Beyond Belief (2 page)
Authors: Cami Ostman
W
e met in a memoir writing class taught by author Laura Kalpakian in the fall of 2006. Susan was writing about her years spent in Orthodox Judaism, her difficult divorce, and the disorientation of transitioning out of living an Orthodox life. Cami was writing about how her journey to run a marathon on every continent was helping her find her way after a divorce and a profound change in her relationship with God. As we shared our respective stories—both in class and over coffee or wine outside of class—we discovered surprising parallels in our lives. Both of us had chosen to enter religious communities we weren’t raised in. We had each adopted faiths that asked us to eschew many personal “freedoms” and choices most nonreligious women take for granted. Though Cami was not asked to cover her head or stop wearing pants as
Susan was, she was asked to believe that women shouldn’t teach men in church and that her husband should be her “head.”
Comparing notes further we realized that, despite the differences in our respective religious practices, we could empathize with each other’s difficulties reintegrating into the secular world and shared the doubts and second-guessing of our decisions to leave. We understood the self-blame and guilt that comes with leaving strict religion behind. We experienced similar struggles surviving the wistful, nostalgic, and sometimes heart-wrenching emotions that arise from missing familiar community and ritual.
The more we talked, the more we began to ask ourselves, “Why
did
we choose to join such restrictive religious practices?” Even more compellingly, we wanted to explore both “Why did we stay so long?” and “Why was it so hard to leave?” After all, although we each experienced intense emotional and psychological pressure from friends and family to stay, we were not obliged by fear of violence as some women around the world are. What did we gain by staying—what kept us in even through years of serious misgivings?
As we formulated more questions and explored our own answers to them, we began to wonder about all the other women who, like us, had lived or were living through their own version of this story and were grappling with many of the same experiences, emotions, and questions. As our friendship with each other taught us,
women living life inside extreme religions have much in common despite their differences of practice and belief
. Sharing our stories with one another through writing and in conversation helped each of us to feel less isolated, learn from our experiences, and become willing to dig deeper. Realizing that the commonalities of our lives within extreme religion far outweighed the differences of our particular paths inspired us to widen the conversation. We decided to share
our stories and give other women the opportunity to tell theirs. Thus, the seeds of
Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions
were first sown.
Far and wide we flung our net, asking writers the same core questions we had asked ourselves: Why did you, a modern-day, liberated woman, join a religion that restricted your autonomy? What did you experience inside? What compelled you to stay? What compelled you to leave? How did you leave? What do you miss? How do you make sense of the world without your faith (or with an altered understanding of your faith)?
As
Beyond Belief
began to take shape, the one question we were asked most often by contributors was, “What’s your working definition of
extreme?
” It’s true that the word
extreme
is an extreme word! For some of our atheist friends, any religion that espouses a belief in any kind of supreme being is extreme. Yet for those who live inside orthodoxy or fundamentalism, what they live is not extreme to them at all: It is quite normal and sensible.
We agreed that we would let women who resonated with the term
extreme
define it for themselves. As editors, it’s not our place to pretend we have an objective, unbiased definition of what is extreme that we can apply like a measuring stick to other people’s experiences. What we do know is that, looking back on what we put ourselves through at an earlier time, we now see our religious commitments as extreme in comparison to our current lives. We hope you, the reader, will keep an open mind to the stories contained in
Beyond Belief,
and employ empathy as you read, even if certain writers’ beliefs don’t resonate with your own.
Another question we encountered when we made our call for submissions was, “I was born into a family that practices this religion. Can I still submit a story?” Our answer at first was no, but we
changed our minds. Although we originally hoped to find women, like us, who chose to enter their faiths in adolescence or adulthood, we came to understand that, except for some women who risk their lives to leave their religion behind, even those who were born into a particular faith must
choose
to stay in it at least for some period of time (often because the consequences of leaving were, while not deadly, quite huge).
Finally, potential contributors asked us, “I’ve left a conservative branch of my religion, but I still attend a more liberal church/synagogue/congregation. Does my experience count as ‘leaving’?” Again, our answer was yes. We understand firsthand that faith and spirituality can be in flux. Where we are today may not be where we’ll be tomorrow, and so it’s best not to judge as definitive where other people happen to be on their spiritual journeys at any given moment.
In fact, it is precisely because we do not consider ourselves judges of other people’s experience that we asked our contributors to write “slice of life” stories rather than informative or opinionated essays. It is not our intention to refute or belittle religion. On the contrary, we, as editors, wanted to spark a conversation about the commonalities of women’s experiences in restrictive religions. The fact that most of the writers included in
Beyond Belief
have since left or greatly altered their religious practices is a reflection of our longing to hear from those who share the trajectory of our journeys and should not be read as a suggestion that women
should
leave. This book is entirely about sharing experiences in the way women do: by telling stories to one another.
In
Beyond Belief
you will find appreciation and gratitude for experiences of faith side by side with deep resentment and anger. Some writers are still grappling to make sense of their lives both in
and out of extreme religion, while others are absolutely clear about how to understand their histories. We have made every effort to include women from as wide a range of religious backgrounds as possible. And while we couldn’t include every single religion out there, we are proud of the quality and diversity of writing that has come together to form
Beyond Belief.
It’s our hope that you’ll see yourself, your friends, and even a few of the people who irritate you in these pages—and that your curiosity will be piqued and your compassion stimulated. We hope that in reading these stories you will become inspired to enter into open-ended conversations such as the ones we strive to nurture in our own lives.
1. IN WHICH I LEARN THAT CHURCH TRUMPS EVERYTHING, EVEN ILLNESS
This Sabbath is to be kept holy unto the Lord when men . . . do not only observe an holy rest all the day from their own works, words, and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations, but also are taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of His worship.
—The Westminster Confession of Faith, XXI:8 (1646)
Going to church was of paramount importance in my family. Church was so important that we went twice every Sunday, morning and evening, and also Wednesday nights for prayer meeting. One Sunday morning when I was seven, I woke up with agonizing stomach pain and vomiting, and my parents took me to church anyway—that’s how important it was.
We lived in Long Beach, California at the time and attended Pilgrim Reformed Baptist Church, a congregation so new and small we met mostly in people’s homes. On the morning in question we met at the home of the Wheaton family. They stuck me on a daybed in one of those dark 1970s dens with no books, provided me with a bowl to throw up in, and proceeded with church in the living room. I lay there for an hour, racked with stomach cramps, until a large Siamese cat jumped up on top of me. Terrified of the animal, I hobbled out of the room and into the hallway, doubled over in nauseated pain, until Mrs. Wheaton noticed me. She shooed away the cat and closed me back in the room. To this day, I’m phobic about vomiting. I’m not overly fond of cats either.
Otherwise I liked Pilgrim Reformed Baptist Church. Everyone else’s house was much nicer than our downscale apartment, and my younger sister, Mari, and I befriended some of the other girls. And I liked the grown-ups too, particularly the pastor, an Englishman called Ron Edmonds, and his wife, Thaïs. Mrs. Edmonds was Brazilian and had jet-black hair coiffed with meticulous, unliberated perfection. The Edmonds were genteel and never talked down to children. This mattered a lot to me.
But my father, a fractious individual, had a falling-out with Mr. Edmonds, the first of many such estrangements. When I asked why, he said it was complicated, a disagreement between men over how the church should be run. One Sunday morning he woke us up and told us we wouldn’t be going to Pilgrim anymore. I cried. He found my grief touching; I remember sitting on his knee while he comforted me. He wasn’t a heartless man, my father, however much he pressed his family to extreme religious observance. My mother, a practical and unsentimental Japanese woman, had more moderation. But she rarely overruled my father.
Leaving Pilgrim didn’t mean we’d be skipping church, of course. I don’t think we took even one Sunday off. But where to go? My parents always disparaged “church-hoppers”—ecclesiastically promiscuous people who cannot commit to a church family but keep shopping around in an endless, vain search for the ideal place of worship. But we did a lot of church-hopping ourselves. My Sunday memories of our post-Pilgrim years in Southern California are mostly of being on the freeway as we drove—and drove and drove—to one church after another. And although we were Baptists, almost all the churches we visited were Presbyterian.
Orthodox
Presbyterian.