A Question of Identity

If reading my book or my blog challenges or messes with your self-image and identity a bit, I feel your pain.  Writing it and hearing people's responses do much the same thing to me.

When you speak out like I do about a human system, some people treat you (and speak of and about you) as if you were a victim.  Am I a victim?  A Brethren person born into a Brethren assembly to two Brethren parents, who had the whole Brethren lifestyle (the no TV, no movies, no overnights with worldly people, the no Christmas decorations, Halloween costumes and so on and so on) and then got treated unjustly?  Who was taught rules and shame but experienced very little of love and acceptance, grace, mercy and forgiveness?  Didn't enjoy the youth stuff or fit in?  Got ostracised systematically from youth social stuff and the dating pool, to then be treated coldly, viciously and shabbily in his youth by people who are now well-known to have done that and worse to any number of other people?  Who has never since been able to so much as openly date women from his own culture?

    So now, when I speak out, am I bravely, eloquently and humorously sharing my experience, and getting shut down by nay-sayers and people who need to protect the PR, the image, the self-esteem of what remains of the TW Plymouth Brethren movement worldwide?  Upsetting people who love darkness rather than light because their ecclesiastical dealings are more than a bit dubious?  So, as this "victim" I'm of great help and encouragement to all of the other "victims" who thought they were the only one?  And to those who thought they were one of only a few, when in fact we are legion?  

     Is it an act of love for all of the many, many people struggling through situations similar enough to derive comfort and help from reading about my experience?  Is it an act of loving and serving God, with me outlining what a renewed focus and understanding of love looks like, despite severe detriments to that very thing in my upbringing and current standing with my birth culture?

Or is it the opposite?  Am I the son of a known trouble-maker at Meeting, abrasively, coldly causing trouble just like my abrasive, cold father did?  Someone who never really attended meeting very regularly in his adult life and started right in going to movies and concerts, drinking socially and playing rock and roll music in bars not long after he moved out from his parents'?  

     Someone who can't get along with people and simply thrives on conflict?  Someone who is always obsessively making bitter, spiteful, perverse things with apparently no purpose other than to hurt the people who hurt him?
   Someone who left the Gathered Saints in spirit long before, the excommunication of whom was, at that point, a formality, really.  Someone who did not fit and was generally a fount of negativity, and who continues to be a fount of negativity, which goes a long way toward justifying the wisdom and necessity of his excommunication?  

     Someone who, as an outsider, creeps in stealthily from time to time and spies out and reveals unfortunate Brethren things which really ought to be kept hid, in the name of love and mercy and a Christian spirit?  A traitor and betrayer of his own people, an intruder and wolf among the sheep, who needs to be stopped?

Am I a good person doing a good thing or a bad, dangerous, crazy person doing a bad, dangerous, crazy thing?

Am I both?  Neither?  

I think I'll go with neither.  Because t's much more complicated than that. It almost always is.