Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  When we reached a point where I was sure we were lost, Adam suggested we build a fire. It made no difference to him whether we knew where we were going or how long we would be there. The air was taking on a chill, and if it weren’t for the moon lighting our way through the ancient foliage, we would have been in total darkness.

  Adam expertly built a fire in the shape of a pyramid and filled it with dry leaves and twigs. The flames rose quickly and cast a flickering orange light across his somber face. I reflected on how, as a child, Adam had been so carefree. He would run around the bonfires we built in our garden in the autumn, waving sparklers and climbing a nearby oak to get a better look at the world. Now as I watched him, I wondered where all his exuberance had gone and felt sad that I could do nothing to help him retrieve his former self.

  Out of the silence, Adam sighed and looked toward me. “Sometimes I think I can only get better with you,” he said.

  His words seared like burning black embers in the pit of my stomach, while the cold night air began to bite at my fingers and nose. I knew he was sick, but Adam’s faith in my ability to help him scared me. How could I stay here with Adam and take care of him? I yearned to give my brother the stinging nettle suit that could set him free to live a life like other men. I imagined him with a wife, laughing and playing with children of his own. But as much as I wished for this, I didn’t know how to weave that fairy-tale ending. And besides, I had my own life to attend to: My new boyfriend, Richard, needed all of my attention to overcome his ambivalence about our relationship, and then there were my studies. I wanted to make a go of my own life, too.

  “How long do you want us to stay here?” I asked, wondering if we would find our way out through the night-darkened trees.

  “Forever,” he said.

  “I have to go back to London tonight, Adam,” I said, fearing that if I didn’t return, Richard would end up spending the night with someone else. I couldn’t let that happen.

  Resigned, Adam extinguished the fire with a layer of damp leaves. His six-foot frame bent and stretched with the gentleness of an oak. As the last flicker of fire glinted in his moss-colored eyes, I turned and walked back out of the woods and down the hill.

  Later that night, as my bus pulled away, I watched Adam’s lanky form shrink into the distance, the moon still glowing above him. I didn’t know when I would see him again. My hunger for the nobility of the swan sister was matched only by my desire for the intimacy I was building with Richard. Between brief moments of satiation was an almost constant yearning. I felt as brittle and disposable as a doll.

  FOR YEARS ADAM CONTINUED the cycle of hospitalization or incarceration, followed by escape. When he was free, he sometimes grew his hair and beard long like Jesus. At other times, he shaved his head and wore white robes like a Buddhist monk. Occasionally I encountered him on London’s street corners meditating, dancing, or begging—and, each time, the sight of him so vulnerable made my heart ache. During this period, I worked hard at my life. I graduated from East London University and attended a postgraduate film course at Saint Martin’s. I cowrote and made a film with Richard, then made two more films with other friends.

  One of these films would indirectly change my life. It was a documentary called Soul Searching and was about what the human soul might look like if we could see it. An interviewee we spoke with for the film was a German man named Roderich, a teacher at the Principle Life Study Centre in London. I had no idea what the Centre was or what its members believed. I only knew that when we arrived to interview Roderich, an international group of wholesome-looking young people invited us to stay around after our conversation and discover the true meaning of life. My friends were suspicious, so we left right away. But I was curious. Something about Roderich and the young people at the Centre tugged at me, and I promised myself I’d return.

  A week after we finished editing Soul Searching, I saw Roderich passing out business cards in front of a minimart on Charing Cross Road where I had often encountered Adam meditating in his robes late at night. Roderich stood under the same streetlight where I had last seen my brother just a few days earlier. And although Roderich looked nothing like Adam, and wore a beige trench coat and a secret agent hat instead of Adam’s signature white flowing robes, to me he represented something I was missing—or someone. With his prominent brow, jutting cheekbones, and chapped lips, Roderich looked determined, as if his mission was so important that he had not stopped to even drink water for days. (I later learned he had been fasting for a week.) His dedication impressed me, and I felt amused at God’s sense of humor leading Roderich here to the last spot where I had seen Adam. Despite my friends’ derision of Roderich, I could not help but feel drawn to him. My stomach tingled at the sight of him there, a spiritual teacher who potentially held answers to my deepest questions. I had to speak to him. Excitement and fear sparred in my chest as I felt something profound was about to happen.

  “What a coincidence to see you here,” I said as I approached. “We’ve just finished editing Soul Searching and we ended the film with one of your comments—the part where you said the soul wasn’t something hovering around in space, but what exists within the love we share with each other right here and now.”

  Roderich moved more directly into the beam of the streetlight and gazed at me.

  “You must come to study,” he said in his carefully measured English. “I have many more things to say to you. This is a sign from God that you meet me here now.”

  “I’ll come soon,” I laughed nervously, actually not intending to do so. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone with him in his mysterious study center. Still, something about this man, his German accent, his tattered devotion to his post in front of the market, and the way he looked at me, drew me in.

  “Come tomorrow,” said Roderich. “Tell me what time and I will meet you at the Centre.”

  THE NEXT DAY, I turned up at the Study Centre at 1:00 PM. Roderich led me to a room where I watched a short video that basically introduced me to the idea that following my own desires wouldn’t make me happy because, as the Bible says in Galatians 5:17, “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”

  The words in the video resonated with me. As I thought about it more, it struck me that my own desire for my boyfriend had interfered with my more spiritual desire to help my brother. I longed for the strength to make more selfless choices in my life.

  After the video finished, Roderich invited me to discuss it with him. We walked up a spiral staircase to a pink-and-white room with tête-à-tête round tables and bright windows. As we started talking, Roderich expressed such interest in me that I found myself pouring my heart out. Among the many things I told him, I shared that I didn’t know what love was, and that I did not understand why people lost their minds.

  “My brother said that he could only get better with me,” I said, searching Roderich’s face for an answer to the question that haunted me: Could I help Adam?

  “When your brother says you can make him better, he is right,” said Roderich. “If you dedicate your life to God, He will heal your brother.”

  My heart thudded against my ribs so hard that I felt the vibrations right up to my throat. Could I take back the selfishness of the night when I had walked away from Adam in the forest? My decision that night ate at me constantly. Could I fulfill my dream of seeing my brother happy and free the way I remembered him as a child? My eyes clouded over as I struggled not to cry, but Roderich didn’t look away.

  The mysterious German’s gray eyes bore through to the back of my head. I had never experienced such intense focus from a man who clearly was more interested in my soul than my body. When Roderich spoke to me, he looked only at my face and seemed to have all the time in the world to listen to me. I began to feel that the Study Centre was home to a different and purer kind of love than what I had known.

  For the nex
t ten days I returned to the study center. I watched videos about the purpose of Creation, the fall of man, and the parallels of history. From these videos—which were based on a philosophy called the Divine Principle—I learned the Study Centre’s answers to the big questions posed on the ivory business cards the members handed out in the street. Is there a spiritual world? Does true love exist? Why do the innocent suffer? Will Christ come again? I loved the Divine Principle theory, which says we are all destined to live for the sake of others and create perfect, everlasting families. I felt I had been leading a selfish life, and I longed to turn that around. The possibility that I could actually do so filled me with new hope.

  By only my second visit to the Principle Life Study Centre I started to feel an infusion of bliss while watching the videos. When I put on the headphones and listened to the lectures, I felt like angels were holding their hands above my heart and hugging me with pure loving energy. After years of yearning for intimacy, I started to imagine that I could experience ecstasy even without touch.

  By the third day, I felt safe only within the doors of the Principle Life Study Centre. The moment I walked inside, I felt sated and complete. When I left, I felt alone and separate from those still inside, who were quickly becoming my surrogate family. It was as if an invisible thread bound me to the Study Centre and pulled me back whenever I stepped away. The people inside were innocent, open, and interested in me as a soul—not because they wanted anything from me. They didn’t care if my films were good or if I was an accomplished artist or if I was pretty. These new friends liked me purely for my heart. They saw me as a vessel who could carry out God’s will. Inside, I didn’t have to strive; outside my life consisted of an unfaithful boyfriend, a brother I couldn’t heal, and, with the completion of Soul Searching, the dissolution of creative connections with friends I had been working with for the past two years.

  I started to feel that if I could do what God wanted me to do, I would no longer be judged by Him or by other people, because I would no longer have to figure out the difference between right and wrong. God would tell me through His words and I would simply follow.

  This, I believed, was my chance to save my brother as he had asked me to do that night in the forest. And—with all my connections so tenuous now—this was my opportunity to belong to a new family, one that would never reject me, as long as I followed the rules. The feeling of relief was enormous.

  On my tenth day of studying, I learned the answer to the Centre’s most important question: Will Christ come again?

  The answer? Yes. He already has come. In the book of the Revelation, an angel came from the East carrying the seal of the living God. Therefore, the Messiah would arrive in the East, in an Asian country. We were told he could not appear in Japan because the Japanese had started too many wars, nor in China because they were Communists, so he would come to Korea. Actually, he had already come to Korea.

  While it seemed like a jump in logic that the Messiah was living somewhere in Korea, I had read from studying the Divine Principle that the human heart—when connected to God—could possess a “knowledge” greater than logic. And as the mindless ecstasy I felt while watching the videos was as powerful as any drug I had tried—and having no explanation for this other than the possibility that what I was learning was true and right—I chose to suspend my disbelief.

  Anyway, what did I have to hold on to outside of these new teachings? If believing the Messiah had returned to Earth via Korea was all I had to do to become a better person and save my brother, I could do that. I could put my questions and my logic aside.

  AFTER A WEEK OF study, I asked Roderich how I could do God’s will. What did God require of me?

  “Give up everything you own, Yolande. Come and live with us. Pray for your brother every day, and the spiritual world will heal him.”

  These were exactly the words I needed to hear. It was as if I had swallowed a large effervescent tablet, like a slot machine was wrought into action. I gulped and felt the fizz fill my chest as my cogs began to turn. Now I knew my purpose. I was eager to leave behind my life of striving for the trappings of success in a world that changed whenever I began to understand it. I wanted to give up art and romance—which now seemed like myths to me—and live my life for the sake of others. Here was my chance to become the fairy-tale swan girl who saved her brother through years of pain and sacrifice. I believed God had prepared me for this moment of decision since girlhood. I believed I had been exposed to my brother’s suffering so I would become determined to work toward the healing of all the world’s mentally ill. Didn’t Jesus tell one young man if he gave everything to the poor he would find “treasure in heaven?” I loved the concept of giving everything away, of just being a raw human available to do the will of God. Besides, if what I’d been learning was true and we had to create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in three years, there was no time to hesitate.

  “I’ve decided to move in,” I told Roderich the next day.

  AFTER AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP the following day, my membership was approved. A day later I arrived at the church center with just a small duffel bag. Within eleven days of accepting Roderich’s first invitation to study, I’d left behind my brand-new apartment along with all my ambitions, friends, and family. On inspection by my elder sisters and Spiritual Father, most of the contents of my bag were discarded, since my clothes weren’t modest enough and my books “belonged to Satan.” Thus, stripped down, I began my new life.

  EACH DAY FOR ME as a new initiate was scheduled from early morning until lights-out. I awoke at 5:00 AM to catch a bus at 6:00 that carried me from our house in West London to a 7:00 AM meeting across town in the Study Centre. After each meeting, I was sent out to beg for money until 7:00 PM. In our morning sermons, I learned that every penny given to God was a penny snatched from Satan, and that we should use any means necessary to procure as much money for God as possible. “Any means” included “Heavenly Deception,” or even stealing if we could do it without being caught. Acquiring money was how we supported the building of the Kingdom of Heaven. Even though I knew the church had multiple businesses, it never occurred to me this money might actually help pay the substantial bills of the church’s real estate around the world.

  My devotion to the church and my desire to save my brother kept me going all day every day with barely any breaks. From my starting point at the Study Centre each morning, I asked for contributions from everyone I encountered as I moved about the city. Carnaby Street and anywhere in the London Underground were particularly lucrative spots. While holding out my One World magazine, I asked every person who passed me for a donation for homeless children. Although this line wasn’t strictly true, I justified the “homeless children” claim by telling myself that all people were homeless children until we created the Kingdom of God on Earth.

  We were allowed £2 each day for lunch, but in order to save all my earnings for the church sometimes I took discarded fruit from a street market, and once I took a bag of chips from a garbage can.

  Every night before going to bed, I took a cold shower to punish myself for having lusted after men in the past. Some nights I was so tired I fell asleep in the middle of my bedtime prayers. One such night, a sense of ecstasy awoke me deep in the middle of the night. As my sisters slept around me, my heart radiated with love that pulsed in and out simultaneously. The sensation was so powerful it seemed to beam like a floodlight to the farthest corners of the room. I believed this was God’s love—and proof I was in the right place. My last thoughts before falling asleep again were prayers for a healthier, happier world, and for my brother to be cured.

  Roderich said God gave me this feeling to encourage me to continue living this life, and I felt sure he was right. For once in my life, I was never alone. I was working toward a better world. Moment by moment, I became more attached to my new persona and more divorced from my old self. I now wore garments that covered my neck, arms, and legs for modesty, and shaved my head to evict the
spirits that my House Mother told me were clinging to it. I gave myself to all of this wholeheartedly.

  ALTHOUGH I HAD LEFT my old life behind, I was reminded of it at times. Occasionally when I was out begging I encountered friends I used to know. I ignored them completely and walked around the streets of London in a state of spiritual bliss, certain that—with each penny I received—I was transferring the world’s power back to the good side.

  Once, an old friend saw me begging. She approached me but I turned away. In despair she fell down and grabbed my ankles.

  “Yolande, don’t go back to those people,” she pleaded. But by then I was certain I was one of “those people”—and my past friends and family were not a part of my new life.

  I walked away from my friend, ignoring her tears, believing her to be trapped in a Satanic realm to which I, thankfully, no longer belonged.

  SINCE EARLY CHILDHOOD, I had longed for a fairy-tale world where families lived happily ever after and even one small girl could change reality for the better. The girl in “The Six Swans” stayed silent despite the burning nettle stings she received while sewing her brothers’ suits. In the years to come, I too would withstand pain without a word of complaint. I would overlook shocking facts about Reverend Moon and the Unification Church. I would strive to give up my personal desires, expectations, and beliefs. And I would stay the course, making allowances for divine necessity, certain that my brother would be healed. My only concern during all this was my fear that, like the girl in the story, I wouldn’t finish in time—and that Adam would be left with one snowy white wing hooking him to his enchantment forever.