a response to the violent, sudden death of that idealistic belief in my birth culture.  How could I have retained that belief?
  I believed in God, alright.  Worse yet, I believed the "how things could be" scenarios.  And this just made me all the more disgusted with how the old guys had screwed everything up for everyone, all to keep their gnarled, veiny hands clutching what little status and power is available in such a small group, until they died and left a new generation to quote them at their kids, and have them turn cassette tapes into CDs and mp3s.
  The World had to be kept out of our lives so that our church would appear to be better, and all-important.  Our church was threatened by The World.  By everything that wasn't Itself, in fact. Us Against The World.  Because It could destroy us.  Its art and entertainment, particularly.

Make a Hawk A Dove, Heal a Sneer With Love?

No one still left in my church approached me in the 90s with a kindness that could only be taken as loving concern.  Many people who had been kind to me once, had since been kicked out and were now dead to us and us to them.  Some from both sides wouldn't speak if they saw me uptown.
  Others stopped being kind to me once I stopped fitting in and believing in the church.  (The crutch.)  In fact, I was sometimes warned to stop being kind to various "straying" souls among us, and I eventually lost what remained of my tattered reputation by being willing to eat with these Def Leppard fans and sinners.
  Maybe if a few people had been kind to me instead of shunning me for doing what I felt was right while being outraged over what I felt was wrong, I might have had some actual qualms about mocking my culture?  Probably.  As it was, it was absolutely me against them.
  Forget about "living in a world that hates Jesus." I knew I was attending a church that hated people who tried to act like him in any number of ways.  Forget name-calling and kicking over tables.  We moved quietly and carefully in a place where one of the worst things you could be accused of was "rocking the boat."  
   You have to have mad power and status to rock the boat. If you have enough though, you can author your own division to clear the playing field of challengers to your position. And you can't get your hands on that kind of power, and keep them clean, too.
   Division is Brethren war.  We'd had one.  The harder you'd believed in the Fatherland, the more trauma it caused within you to have the whole place levelled with the bombing.  The cold war was going on in its aftermath, all spies and lies, and another division was coming within the next ten years. World War II.  Our fathers' war.  It happened four years after they kicked me out.  My parents got kicked out/left/stayed in that one.

   No one still left in my church in the 90s stood up and taught us things that made me think or feel anything other than "I've heard all this before.  You're just trying to prop up your own failing, obsolete human traditions.  You're just trying to claim to be better, to be God's Favourites in about twenty different ways."  A lot of intelligence had bled out of our group with the division.  That much was obvious.
   Maybe if someone had had anything concrete to offer a young man besides "Isn't it awesome to be us!" and "The Lord is coming in 1995!  The bible says once the ships of Shittim are truly in the Gulf, that the end is nigh! What exciting days to live in!" and "Here's a book about how Adam rode dinosaurs in the Grand Canyon! What a saviour!" I might have had some qualms about mocking my culture?  Probably.  But I was trying to put a young adult life together.  One that made sense and worked.  One with some safety, some reality, some joy and warmth somewhere.  I couldn't just enjoy retirement and play with my grandkids.  I was pretty sure I was never going to get to have any.  Not now.  Not once they'd torn our culture apart like this and relegated me to the far off country with the pigs, a reverse prodigal.

   No one left in my church in the 90s was terribly willing to admit being troubled by anything that was deeply, incessantly troubling me.  (Stuff I expressed in the songs.  Often a sneering one first, followed by a sincere one second, that sneering-amour out of the way.  Kind of like when you talk to me and find what's behind the sneering you may see on the Internet.  Heart of warm, mushy goo in here.)  No one was troubled.  Nope.  Mostly they avoided me entirely, and if they didn't, they dismissed both the concern, and the wisdom of spending any time in discussing what I saw as Stuff We'd Best Learn, in these 1990s, Given How We've Been Carrying On.  I thought having a division in the early 2000s looked like a really bad idea.  I was told things like "I think Satan laughs when we waste time discussing such unedifying things. Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are honest...think on these things..."
   Maybe if someone had sat with me and said "Yes.  It's terrible where we've gone, as a group.  The division was a mess.  We didn't act well, and it's brought us to where we are now, and it's not time to humble-brag about being God's Favourites. In fact, let's not have another division, okay?" I might have had some qualms about mocking my culture? Almost certainly.  I was desperate to find other people who'd been hurt by it and didn't want to claim it had been simple, clear, unavoidable and right. (Or that it was over.)
   As it was, I found Brethren friends who sneered with me, and mostly laughed themselves just as silly at my satire as they failed utterly to feel my sincere pain and confusion underpinning it all.  They, after all, had alcohol.  I didn't indulge in more than one drink of an evening.  Satire was my outlet, rather than scotch.  Too Brethren to "let myself go" enough to get drunk.  We are creatures of repression, pent up feelings we hide from ourselves, and control above all things.

What Really Happened

But all that "meeting a sneer with understanding and acceptance" or "pointing a young guy in a better direction without demanding he betray his own conscience" never happened for me.  Still hasn't.  I was shunned pretty hardcore for the entire seven years between the first division and my final ousting for mocking The Lord's Things.  The way in which The Lord's Things dealt with me was just another display of How They Roll in Nepean.  It was underhanded, manipulative, ruthless, cold, dishonest and above all, secret. And it was all done by two guys.  The authors of both divisions.  The ones people are currently "bowing" to the "assembly decisions" of.  Mostly they're just bowing to those guys.  Not out of love, either.  Out of fear of rocking the boat.  Out of concern that not bowing will be the thing that triggers the inevitable next division.  The guys are getting old.  Some people question the appropriateness of my calling their actions out into the light.  I think I will, though. After all, everyone's still bowing to their "assembly decisions."  They haven't let go of that power.  And they have trained replacements.  Like Fred Phelps. Successors.  Who've seen it all and will still repeat the same crap.  And will claim they have no choice, and that these are days of weakness and failure, so they can't help it and we are fools to hope for better.  Repentance-free folk.

   To this day, many people have been told that this pamphlet (written in the aftermath of the 1991 division, right when everyone seemed bent on self-congratulation for it) was so bad that people just shouldn't even look at it.  Too disgusting to put yourself through needlessly.  Trust us.  What reason would we possibly have to lie?
  As recently as this weekend, someone used the alleged vile offensiveness of this pamphlet to make a case for my own repugnance and difficulty to conversing with, all the while admitting to having never seen it.  Knowing it only by reputation.  As beyond the pale.
  It's not a secret.  It's been here for fourteen years now.  At first, when confronted with it those four years after I'd written it, I was already embarrassed at its sneering, juvenile tone and wouldn't have wanted anyone to see it.  But once they proved willing to kick me to the curb forever, and people were being told that I'd taken naked pictures, or written blasphemy and porn, I felt like I needed it on the newly-minted Internet so people couldn't just feel free to imagine and make up whatever stuff about me they pleased.  There was never any safety in secrecy, for me.  Sometimes there are daggers in "discretion" that can't be hidden when everyone's being more Frank.

  In the 90s I had problems and I was a problem for my church.  I wasn't lending harmony to the whole "we've had a division, now shut up and be united, dress up nice and sing the songs" thing.  My assembly certainly didn't let me help with anything.  I was a problem, not a solution.  An ass, not an asset, though I was far too Brethren to ever say the word "ass" back then. 
  They even started banning me from young people's activities as early as seven years before kicking me out entirely.   And they have always had only one strategy for dealing with problems of any kind, in my lifetime anyway: The Axe.  When people question the necessity for this strategy, they get The Axe too.  It's the only spiritual tool in their spiritual toolbox.  Apart from The Axe, there's nothing in there at all.  Some of us needed perhaps even more delicate handling than The Axe, though we're often told our spiritual needs are pretty special and unreasonable and we can't expect anything in these days of weakness and failure besides The Axe.  So keep your head down.  Lay it gently on the block and keep quiet and still.

   I really wish someone had been able to deal with juvenile, post-division me.  Had firmly shown me a better way to deal with the frustration, confusion and hurt than the silly mocking.  But I guess they had kicked out all the smart guys.  The guys they had left now needed me to tell them what the word "parody" even meant.  They seemed to think I'd invented it myself, just to annoy them.  And people from the happy, chipper churches around?  Oh, they'd agree to talk to me about stuff, especially if they were social workers or pastors or something, but as soon as I started talking, they were almost instantly in over their heads, both in terms of Brethren jargon and information, and in the ability to alike believe me, or deal emotionally with the simple fact that stuff like that happens in churches.  (and was happening in their own church, more often than not.  Just giving me an Amy Grant CD proved insufficient to my needs)
   So I squawked with satire over how dark it was getting inside me.  And they sent me packing, met with me once a year later to tell me there was no hope of my getting back in, and then refused to answer phone calls, letters or face-to-face interactions ever afterward.  They'd pulled the plug.

Decency
It was the 90s, and I thought Kevin Smith movies, South Park, The Simpsons, The Tick, MadTV, Saturday Night Live, Weird Al Yankovik and anything that mocked anything, was the funniest stuff ever.  And the 90s were mostly about that.  Mocking.  Satire.  Parody.  I was right into all of that, and so was everyone I hung out with. It wasn't "decent" (that was the point).  But it spoke to me.  I braced myself and braved the swearing and pointedness, because I saw it as a hard-to-ignore may of telling difficult truths no one wants to admit to.  Be quotable.  Be colourful.  Be hard to forget.  Decency, niceness and gentleness is the first casualty. Ask an Old Testament prophet. Or the apostle Paul.  Or John or any of them.  When they need to address something that's not working, that's not being repented of, they do not pull punches.  When they quote God, they get downright scary.

   Nowadays, when people talk to me as a vile, exBrethren Abomination, the Anti-Brethren Beast (mostly they just avoid me entirely, and ask me to help them do so, as they can't "process" impossible, insupportable, abortive me) they try, ironically, to appeal to my Christian decency.  Discretion.  Fairness.  Privacy.  Kindness.  Christian virtues they claim are almost universally seen among Christians who aren't me. For example, in my church group.  You know.  Decency.  Proper behaviour.  Being nice.  Why am I harsh and grating?  Why can't I speak unto them smooth things?
   They also accuse me of being manipulative and dishonest, which, despite the validity of all the other charges, I feel is very unfair.  (Despite all my other failings, I'm not known to be a liar. Ask anyone.  Just like I was telling Frank Sinatra in Egypt yesterday aboard the Hindenburg. Ask Anna Nicole Smith and Hilary Clinton.  They were there too.)  It's interesting.  If you ask "our" side of the 1991 division what caused it, they will likely tell you it was because "Frank Allan was lying."  Ironically, that isn't true.
   They're not being Frank at all. About anything.
  The division they had ten years after that previous one didn't pretend to be about anything besides the right of the same two guys to kick out whoever they want, even if only for complaining about all the kicking out that's always going on.

   Thing is, I find that I never experienced any of those now-appealed-to Christian virtues in my assembly experience.  They weren't how we did things.  My family either.  And I never learned, to my shame.  They are utterly foreign. We shun.  We backstab.  We muck-rake.  We gossip. 

   Nowadays I have no faith in secrecy calling itself "discretion," in trusting a few Brethren guys with the door shut, to act well.  I don't believe it is possible for Christians to really keep much of anything really secret.  You can't even keep a gay lover in the Bahamas without people all over North America finding out, anymore.  You can't fondle a twelve-year old without people knowing you did that, either.  But you guys can still "serve the Lord." People will let you do that.  So long as you don't actually, you know, speak out against their right to use The Axe any way they see fit, of course.  So long as you bow your own head to "assembly decisions" to Axe people.  You're golden.  You can go on tour each year.  People will actually record what you say, take stuff you write, and sell it.
   I believe, with the Alcoholics Anonymous guys, that "we are as sick as our secrets."  The more secrets, the more sickness. I try my very best not to have any.  They aren't safe.  (Privacy is something different.  The very opposite of a secret, really.)

What I Lost In the 90s
I didn't lose my faith and trust in God in the 1990s.  But [expletive untyped] did I lose my faith and trust in Christians acting in groups!  That's gone.  All of it. I can't imagine it ever coming back.

   To this day I do not trust Christians, in general, to tell the truth, to not play games of "let's pretend," to be real, to face up to their own crap, to act with trustworthiness and integrity, to not live in the clouds drinking from sippy cups with the Care Bears, to admit much of anything, or to be open, tolerant and helpful.
  In fact, I don't even trust Christians to remember what has been done and said in their own circles, by them, as recently as last week.  Memory problems seem chronic.  In "sincere" people who don't remember what they said and did, so sincerely don't want to discuss it, given how much of an unknowable mystery it all now sincerely is, a week later.  No matter what harm it's done.

   I do not trust Christian men with positions of power to keep their penises and hands to themselves anymore.  Not any more than I trust any other politicians.  And I do not trust Christian women with husbands and sons in positions of power to not cynically use their husbands and sons as their own power puppets, acting behind the scenes, moving the scenes which they are behind. Moving them in most mysterious ways.
  "We all make mistakes. None of us are perfect."
  Fine.  My problem is I can't take you guys seriously. Just can't.  And I don't believe anything much you guys say anymore.  I don't believe you will actually do much of anything you claim to believe is right. I think you're all claims.  Just talk.  I don't think reality matters to you.
   I believe you will talk and talk, and "take positions."  I believe you will do whatever you like, whatever's easiest and usual, and blame any shortfall on "things not being perfect."  I don't hold it against you.  I'm not terribly bitter about it.  But when you claim the stuff you do, I hope it's okay when I sneer a bit, inside.  Because I don't believe in Christians anymore.  Not in groups, supposedly making the world a better place, and exercising "oversight."  I just don't. I literally can't.

It's Not Working

Every time I meet a Christian I like, I ask to meet other cool Christians who'd talk to someone like me.  They invariably say they don't know any, and say if I meet any, to send them their way.  So I have this attitude.  It would be nice to think that I can teach myself to simply "be otherwise."  That I can simply will myself to respect and trust Christian communities.  Would be great to imagine that when they accuse me of being "so blinded by the pain" of my own (apparently, they somehow feel, entirely unique) past experience, I can resolve to be more positive, and have that just happen.  Wake up and find I trust and depend willingly on Christians in their groups.  Reacquire a taste for Koolaid, like I had when I was twelve.
   Well, I've tried that for decades. It's not working.  I'm going out to various churches.  I'm talking to various people who clearly consider themselves upstanding Christians.  And mostly I can't stop sneering.  Just can't. There seems to be no shortage of things to sneer at, either.  People who gather in glass chuches?  You can see right through them.  You can see their next sentences coming minutes in advance.  The talking and not doing.  The thinking that giving other middle-class people a bit of your money, is going to solve problems.  The hothouse flowers will wilt if you open the door and let any air in, and the bugs will crawl under the rock if any sunlight is about to let people see them clearly.

   I think the actual belief in an actual God who might want actual stuff that's more authentic than what we're all doing is an abiding problem in my dealing with Christians.  Not that I can do any better.  But I can't take any of it seriously, and I feel like I'm positively required to.  Very seriously. No sneering.  That expression of enthusiastic, supportive belief is lightyears beyond me now.
  And I realize that I am also blind to good in Christian circles now. I just don't see it.  When I do, I don't trust it.  I don't reach for it.  I don't let myself enjoy it.  And when I wait, usually, given a bit of time, it soon isn't good anymore.  Often it's soon gone.  Or it's been hiding a scandal the whole time, which seems to taint it, for me.  I can love Christians, but only one at a time.  And I do.

  I have no faith in my ability to pull up my socks, muster up my fleshly resolve, and vow to be positive and trusting.  To trust and hope and appreciate.  I have no faith in my ability to "catch" this laudable attitude from enthusiastic Christians, cheerfully singing Disney songs about cheerfully singing songs about singing cheerful songs to God.  (the endlessly sitting in silent rooms with solemn people endlessly singing solemn songs about singing solemn songs to God was also unsuccessfully tried throughout my childhood.  The face is pretty solemn.  But there's a sneer on the inside.) I have no faith in bible school graduates teaching me that my attitude is unorthodox (in Hebrew, Babylonian, Koine Greek and Pig Latin) and my then being able to find that this judgment (and knowing what "ism" it is) somehow fixes my attitude.

   I am to the point where I know that there is a God, and I know His Son Christ Jesus.  I know that "Jesus/Joshua" literally means 'saviour.'  I am to the point where I don't trust anyone, not even me, to know what's wrong with me, what needs to be fixed, and what I need to be saved from, let alone to save me from it.  So I need Jesus.

  I am helpless before God.  If He wants me to miss less good stuff, to be more trusting, forgiving, sympathetic, open and giving, He will have to make me a better person than I can currently be.  If He wants me to stop sneering, He will have to save me from that well inside me from which it springs.  When bleeding hearts bleed, they bleed cynicism and satire.  (I just read Haggai.  God does nothing but sneer at Israel in there.  All snark and sneering comments.) 
   If God wants me to take myself or other Christians seriously, He will have to save me from myself.   I take Him seriously, sure enough.  If He's getting use out of the sneering, if it's "prophetic" sneering, like that done by Elijah and Haggai and so on, then wonderful for Him.  But I really wish I had more, and other stuff.  Because sneering doesn't provide a happy, social life filled with people. (Unless you're Weird Al Yankovik, or the creators of South  Park or The Simpsons.)  In Christian circles, many are irony-blind and satire-challenged.  Many don't know the meaning of the word "parody," let alone understand the uncontrollable urge to make some.

    I wish I could believe a single thing that one Christian said to me this week.  Because it's not happening by itself.  It's not getting better.  A sneer doesn't keep you warm at night.  And it's not much fun Sunday morning.

  So I am left with God. I wonder what He can do about it all?