Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (42 page)

I felt an emptiness inside, and I realized that before this emptiness I had been living in chaos.

I began to understand something about my soul from that point on. The issue in my life was not only cult involvement. Another issue was, and still is, the abusive power imbalance. The fact that my father, like many fathers, brothers, uncles, and other authority figures, as head of the family (or whatever power position they hold, such as priests, teachers, coaches, doctors), could violate his duty of moral transmission and get away with it is an attack on a child’s soul. This scene, which I had repressed, was not the only blow to my soul. There were others, such as the time my father threw a chair at my mother and it hit me on the head instead, leaving a scar that remains today, and the nights I spent at the top of the stairs, afraid to go to sleep and ready to run out the front door if my father came home drunk. By the time I was ten years old, a strange man exposed himself to my friend and me on a quiet neighborhood street, and I was so confused, I thought it was funny. Recently I read that child-abuse survivors can experience a long list of psychological disorders as adults. One of them jumped off the page—an inability to establish meaningful intimate relationships. That was another reason why I had found it so easy to be a Heaven’s Harlot and so hard to be a wife.

My psyche had been wounded at a very young age, and no one came to help stop the bleeding. There had never been any healing. Perhaps this was the bloodied little girl who had appeared to me in Italy.

When I eventually discussed this with members of my family, no one but my sister Ruby gave me any emotional support. On the contrary, as is typical when only one child remembers abuse, I was discredited. One of my siblings suggested it could have been the typical Freudian fantasy of a female child in the oedipal stage, which is commonly known as “penis envy.” My family insinuated that I was imagining the incident, and at the same time they said,“Well, it wasn’t that bad! Lots of drunk men expose themselves.” They were right—child abuse often involves much “worse” intrusion than mere exposure, and drunk men are notorious for indecent exposure. Some children are more resilient than others.

However, the fact that I buried this incident so deeply in my subconscious, and that it returned with such emotional violence in dreams and visions, indicates that I was profoundly affected.

Perhaps I had become a “deep feeler” for the sufferings of the downtrodden masses, but I was also an “unfeeler” of my own pain.

Perhaps I had been eager to dissociate from myself so I would not feel the pain.

Perhaps in locking up pain, I had also locked up morals and values.

Wasn’t it the universal moral taboo of incest that had caused my pain to begin with? What better way to rid myself forever of that pain than to discredit the taboo. if I had not been a mother also, I probably would have remained oblivious to morality. Now that I understood my original wound, I questioned God even more earnestly,“What is the meaning of this? Why would you, God, allow this to happen over and over again?” For some children it is much worse. Some children don’t make it through.

To this day, any incident of child abuse that I hear about causes profound feelings of pain to surface, and I often weep to the point of emotional exhaustion. When I read about the two girls who were found dead in a Belgian farmhouse, having been subjected to sexual abuse for months, I almost completely lost faith in any concept of God.

The parents and townspeople had prayed for months for the protection of these kidnapped girls. I questioned everyone and did not find a suitable answer as to why any God would let this happen. I don’t know how God the Father thinks, but God the Mother would not let this happen. Even after being indoctrinated by Family principles of morality for years, after internalizing the belief that sex is natural and should be shared with all, and after giving my body, in the end I was not willing to give my children. Fortunately, I had enough decision-making power left to decide to take my girls away from eventual abuse. How could an all-powerful, all-knowing God allow continual abuse to happen in His creation? So who or what is God? I want to know!

My mother was living with me at the time I had the dream/ revelation.

Although she had played a significant role in that incident of my childhood, by being absent, I knew she was not guilty of neglect.

Actually, she was a survivor herself, and I now recognized that my detached attitude in life was modeled after my mother’s. I had perfected the coping mechanism by becoming dissociated. I was now able to identify the signs indicating that my mother used whatever she could to survive her pain and abuse.

She had been trained to be a scholar and socialized to live a middleclass lifestyle. Instead, she married an alcoholic who could not keep a job, and being a devout Christian, she allowed him to father her six children. Nothing had prepared her for parenthood by herself, and even more tragic, nothing had prepared her for the abusive relationship inherent in being married to an alcoholic. Her religion told her that she could not divorce, and so she did not. Instead, she bore her burdens by forgetting them. My mother forgot almost all the dramatic incidents that I remember in detail. During her first pregnancy, she developed epilepsy, and she has taken phenobarbital and Dilantin ever since.

Perhaps this had something to do with her memory loss, but it also helped her to survive her life in hell. The Christians certainly did not help enough. When her own father suggested she get away from my father, offering to help her start a new life in Germany, she refused.

She told me later that she stayed with her husband because of her convictions.

Memories seem to collect cobwebs like an unused attic, but I had to start cleaning out the rooms. I have lived too long with vague memories. I remembered all along that my father had been abusive, only I did not consistently remember. As a child I had recurrent nightmares of a “boogeyman” in my bed, and sometimes I would wake up and see a tall figure leave the room. I asked my mother to sleep with me until I was a teenager, and I even wet the bed once at sixteen years of age while I baby-sat at a neighbor’s house. All these are serious disturbances, but I did not look for a cause. When Mo advocated sexual activities with children, I allowed the memory of my father’s actions to resurface as something that was not morally wrong. However, when I saw the results of abusive sexual relationships, through the drawings of Judah’s child, I finally made my own decision that indeed it was terribly wrong. But again I blocked out my own sexual abuse. All power abuse cuts to the heart and soul. And as children, who have nowhere to run and hide, all we can do is let our heart bleed and hide our soul!

I think my mother, who stumbled into this abuse as an adult, hid her emotions. I know she suffered greatly because she stayed with my father.

When I was five, right after my second little sister was born, my mother’s fourth child in less than eight years, she had a nervous breakdown in front of her children. We were living in a hotel on the highway, and she took the baby and sat in the middle of the street screaming like a lunatic, while the other three children, myself included, stood on the side of the highway waiting for help. The police came and put her back into the hotel room. She doesn’t remember the incident. She was one of the silent survivors of a society that allowed patriarchally sanctioned abuse. Abusive husbands in the 1950s were supported by the law, while abused wives were silenced. I was not going to perpetuate this grim silence. I wanted to scream to God—to the world—“Why do you let this happen?” But I couldn’t scream yet. I couldn’t even find my voice.

Through books, I learned much about the correlation among suffering, searching, and knowing oneself. In Women Who Run “Pith WolPer, Clarissa Pinkola Estes talks about the women who die a thousand deaths and are constantly reborn, Having lived through a gross repression causes gifts to arise that compensate and protect. In that respect a woman who has lived a torturous life and delved deeply into it definitely has inestimable depth. Though she came to it through pain, if she has done the hard work of clinging to consciousness, she will have a deep and thriving soul-life and a fierce belief in herself regardless of occasional ego-waverings.

I had lived through an emotionally torturous childhood. As a young adult I joined a repressive authoritarian subculture, and I lived most of my adult life allowing myself to be manipulated by men. Somehow I hung on to consciousness, and I was ready for a thriving soul-life, sensing that there was more to learn. Little did I know that my oldest son, the love of my life who gave me the utmost joy and was the unwitting cause of my most intense pain, was going to be the key to a deeper spirituality.

Thor came to live with me in 1995. With a hard-earned French degree in math, he applied to graduate schools in America. After scoring a perfect 800 on his GRE, he received an assistantship at one of the best schools in the South. The time we spent together was priceless, and I discovered that my twenty-two-year-old son was a spiritual seeker of great depth.

His own sufferings, which only he can write about, and his essential search led him to an Eastern form of meditation, a spiritual discipline known as Sahaj Marg, or the “natural path.” He explained this practice to me patiently for many months, and I started the meditation sporadically at different times, but because there was a “master,” which reminded me too much of my cult experience, I was always wary.

In fact, during one of my rare conversations with the “master” of this particular discipline, I expressed to him my distrust of any type of leader or guru. He suggested that I “just meditate.” I have not become as involved in the Saharj Marg practice as Thor has, but as a result of the meditation I have done, I began to experience more dreams and visions. First, I rejected these as too “cultish,” because the Family had put so much emphasis on dreams and visions, especially those received by Moses David. However, I wrote them down, and they have been a source of inspiration for me, since they were usually messages about myself. It also is a way for me to counterbalance the nonspiritual world of academia. I had become so absorbed in external struggles, such as the economic one, that I found I had little time for self-reflection. Yet self-awareness, like morning dew, is life-sustaining.

When I began to meditate, I was doubtful that it would yield any benefits, but because I wanted to be part of my son’s life in whatever way I could, I did it. Sitting still for an hour was very hard, and thinking “no thoughts” was even harder. No one gave me any indication as to what should happen during meditation, or that I would “see” anything.

However, as I concentrated on the inner light as a focal point, I began to feel more peaceful. My first visions during meditation were of beautiful colors and designs that I had never seen before and could never reproduce. Another time I saw a multitude of robed people, stretching out across eternity. One day I envisioned an evolution regression, seeing an ape change into a fish and finally into some microscopic organism in which I felt intimate energy. Sometimes I saw things that I recognized as “my story” in symbolic form, other times I received images that gave me inspiration or revelations about something that was bothering me. The meditation practice helped me during a difficult period in my life. I was a single mother, with four school-age kids, and going full-time to college. I felt I was just keeping my head above water. Then one night, while sleeping at Thor’s apartment, I had the “dream.” I will recount the dream exactly as I wrote it down early in the morning, with tears still streaming down my face.

I was living next to a big old house, almost a mansion in size, and it seemed that I knew this house intimately. Maybe I lived there before.

I now live next to the house with my children. I know that the people who were living in the big house had left and the house was now empty.

But I heard a baby crying in the house. At first the cry was very faint.

Sometimes it would go away. This had been going on for months now [as I knew in my dream]. I thought the child must surely be dead, if there really was a baby in there.

I often asked myself,“Why don’t I go in there and look?” But I was afraid. I was afraid of that house. Something had happened to me in there. But tonight, in my dream, I hear the baby distinctly. I hear her crying louder and louder in desperation. I know I will have to go in and look for her or else I will go crazy!

I do not want to go alone, so I wake my oldest daughter, Athena, and tell her about the baby crying next door. She believes me, although she cannot hear the crying, and she says she will come with me to look for the baby.

The old house is connected to our house somehow, and we climb through the attic and into the house next door through an attic trap door, since I do not want to go in the front main entrance. Once in the big house, I feel oppressed with fear, but the sound of the baby crying keeps me going. I must find her.

I start looking everywhere in the attic, and I can’t find the baby anywhere. Then I stop hearing the cries. “She must be dead,” I think, but just then I hear the crying coming from downstairs. Athena thinks she heard something but isn’t sure. I hear it distinctly, however I don’t want to go downstairs. Athena thinks we could save the baby. So we go to the next floor and search everywhere, but again the cries stop, and again I hear them coming from down further. Each time I search a level, I can hear the cries on a level below. Finally, Athena, who has never really heard the cries, thinks we should give up.

We are on the floor above ground level now. It is the floor of the master bedroom and the library. The furniture is of an old, massive type and very heavy to move. I pull drawers out frantically to look for the baby behind the big dressers. In the library, I madly rip the books off the shelves, looking inside and behind them. Athena is beginning to think I am losing my mind.

“I am sure the baby is dead by now,” she says, almost trying to help me give up my frantic search before I go crazy.