Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  My mother said God had blessed Brother Terrell for all of his years of hard work and sacrifice. She became his ghostwriter, and her monthly articles always appeared in his magazine under his byline. It was in one of these articles that Brother Terrell, through my mother’s words, laid claim to the prophetic mantle. He dressed all in black for tent services and fasted for months at a time. Jesus, God, and the devil spoke to him. He prophesied earthquakes, bombings, plagues of locusts, famine, war in the streets, the numbers 666 stamped across foreheads as well as hearts and minds. I watched people scribble his every word into spiral notebooks. The turbulence of the sixties and seventies lent credibility to his prophesies.

  No one questioned Brother Terrell for fear of divine retribution. They believed he was God’s anointed, a pure and holy man. They did not know about his relationship with my mother or the three daughters he had fathered with her. I was twelve when my first sister was born and fifteen when the twins came. I asked my mother how she would keep these girls a secret and what she would tell them as they grew up. She gave me the same answer Brother Terrell had given her: Jesus will come before then.

  We left the babies with a neighbor when we attended Brother Terrell’s revivals. Over time the atmosphere under the tent shifted from celebratory to ominous. Brother Terrell stripped off his shirt onstage and ordered the men who worked for him to beat him with a belt. There is a price to be paid, he said. I watched the audience wail and cry and rock in their seats, arms folded across their chests and stomachs. I cried too, for him, my family, myself, for all of us.

  Oddly enough, during the prophetic period our home life was the most normal it had ever been. We lived in the same house and I went to the same school for three years. Brother Terrell ranted against the evil of the World, but, compared to the tent revivals and our personal lives, the world seemed like a tame and friendly place. The families of the kids I went to school with seemed like good people. I liked the way their parents knew things, the names of trees and birds and past presidents. I liked the way their knowledge infused the world and the things in it with a sense of importance and permanence. My family valued the invisible over the material, dreams and visions over reality, the spiritual over flesh and blood.

  In my early teens I spent hours walking the land around my mother’s home. I watched morning break over the pasture and scatter light this way and that. I watched the sun withdraw in the evening, its long golden light caressing the grasses as it went. I watched the birds rise and wheel above me in a single sweep of motion. If I looked at something long enough, the veil that separated me from it fell away. There was no I. There was no it. There was only connection. This experience first came to me in early childhood when one of the caretakers my mother left me with locked me out of the house for hours each day. I found in that solitude what evaded me under the tent and in church—the ability to slip the bounds of my own self-consciousness. And yet, it was not so much an annihilation of the self as an affirmation of belonging. I began, without realizing, to think of these experiences as sacred.

  I still believed Brother Terrell knew the Will of God and that his ministry was divinely ordained. But the questions that had always been with me grew louder as I got older. Questions about the nature of God and his will and the nature of Brother Terrell and his relationship with my mother. Why did God demand everything dear to us? Why was it okay for Brother Terrell to accumulate wealth when he told his followers to give up their possessions? Why was it okay for my mother and Brother Terrell to live as they did? No matter how hard I prayed, the questions and the doubts they brought would not go away.

  Meanwhile the Terrellites were preparing for the end-times. Thousands of them moved to backwaters across Texas and the South, designated by Brother Terrell as Blessed Areas. These places would provide the only safety during the apocalypse, which was imminent. My mother announced that we too would soon move closer to one of the Blessed Areas. I didn’t know much about who I was or who I would become, but I knew I couldn’t move to the middle of nowhere to wait for the world to end. Especially since everything in me was still waiting for it to begin.

  I took the only way out. I married. My husband was twenty-three and the second-smartest student in his law school class. I was fifteen. After the wedding, my mother and family moved away. I did not know their whereabouts for a time. My mother said the secrecy helped ensure their safety during the apocalypse. For me, there was isolation. There was grief. There was a longing for my own kind. God, my family, Brother Terrell, the tents, the Terrellites, and everything I knew were tangled in a single knotty reality that felt like home. I could not leave one without leaving the other.

  I attempted on occasion to rejoin the Terrellites. My husband and I attended a revival where we met a woman with a young son who seemed genuinely deaf. Brother Terrell prayed for the boy and he heard. This miracle turned us into believers for a time. Then all the old questions returned. The constant internal interrogation of everything I had been taught was true caused a rift in my soul that would not heal. I experienced my lack of faith as a character flaw, and I hated myself for it. I turned that hatred on my husband, and we divorced. Life became one long alcohol- and cocaine-fueled party. I contracted an illness doctors could not identify, and, after months of fevers and aches and unexplained weight loss, I went back to the tent. Brother Terrell prayed for me, and I woke up well the next morning.

  Jesus tells a story in the New Testament about the deaths of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man goes to hell and begs God to send Lazarus from heaven to warn his brothers to change their ways so that they too will not end up in torment. God replies that the testimony of the dead is not enough to convince an unbeliever. And so it was that the magic of miracles could not compel me to stay.

  It would be easy to say I left the Terrellites because of my mother’s abandonment, the deceit and money grubbing, the harsh and uncompromising view of God. These are reasons people understand, and no doubt they played a part. But in the end these reasons are simply pieces of the story. I have come to understand that a large part of why I left, why I was always leaving, was not because of anything my mother or Brother Terrell did, but because of who I was. Or rather who I wasn’t. What I am talking about here is a vision, a vision that haunted, inspired, and remained with me through years of agnosticism that nonetheless found me kneeling in an Episcopal church from time to time and sitting zazen in a corner of my room. It is a vision of the tent, stretched out along the outskirts of town where the trash and outcasts congregate. She opens her grimy canvas wings and pulls them under, old and young, black and white, poor and poorer. They clap and dance and wave their arms. They jabber like idiots and smile like angels. The differences that drive them apart fall away. They are, for a few hours, one people. It is always them, never me. I am on the outside watching. This is where I will make my home. This is where I belong.

  Separation

  Colleen Haggerty

  Mom reads me the acceptance letter to Western Washington University. The relief in her voice is palpable. This was what we both hoped for when I mailed in my application two months ago. But now, in my medicated daze, I can only mimic her smile, and wonder if college is even possible anymore.

  A few days later, my drama teacher, Miss Tarr, visits me in the hospital with my script for Funny Girl. On the last day before Christmas vacation, I’d quickly scanned the casting list in the hallway near the drama department. Next to MRS. STRAKOSH my name was penciled in! I spent winter break thrilled with the thought of a singing role in a musical. But now I know I can’t be in the play. Still, here is Miss Tarr, smiling, eyes determined, like she is doing me a favor. How can they expect so much from me? College? Acting? Everything has changed.

  The car accident has ripped more from me than half my leg; it has torn my picture-perfect future into shreds. This accident is worse than when my father suddenly drowned four years ago. Even though that hurt more than anything I’d ever felt, my Catholic faith taught me to believe
that death was simply “God’s will.” God wanted Dad with him. It was his time. But why would God do this to me? The stirrings of deep anger roil in my gut.

  I turn my gaze down to my stump. Yes, this is the name that doctors, nurses, and now I call the remainder of my leg. Only those of us with appendages that have been whacked off, like a fallen tree, get the honor of using this ugly term to describe a part of our own bodies. The small stump under the white blanket ends too quickly. Enclosed in rolls and rolls of casting material it is too wide. This lump makes me sick, and I’m sure it’ll make everyone else sick. I turn my eyes away.

  The word stump reminds me of a tree outside our kitchen window at home. Native Americans once cleared the land and left a stump, which serves as a prized reminder of their existence before our arrival. I feel a kinship with that lost tree. I wonder if it was as painful for the tree to be whacked by an axe as it was for me to be hit by a car. The tree stump is buried, camouflaged by salal, and it’s actually pretty now. My stump will never be that pretty. I will never be that pretty.

  WHEN MY FRIENDS VISIT me three days later, I notice how they force themselves to look at my face. I sense their morbid curiosity, their desire to gaze at the remainder of my leg, the small bump hidden under the bed covers.

  “Did you hear about David and Sandy?” Karen asks. Karen and I have been friends since sophomore year, when we met in our first play together. “They broke up!” Leslie, another friend from the drama department, chimes in, “I heard David is really bummed about it, but Sandy acts like she doesn’t care.” David and Sandy are the golden couple of the senior class. I listen as my friends report on the couple’s latest crisis, but it seems trivial and meaningless. Their words sound like the schoolteacher in the Charlie Brown comics: “Wah-WAH, wah-WAH, wah-WAH.” I smile, nod my head, and laugh when they laugh, but I feel as disconnected from them as my leg is from my body.

  I am grateful that Glen hasn’t visited me and I hope he doesn’t. I’ve had a crush on him since my first play sophomore year. We’ve had fun together hanging out backstage with the cast, but we’ve never spent time alone. I’ll be mortified if he sees me in the hospital looking like this. Nobody mentions him, and I don’t ask. But secretly I’m curious to know if he’s heard about my accident. Does he care? I’ve spent hours fantasizing about him, but . . . If he didn’t think I was cute before, he certainly won’t now.

  As I lie in my hospital bed later that night, frustrated and forlorn, I weep, feeling separate and alone. Gail, a kind nurse, hears me whimpering and comes into my room. “I’ll listen,” she says softly.

  “They all feel so far away and in another world. They don’t understand what I’m going through.” She explains that my friends are too immature for me now and that they can’t understand. This doesn’t help me. I don’t want to be the mature one. I don’t want my friends to have to “understand” me. That is for grown-ups. I just want to be a senior in high school. I want to turn back the clock a week and replay the whole scene. Take two. In this scene I don’t get hit by the car. I go back to school the next day and I gossip about my classmates, take my tests on time, and show up for rehearsal.

  MY EYES POP OPEN and it is dark. The hospital is cold and quiet save for the distant hum of this huge edifice working around the clock. Flowers pack my room, masking the antiseptic odor. I don’t need to look at the clock; I know what time it is. I’ve been here for a week, waking up every morning at 3:00 AM to stabbing pain and an incessant deep ache that begs for another dose of medication. I still insist it be given to me by injection instead of orally. The act of taking a pill, putting it in my mouth, holding a cup of water, and swallowing requires too much effort.

  I lie with my arms bent at the elbow, hands resting palm-up beside my ears, as if in surrender. I can’t sleep any other way. The cast digs painfully into my crotch, and any attempt to readjust my position serves as a nauseating reminder of my missing leg. It is unnatural and disturbing how nearly weightless the absence of my leg feels now. The doctors tell me I lost about twelve pounds of leg. I am reminded of how it feels after a long hike carrying a fifty-pound backpack. When you reach camp and take off the pack the sudden lightness of your body is a relief, but now that weightlessness does not feel like relief, it just reminds me that part of me is missing.

  I look out the window at the Space Needle decorated with Christmas lights. For the first time in my life, a twinge of uncertainty and doubt about my faith surfaces. All of my life, the story of Christ’s salvation has sustained and comforted me—especially since my dad’s death. Now I feel Jesus has betrayed me.

  It isn’t fair. I’ve been the “good girl”—reliable, responsible. And, for the past six months, I’ve dutifully gone to Mass every day before school with my mom. I praise God every morning; I love Jesus and try to emulate him. I adore Mary’s quiet strength and want to be as pure and chaste as she was. I’m proud of my Catholic upbringing and my Good Girl status. To my high school friends, I’ve gallantly referred to myself as Colleen Wait-Until-Wedding-Night Haggerty. Everyone laughed when I said this, but we all knew that I meant it.

  The reward of a good life will come, I’ve been promised—it will come. But this is no reward.

  These new feelings of uncertainty and doubt leave me with a tight panic in my chest. Maybe there’s no reward for me because I’m actually being punished! There’s a boy in my choir class with a deformed hand. The first time I noticed it, my stomach lurched, and I had to keep the bile from exploding from my mouth. I can’t bring myself to sit next to him, let alone talk with him. Whenever I find myself near him, I am certain that his deformed hand smells like a garbage dump on a summer’s day.

  Then there was the time when I was in fifth grade and I volunteered at a home for the physically disabled. The first time I went there I was assaulted with the stale, disgusting odor that permeated the house. With a mixture of awe and disgust I watched a man with shortened arms play the piano. Another resident, a young woman with a huge, warm smile, had arms and legs that were so deformed she scooted around on a gurney. Like most of my recent visitors have done, I focused on her face so I didn’t have to see how distorted her body was. It was the only way I could keep myself from throwing up. Just before I was scheduled to return there, I got appendicitis, and that ended my volunteer job. I was racked with guilt at the relief I felt that I didn’t have to go back. Yes, God is probably punishing me for my sin of being disgusted by other people’s deformities.

  My faith assured me that my relationship with my dad was not over when he died, it had merely changed. Although I missed him terribly, my faith in his altered existence allowed my life to carry on without him. But this tragedy is different. How can my life possibly go on now with a part of myself missing?

  If I learned anything from Dad’s death, it is that God is calling the shots. What happens to us here on Earth is determined, not by fate or by chance, but by God’s will. God makes the decisions and I’m supposed to accept them.

  Right now, this isn’t good enough for me. I feel buried by anger, crushed by doubt, and overwhelmed by panic. God’s decisions don’t make any sense. I stifle the desperate need to yell, at the top of my lungs, “FUCK YOU, GOD!” This is what going to Mass every day gets me? This is what saying no to the wrong crowd means? As long as I obey you, stay a virgin, go to confession, don’t swear, obey my mom . . . Well, it’s a long list, but as long as I do it all, I’ll be rewarded. Right? If this is my reward, no thanks! And why me? God doesn’t ruin the lives of other people who keep fewer rules than I do. I bet David and Sandy have had sex and it doesn’t look like God has punished them, I almost say out loud. This isn’t fair and it isn’t right!

  I don’t even care that I might be committing a sin just by thinking these blasphemous thoughts.

  I LIE AWAKE A long time fretting. I worry about acting in the play, I worry about walking around a college campus and I worry about how my relationships will change. One fear about my future in particular nags at me:
What man will ever want me now? I don’t know a lot about sex; I have only kissed a few boys and still consider that icky. But I know that during sex I will be naked. I know that legs wrap around bodies in moments of passion, and I’ll have only one leg to do the wrapping. Who will ever want to make love to me now? I imagine a disgusted husband on our wedding night, seeing my ugly body for the first time. I imagine myself in his shoes. If I were him, I would want to know what I was saying yes to for a lifetime.

  In the dark on my seventh night in the hospital I come to an agonizing but practical decision, and I decide to tell my mom about it. My stomach tightens as I remember a conversation a few years ago when Mom assured my sister and me that she and Dad were virgins on their wedding night. I know she’ll be disappointed by my decision. All I’ve ever wanted is for her to be proud of me.

  In the morning, Mom comes in for breakfast. With me in my wheelchair, we sit near the window of my hospital room, which overlooks the steeples of the nearby Catholic church. The gray January light streams through the window, filling the room with the same heaviness that rests in my heart. Her eyes look at me with a mixture of sorrow, strength, and pain. They let me know I can share my thoughts and, at least right now, I won’t be admonished. She sits next to me, holding my hand.