Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  Having been raised on stories like these, I lay across my daybed praying for the opportunity to prove that I was not a “woman of the flesh.” To prove that I too could be an Agatha, an Agnes, a Lucy, or a Blandina. If I was just given the chance.

  * * *

  My senior year of high school, I studied abroad in Australia. For the first time in five years, I was living apart from my religious subculture. When I began to experience a mysterious abdominal pain and blood loss from my anus while living there, the first thing I did was thank God for the opportunity to grow spiritually. But the second thing I did was schedule an appointment with a doctor. Because come on, suffering was all well and good, but God liked to work miracles from time to time, right?

  The Australian doctor I saw took one look at me and said my real problem wasn’t blood loss; it was acne. I hid my face in my hair. I had been working hard to embrace my acne, which had gotten worse in recent months, even silently cheering on a self-assured classmate rising through the ranks of popularity at my school despite her own outbreaks. That’s right, I would say to myself as she ignored me in the hallway. Our physical appearance shouldn’t dictate our level of confidence! After all, we are creatures of the spirit, not of the flesh alone! The pain and blood loss worsened, but I didn’t go back to the doctor. If he didn’t take it seriously, I thought, it must not be that serious. Instead, I popped a few ibuprofens.

  My last month in Australia, a thick envelope arrived in the mail with my parents’ return address. Inside were articles in which I learned that my church youth pastor had been charged (and was later convicted) of child enticement with the intent to have sexual contact with a twelve-year-old girl from my youth group. He was caught after having lured the girl into a closet in a darkened part of the church basement during a youth meeting, an article read. A friend of the girl opened the door to the closet; she turned the light on; he stopped touching the girl; the girl called her friend’s name; he grabbed the girl from behind and tried to pick her up, before finally putting her back down.

  Though the girl told the police of earlier incidents, my youth pastor was charged with only one felony. Later, my youth pastor told a detective he had been dismissed from two other Christian staff jobs for “improper behavior” with similarly aged girls, which had somehow never come up in his reference checks.2

  Throbbing with rage, I tucked the articles in my back pocket and walked to the rocky beach near my host parents’ home. There I sat alone overlooking the water and read and reread the articles, crumpling their edges in anger.

  “Two Christian institutions before ours?” I appealed to God as I looked out over the ocean. “Two boards of leadership that could have prevented him from doing this to her . . . and didn’t?” Though it would take me many more years to come to terms with it, I know that the fire I feel in my belly for reforming the church went from smoldering coals to a flame that day, as it was the first time I saw the systemic nature of injustice in the church. Sitting on that rocky beach burning with anger at my youth pastor and, moreover, at the two other supposedly Christian institutions that had sent him to our community knowing what he might do—apparently more interested in protecting their reputations than the safety of children—I couldn’t stop thinking about the twelve-year-old girl in my church. How must she have felt sitting through those True Love Waits lessons in which we learned that good girls were not sexual stumbling blocks to men and boys? Did she wonder if what our youth pastor was doing to her meant she was not one of the good girls after all?

  I gripped one article so tightly in my hands that it tore. I balled it up and threw it down the rocks. Then I climbed down to the beach, picked it back up, and read it again.

  * * *

  When I returned home from Australia, a newly minted high school graduate, I was glad to have aged out of youth group. My mom had already made an appointment for me to see a gastroenterologist. The doctor did a short scope and diagnosed me with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but before I left his office I remember him telling me that if my symptoms were as severe as I claimed they were, I wouldn’t be smiling so much.

  Clearly, he had no experience with good Christian girls and our truly outstanding capacity for smiling. My girlfriends and I knew it was our responsibility to represent Jesus to the non-Christian world. The word Christian, after all, meant “Christ-like.” So if we were a drag, people would assume that Jesus was a drag. But if we were fun, we might entice someone to join the church and save them from eternal damnation. And so, even while we suffered, especially while we suffered, we smiled. We laughed. We wrote people encouragement cards. I even made Christmas cookies and dropped them off at every storefront open on Christmas Eve one year. And when my friends and I got home from a long day of smiling goodness, our smiles got even bigger, because we knew it was also our role to be what my pastor called “cheerleaders” for the “football players” in our lives—our fathers, brothers, and husbands. You never saw a group of teenage girls so . . . happy.

  One of the most common themes that arose in my interviews was the pain that those I spoke with felt at not being allowed to express their true feelings.

  When I was a teenager, I wasn’t allowed to experience anger or sadness because that was just evidence that you’re giving in to the Devil and him wanting you to feel that way—not having joy in the Lord, and all that stuff. When I would go to my friends’ houses, I went from my home environment of almost no emotion to an environment where families were screaming at each other all the time and just having these horrible fights and throwing stuff. It was crazy. But it was refreshing. Because it was like, “This is what normal humans are like when you’re not forced to behave a certain way all the time.” It was just nice. (Holly)

  Some of those I’ve spoken with said they eventually got so good at denying their feelings that they could no longer access them, even when they wanted to. They couldn’t touch their anger, their sadness, their pain; they couldn’t even feel happiness.

  I didn’t even know what happiness was. Happiness was a sign that you’re on the wrong path, because if you’re happy, then things were too easy, and things are only too easy when you’re really giving in to your sinful nature. If we wanted to be holy, it was going to have to be a struggle. So, you have to be struggling and suffering constantly. There is no happiness. There is no peace. It’s as though I’m only comfortable operating in chaos. When the chaos and pain are gone, I feel off-centered and somewhat guilty. I was taught I should always be in a state of suffering and don’t deserve to be happy. Things have been going really well for both me and my husband lately, which has filled me with a sense of dread. (Holly)

  I think that if you’re trained to be subservient, if you’re trained to submit, then the logic is that your happiness probably means you haven’t done enough to submit because there’s part of you that’s still getting satisfied. And if you are really submitting, then actually none of you is supposed to be satisfied. I am happy. It’s depressing that that’s hard to admit. I have to be unhappy about my unwillingness to admit my happiness, right? (Piper)

  And yet, we were expected to be “joyful.”

  I was so sad and so alone. I was living in this world where I was supposed to be “joyful,” right? We’re taught joy is different from happiness, it’s innately blah, blah, blah. So I was acting. It was like, fake it until you make it because you want other people to be attracted to Christ, so you’re joyful. But I was so sad and alone. (Meagan)

  It’s said that you have joy in suffering because God’s getting you through your suffering well, and because you know you’re going to Heaven because you’re suffering on earth. So you have that joy deep within you because you know what’s coming and because you’re doing a great job at suffering. (Holly)

  Some readers who have attended evangelical churches—particularly more Charismatic ones where congregants may throw up their arms, break into tongues, and fall onto the altar with weeping—may find themselves perplexed by my interviewee
s’ disconnection from their emotions. Surely, they may suppose, evangelicals are more connected to their emotions than just about anyone else!

  On many subjects, they’re right.

  As an adolescent, evangelicalism’s emphasis on feelings was one of the most compelling parts of the faith for me. Here, all my wonderful, terrible, unavoidable, feelings were encouraged and intensified by a religion in which every decision was not only a matter of life or death, but a matter of eternal life or eternal death. The dark swell of my own disgrace; the overwhelming terror of the abyss that lay awaiting all unforgiven sinners; the ensuing relief that I had been saved from it; the life-giving elation of singing praises to God; the intimacy of tear-filled prayers with my peers; the gripping of one another’s warm hands when we admitted our most painful truths, wordlessly saying to one another: I am listening.

  In 1912, Émile Durkheim identified the emotional high individuals get from being part of religious group experiences and the effects that high has upon the group itself. He called it “collective effervescence.” In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life he argues that by creating positive feelings among participants, collective effervescence enables a group to overcome divisions. Today, scholars like Dr. David Chidester see forms of collective effervescence in everything from singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” to attending Tupperware parties.3 However, I have never seen collective effervescence as intense as when a bunch of evangelical adolescents, fired up on hormones, get together. Here, the adolescent’s most extreme emotions are called forth time and time again. In 1923, the theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto said that there is a kind of heat in religion—“vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, energy, activity, impetus,” all coming together to create a “consuming fire.”4 Still today, I yearn for it. There are few places in this world that we can go to feel like this.I

  But in the church, not all emotions are equal.

  At certain times and concerning certain topics, admitting that you have feelings, particularly the “wrong” feelings, is tantamount to admitting the Devil has got a hold of you. Yet at another time and concerning another topic, you may be accused of not being godly enough if you don’t express emotions (by which I mean, of course, the “right” emotions for a Christian, for the particular moment, and for your gender). It can be tough for a newcomer to get the hang of the rules, particularly rules like these that are never spoken outright. But if you spend enough time in the subculture, and experience a few shamings to help show you the way, you eventually figure it out: Express lots of emotions here, perhaps even falsifying emotions if you don’t have them, and put on your “joy” mask the rest of the time—disconnecting from or hiding feelings that don’t fit.

  In order to survive in the church, you have to live on the surface. Every action is filtered and judged as good or bad and the depth of the reality is lost in the process. If you are vulnerable, you will have hands laid on you. People saying, “I’ll put you in my prayers,” because there is something wrong with you. There is something wrong with feeling that way. There is something wrong with you having those thoughts. There is something wrong with you being real with yourself. This forms a hard-surfaced layer, the only layer you can show. And you learn to live from it. (Johnnie)

  When the gastroenterologist told me I couldn’t be in as much pain as I claimed to be if I was smiling so much, it triggered something deep in me. The implication that I was a “bad girl” performing sickness for—what?—attention?—(when I was actually a “good girl” performing health)—was enough to shut me up for another year or so. I put less energy into getting better, and more energy into suffering better.

  In their book, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker write:

  I’ve heard stories of abuse and rape that break my heart—from ordinary kids. I counsel some of the religious kids, and the more attached they are to traditional ideas about Jesus, the more likely they are to think of their abuse as “good” for them, as a trial designed for a reason, as pain that makes them like Jesus. They are often in denial about the amount of pain they live with. It amazes me that they survive and appear so “normal.”5

  I am quite certain that almost anybody who knew me in those years would have called me normal. I don’t think that anyone had the slightest suspicion of just how much pain I was in, including my parents. Though my mom was concerned, and pushed me to continue seeing doctors, even she didn’t know that—two years after seeing the doctor in Australia—the pain had grown so bad that I was taking up to five ibuprofen before my first-year college classes. Or that by the start of spring break that first year of college, I was bleeding what I remember to be a quarter-cup of blood and intestinal lining at a time into the toilet. Or that in the middle of spring break, I had lost so much blood that I tumbled off of the toilet and onto my college dorm’s bathroom floor. I managed to pull my pants up but I was too weak to stand or even get back onto the toilet to continue bleeding into it. I heard my friend Sebastian’s voice in the hall and called out to him. When he entered, he discovered me curled in a ball in front of the toilet. Helping me to my feet, he called a cab and together we went to the emergency room.

  Crohn’s disease—which was my ultimate diagnosis—is the immune system’s failure to recognize the presence of food and stool in the intestines as normal. The disease tricks the immune system into thinking these essential entities are bad. Attempting to protect the person from the food and stool the body must process in order to survive, the immune system attacks the intestines, making itself the thing that the person really needs protection from (in the same way that those who use shame to “protect” people from natural aspects of themselves, such as their sexuality, can inadvertently become the thing from which the person actually needs protection).

  So while my mind told my guts to shut up, to not be such a bother, my immune system attacked them physically. Neither my mind nor my immune system understood at the time that every part of us is a part of us. That we cannot separate our bodies from our spirits from our minds from our hearts. We are one entity.

  The gastroenterologist at the hospital the day that Sebastian took me to the emergency room took one look at me and said, “You’re really sick, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re white as a sheet, your eyes are dark, and if you’re losing as much blood as you say you are, we have to get you in the hospital right now,” he continued.

  I was so relieved I started to cry on the spot. For the first time, somebody saw me. And somebody gave me permission to see myself. Permission to admit I was suffering. Permission to ask for help. Permission I was not yet able to give to myself.

  After several weeks in two hospitals, another gastroenterologist determined the medications the first gastroenterologist gave me weren’t working. In a very frank discussion, he told my mother and me that they could continue to try medication but that the disease had gotten so out of control that my intestine could perforate at any moment, which could kill me.

  “Before you decide to do surgery, though,” he told me, “I want you to know you’ll have a long, ugly scar. For a young woman, I know this can be difficult.”

  A scar? I thought. Who cares about that? What? I’m going to die because of vanity? Please. I am a woman of the spirit, not of the flesh alone.

  “Let’s do the surgery,” I said flatly.

  We did it the next morning.

  Afterward, my surgeon told me that my large intestine had been so ravaged by my immune system that it had nearly fallen apart in his hands. It was as though someone had scraped the entrails with a Brillo pad, he said. None of it could be saved. My surgeon was one of the best in the country, but there was so much disease in my belly during the time of the surgery that infection had spread. In the weeks afterward, the pain grew worse, at some points becoming so severe that I would shake uncontrollably, my teeth banging against
one another as I pressed a button to release painkillers into my bloodstream again and again. One surgery became two, became three. Each night, I bled the bed the way children pee theirs, blood from my unhealed intestine pouring out of my anus. I would wake and press a button for my nurse, who would come in with a sad look on his or her face and say, “Did it happen again?” before lifting me out of the pool of blood in my bed, changing my sheets, my blankets, and my hospital gown, and placing me lightly back in. One nurse tried placing a bedpan beneath me while I slept to catch the blood but lying on it bent my body back, tearing at my wounds. Another tried dressing me in diapers, but the blood ran out the edges, pooling beneath me again. Finally, the Kegel exercises they had taught me began to work and my anal muscles grew strong enough to hold the blood in, even while I slept. And after nearly a month in the hospital, they sent me home.

  * * *

  The first stumbling block those raised as girls in the purity movement must overcome is the message that if you are suffering, it’s your fault: It may be your sin; it may be your psychosis; but it is certainly not the shaming system you find yourself in. When taken to heart, this message can make us miss—or, when we do see it, dismiss—our suffering, until one day, it’s too late.

  Christianity has a long history of glorifying gore and gorifying God. At the center of the Christian religion is the story of a bodily anguish so terrible that it saved the world. After all, according to most evangelicals, even Jesus, who lived a perfect life, did less good with his life than he did with his death. It was Christ’s torment, not his joy, that set us free. It was his death, not his life, that allowed us to enter Heaven. So when our bodies are beaten and our hearts broken, it is sometimes thought we reflect the perfect life of Christ, whose pain and death is the hinge upon which God’s plan for the world turns. The more God allows us to suffer, the more opportunity he gives us to be like him and prove our unshakable devotion to him.