The Laws of the Ring (5 page)

The 7th Law of Power

Push Through Life's Hiccups (Dealing with Change)

I
want to tell you the story of my brother, Ryan. It's not an easy story for me to tell. Ryan is two years older than me, and he's always been my hero. Our relationship was forged through a shared experience: the days and nights with our dad in the motor home, going back and forth between our mom and dad's places, being each other's rock during a bad divorce. My days watching in admiration as Ryan played high school football and wrestled. I remember when he started freshman football and I was in sixth grade, I would wake up each morning, fill a jug with ice-cold water, and ride my bike to the summer conditioning practice. I'd show up to watch the end of his practices, just in time to see him finish with the lead group on all the runs. He didn't have the best physique or style as a freshman in high school, but he was the hardest-working guy out there, and he led by example.

When I was a freshman in high school, he was a senior and the captain of the football and wrestling teams. He was a peer counselor in athletics. He was on the student council. He took all the available AP and honors courses, was fluent in Spanish after just three years of taking courses, he was off the charts in math. He had to take math classes at the junior college as early as his junior year because they didn't have a teacher at school who was at his level. Ryan never smoked, never drank, and as the MC brought spirit into all the pep rallies at school. I know there's no such thing as the perfect kid, but he came as close as humanly possible to fitting the definition.

He was so good, in fact, that I never wanted to let him know whenever I did anything bad. I wasn't a bad kid, but you have to understand Ryan. He was wall-to-wall good, and he had very little tolerance for missteps. I drank some in junior high and tried weed as an eighth grader, and I knew if Ryan caught wind of it there would be hell to pay. Besides, I didn't want to disappoint him.

Ryan was accepted into Cal Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo after he graduated from high school, but he decided to take the air force ROTC scholarship he was awarded and attend Citrus Community College near Los Angeles. It was all planned out: Ryan would attend Citrus, near my grandparents on my mother's side, for two years, and then transfer to Azusa Pacific University. After graduation, he would go on to become an air-force pilot.

Ryan was incredibly organized for a young man, and left nothing to chance. He had a job working in a Nordstrom's café in Sacramento (he would commute thirty minutes from Lincoln), and before he left for Southern California, he contacted the Nordstrom's closest to the campus and managed to transfer his job to that store. Then, at eighteen, scholarship and job in tow, Ryan moved to Los Angeles. He rented a room from a family in the area, went to school, and worked.

During his first year, he would come home for holidays. Though we noticed that he was getting more into our family's early roots of Christianity, it didn't set off any alarms in our family; Ryan was eight when we left the Christian commune, so he had a stronger religious education than I did. (I was five.) He got all As and continued to be the responsible, upstanding guy we all knew. But when he came back for the summer after his first year in college, I noticed
serious
changes. His beliefs were becoming more fanatical. It's not just seemingly innocuous stuff like the fact that he wouldn't check out girls like he used to—which to
me
was alarming—now he was getting up at four-thirty every morning to read his Bible.

Ryan doesn't do anything halfway, and we knew that he had become a member of the International Church of Christ (Boston Movement). It wasn't until later that we found out this Church of Christ is one of the fastest-growing and most destructive cults in America.
Time
magazine did a story on them, as did television information programs such as
A Current Affair,
a popular news show at that time. This group recruits almost exclusively on college campuses, and it uses young, good-looking people to do the recruiting. They target people like Ryan who are idealistic and away from home for the first time.

There is a big emphasis on fun activities, but the real push is to increase your monetary and time commitment to the church. In addition to the financial requests, each member was assigned to a group of peers with a “discipler,” a person in charge, to keep him in line on his commitment to the International Church of Christ's interpretation of the Bible. He was expected to report to this person regarding every aspect and decision in his life. They twisted scriptures to encourage eating less, sleeping less, and giving more money to the church, even if you didn't have it—they didn't care if you were a young college student trying to make ends meet. Guilt was a major tool in the church's arsenal to control its members, so they went to great lengths to get members to tell anything and everything about their current self and their past and exaggerated “the sinfulness” of what they were coerced into sharing. Kip McKean, the leader of the group, saw to it that his disciplers were collecting everyone's money while (we are told) he and his family were living a lavish lifestyle in Malibu, apparently thanks to the devotion of his followers.

I had only just completed my sophomore year in high school when Ryan was first involved, and as time went on I began to see him getting more and more wrapped up in this church. I remember, during my junior year, questioning Ryan's thought process when he was home for Christmas. He had been praying for me to find a relationship with the Lord, which I guess I could understand, but he also told me he had been including our grandparents in his prayers. Our grandparents were immigrants from Holland and were about as devoted Christians as can be. They were part of the resistance during World War II and hid Jewish families in their home, which nearly cost them their lives, but helped save the lives of those families. My grandfather, Gerard Faber, was a music professor at Asbury Christian College in Kentucky, as well as the organist at his church. My grandmother, Gerry Faber, had her own seat reserved in the front row at church, and I've yet to receive a holiday, birthday card, or a phone call from them without a biblical quote or religious inspiration at the end.

Needless to say, the alarms went off when Ryan was extremely worried that my grandparents were going to hell because they weren't following the Bible the right way, like his church. I remember laughing hard at Ryan and saying, “Dude, are you being serious?” It was apparent that he was, even after I used my best logic and sarcasm to paint a picture of how crazy he was being. The conversation ended with Ryan frustrated, a little stumped, but holding on to his faith as he believed it was the only truth.

A few months later he took my entire family to one of his church's group baptisms in Sacramento, which was being held in a banquet room at the Hilton. Ryan didn't know anyone at the church (his group was in LA, the LAICC) but you couldn't tell. He walked in and, as a member of the church, was greeted like a family member. A man got up on the stage and began preaching about his relationship with a girl. He started out by saying their relationship was originally only about sex, and it got a little graphic. It was really odd and uncomfortable. Even my grandparents—who had been excited about Ryan's born-again Christianity—were so disturbed that they walked out. When I pointed this out to Ryan, he told me, “They were convicted.”

Roughly six months after the meeting—on New Year's Eve 1997 to be exact—with Ryan one class shy of getting his AA degree and moving on to Azusa Pacific, my parents got a phone call from his boss at Nordstrom. His boss said, “I know this is not any of my business, but if he was my child, I would want to know. Ryan hasn't been showing up for work on time, and when he does, he acts strange. He's losing weight—we can't get him to eat when he is here—he will rarely talk, and doesn't smile. He walks around with his head down, and isn't able to perform his job duties as before. Even his regular customers are noticing and commenting. You know Ryan, he is always so fun and bubbly, joking around and making people laugh—he is no longer himself.”

Both of my parents were remarried at this point, my mother to Tom and my father to a nice woman named Marrian. Both had their hands full. Pops was still recovering from a mild stroke he had suffered the previous summer, and my mom and Tom had Michaella, who was almost four.

But of course my mom snapped to attention and called the family Ryan had been renting from. Yes, they said, it seems like something's wrong. Ryan had moved in with some of his church friends earlier in the year, but had recently called the family and asked to move back with them.

Concern turned to panic. My mom, stepdad Tom, Pop, and stepmom Marrian left Michaella with me and drove seven long and anxious hours to Los Angeles to find Ryan. My mom had his ex-girlfriend's number and pieced together where he would be. They found him at a New Year's Eve party for the LAICC. It was on the college campus at Cal Poly SLO. When they finally found the ICC New Year's Eve party, Ryan was nowhere to be found. They looked relentlessly, asking various people if they knew or had seen him. Finally, my mom spotted him. Ryan was sitting by himself in a fetal-type position on a section of one of the lawns on campus. His arms were wrapped around his legs with his head almost in his lap.

“Ryan, is that you?” my mom asked. He looked up.

“Mom?” Ryan said faintly. My mom was horrified. It was him. Ryan was skin and bones, almost unrecognizable. He was so gaunt and starved-looking that you could see the outline of his teeth through his skin. It was as if he had been locked up as a prisoner of war. There was another church member standing nearby, just watching him as if not to let him out of their sight.

My mom and pop said, “Come on Ryan, we're taking you away from here.”

He said, “I have to tell my discipler first and make sure it's okay.” My parents were fuming by then, and my mom said, “What? You have to ask someone if you can leave with your parents? Who is your discipler?” My mom couldn't wait to be face-to-face with this person.

“Steve Burger.”

“Okay then, let's go talk to Steve,” my mom said. She said that when she met him, she could not believe this was a religious leader. He wore a white button-down dress shirt, almost completely unbuttoned to be sure everyone could see his chest, a gold chain, and a diamond earring in one ear. Mom said he looked more like a pimp. My mom had some very choice words with him, and my parents then took Ryan for a walk until they could convince him that they would just take a short ride.

Of course, they were kidnapping him, without much protest other than his mumbling attitude about needing to tell his discipler he was leaving. You could see the relief on his face as they drove off—he was very hesitant and scared but also relieved. They drove directly to the house where he was staying with his fellow church members, went to his room, packed up his belongings, and drove back to Lincoln. My mom called me at the house in Lincoln and gave me a warning: “Honey, I'm just letting you know your brother doesn't look good, we're driving home right now. We have all of his stuff.”

I walked out front when they pulled into the driveway of my mom's house. Ryan walked up and a chill went through me. He looked like a shell of a person, devoid of emotion, completely emptied out of any trace of the Ryan we knew. Ryan is nearly six feet tall and weighed a lean and in-shape 165 pounds in high school; now he was maybe 120–125 pounds. Less than me. As I walked up to him I forced a smile and said, “What's up Ryan?” but he didn't even lift his arms to hug me back as I reached up to give him a hug. He was mute.

He lay down on the couch and slept for three days straight. And when he did wake up, he didn't stay awake long. It was obvious that he had been severely sleep deprived. He wouldn't eat at all and my mom feared that he would die. She finally got him to eat only by feeding him herself. He wouldn't talk but wrote, “They told me I am debaucherous.” A word my mother had never heard of. “I am afraid of what they will do to my family if I talk.” All of our lives were changed from that day on.

Almost immediately, my mom's life went from having two successful boys and a beautiful new daughter and enjoying our successful Lincoln business, the Morning Glory, to being obsessed with finding out what was wrong with Ryan. The quest consumed her. She took him to doctors. Psychologists, spiritual healers, and psychiatrists. More appointments than you can imagine. She even sought out experts of every kind, including cult experts and deprogrammers. She took Ryan to the nation's leading cult abuse expert, now deceased, Margaret Singer. She flew another cult expert from the East coast for about five days and then she flew with Ryan to Boston to work with Steve Hassan, another leading cult abuse expert and deprogrammer. She was determined and obsessed with finding answers. I am sure she spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to help Ryan find his way back to himself.

It was my senior year when he came home, smack in the middle of wrestling season. I had been previously consumed by college prep, but now the only thing going through my mind was hoping Ryan could get better. When it came time to sit down and do my college applications, I had no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to go. My girlfriend Michelle sat down with me and helped me fill out applications, but we were all preoccupied with Ryan.

Ryan was one month away from his twenty-first birthday when he came home that night. The diagnosis was all over the place when he was first home. It seemed that with the help of these fanatical people he had pushed his strict lifestyle with food and sleep deprivation too far, which had caused some sort of mental, spiritual and emotional breakdown. Ryan went through all types of schizophrenic-like behaviors, acting out from intense fear that the cult would come and get him and his family. I would take him out to drive around and he would swear people were following us, constantly looking back in fear.