lengeman-temp

[lengeman-temp]

Essay

*It was a central tenet of my family’s religion that I deserved to die. *

There. Is that the sentence that starts my story? Certainly, no sentence can better describe my life. But perhaps there are other sentences that explain more.

* My father beat me half to death, then sent me out into the world to finish the job on my own.*

There’s another sentence. A bit of a one-liner. A zinger. Try to be clever. A bit of a joke. That was the way my memories handled the awfulness. Could I squeeze my entire childhood into a sentence? Less than twenty-five words? That’d be nice. Then I’d only have to think about it for about ten seconds. Find some humor in it. Bookends. A sentence that has a better beginning and end than my own life. 

The end. Of life. That’s what I fear every day. But I couldn’t see the beginning any better than the end. My brain wouldn’t allow that. It let me have a few one-liners. That was it. My childhood. My family. 

* In my father’s defense, Evangelical Christians in the 90s were obsessed with horror. *

Another good one. No. I told myself I’d stop defending him. Stop working so hard to figure out how I might think about it, so he’s not a monster. How it was something other than endless, aggressive cruelty. I tried so hard. For years. Decades. To have a family. To have a father. A mother. 

Who didn’t want me dead. 

Logically, at some point, I could be pretty sure they weren’t going to kill me. 

But it wasn’t about logic. It was about belief. Faith. 

There was death in my bones. There was fear, squeezing my lungs, every day. 

I deserved to die, and it was only a matter of time before everyone saw it. And the world would take whatever steps necessary to expose me to ridicule, punishment, suffering, and inevitably, death. 

How do you convince a child so completely that he deserves to die? 

So completely, that once he is an adult, logical and educated, he wakes up terrified almost every day? So that the days he is merely scared, he rejoices that he is not terrified?

You start with a verse. “The wages of sin is death.” That won’t do. So tame. Merely a precursor to the Good News of forgiveness. 

You must go further back. 

Deuteronomy 21:18-21. 

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

That was the verse my father quoted to me so many times. 

At 8 years old I didn’t know what a drunkard was. I had never tasted alcohol. I couldn’t be called a glutton. I ate what my mom served at dinner. 

But rebellious? She used that word a lot. So did he. 

Since I deserved death, the most vicious beating was a mercy. Less than I deserved. I tried to imagine so many times what it would feel like to be killed with stones. The beatings helped me know.

It can drive a person mad, trying to remember why they deserved such cruelty. It would be better if I had deserved it. Then I wouldn’t have cruel parents. I’d have just and appropriate parents. Parents who simply tried to beat the evil out of an evil child. But it’s hard to remember what made me so evil. 

I remember telling jokes in class. I was the class clown. That was disruptive. And rebellious. 

I remember erasing part of a bible verse on the blackboard in Sunday school. I wrote something about pizza. I was proud that I could make the “z” in cursive. I learned cursive in third grade. That’s how I know I was 8. Maybe nine at the oldest. That one time. I can’t date most memories. 

But no, the punishment, it happened every day, all week, all summer. The reports from teachers came only every few months. It’d be nice if it was someone else’s fault. Someone outside of my family. Like a teacher. I’ve tried so hard to remember what I did at home to deserve it. I can’t remember.

Sorry. I’ve strayed from the recipe that made me. 

Ingredient one: The verse about stoning a child. 

Is that enough? Oh no. That verse is cast aside easily, onto the heap of verses inconvenient in our modern times. Few can remain troubled by it for long. 

Ingredient two is essential: 

A two by four. 

A two by four is a piece of wood that is four inches wide and two inches thick. 

Get a two by four that is about 18 inches long. 

Cut off the corners at one end to make a handle that is about two by two. You can angle up at the end of the handle for aesthetic purposes, if you’d like. 

Amateurs may round the top corners, even the side corners. 

I was there to observe my father grow into an expert from his amateur days. You don’t want it rounded like an oar, though you may call it a paddle. 

The corners are good. Effective. 

Rough edges, splintered wood, these can assist. Sharp corners are superb. 

You can drill holes in it. For speed, like a fly swatter. This isn’t really an effective aerodynamic move, but it’s a good psychological move. A reminder that it is designed for maximum speed, and should never fall slowly.

While I was directly involved in observing my father’s growing expertise, I can’t claim to know all possible variations of this recipe. But I do know one variation that works quite well. To the above recipe, insert a large man, over six feet tall. 

Then add a small child, no older than six. To be most effective, the two by four really must be introduced by then. 

The beating starts with a lecture. It should be derisive. Mocking, almost jovial. The two by four, cut into a paddle, should be tossed into the air, flipped, and caught. Over and over again. If the paddle is dropped, perhaps even on the foot of the parent, don’t despair. Simply channel that additional anger toward the child. 

When the child is sufficiently confused and frightened and embarrassed, make the child lean against something. A bed will do. The child should be partially laying down. Face down. 

Then the large man should bring the paddle down with all his might onto the child. Again, and again. 

This should be repeated daily, or multiple times a day, for the next five or six years, before other methods must be employed. 

The child shouldn’t know what to expect. Sometimes the paddle falls two, three, or five times. Those are welcome and rare days, seemingly dropped in only to serve as a contrast to the true days. The real days. 

On these true days, which must come frequently, the father must abandon himself to the two by four, and let it fall and fall and fall. 

He must use muscle strength. The board must fall swiftly, to strike the child with great force. 

The general target may be the child’s bottom, but the force will drive the child in every direction, as much from the force of the blows as from the child’s involuntary shudders to escape the pain. 

The mind-numbing, overwhelming pain. 

As the board strikes the child on his back, legs, and sides, you must yell at the child to keep still, then tell the child that you have increased the duration of the beating as punishment for the child’s movement. In order for this to make sense, the father must pretend he has some idea how long it will take for the beating to last, for his rage to subside. 

The only restraint a parent need exercise is when the board begins to strike the head and neck, or the arms and hands as the child tries to shield himself. 

Bruises can’t be visible. The community supports the two by four, as long as they don’t have to think about the details. They’ll make up excuses for angry welts if they have to, but they’d rather not bother more often then necessary. 

When the child runs to the corner, trying to hide, return to the mockery, the yelling. 

Laugh at the child. It will reinforce how helpless they are. How much control you have over them. Use the board to point back at the bed where they must lay. 

Laugh when they ask how many. How many more blows will come? You can’t know, if you are doing it right. Until your arm tires. Until the board breaks. Until the void eating your insides has been sated for the moment.

The board will break, if you do it right. You will make more. You can brag to your friends about how many you’ve broken, and discuss which wood is hard enough to withstand the small body of your child. 

Don’t allow the child to reveal the effects of the beatings. Don’t allow them to lean off the edge of a chair, keeping pressure off of their worst bruises. Don’t allow them to limp.

This is practical, to avoid the judgment of others. Others outside of the community might get particularly meddlesome. 

But it’s also part of it. You control the child. You force them back into the pain. You don’t allow them any release. 

Not for years and years and years. And by then the torture has become part of them. Part of their essence. By the time you cut the last handle in the last two by four, that older child doesn’t even need the beating to feel pain. And as they grow even older, they would gladly return for a beating, daily again, if it would take away the terror that engulfs them every day. 

So, there it is. That’s the recipe, as far as I can tell. Two main ingredients, but the process is important. It can’t be rushed. 

It’s better as a one-liner, huh? No one likes it stretched out. 

* Like many boys, I followed in my father’s footsteps. He liked to convince me I deserved to die. I picked up the hobby when I was on my own. *

See- much nicer as a dark joke. No one wants the details.  

There are some optional elements. It helps if the father is a leader in a religious community. And if he teaches that the world is a frightening, wicked place that is full of danger. 

And what do you get? If the recipe is followed?

A man, if it can be called that, with the terror of a child. A terror that never leaves. A grown child, who fears the night, because nightmares come. 

A man who fears the morning, because the moment he leaves his bed he will unwittingly begin to commit terrible infractions that will lead to a terrible beating. Or, worse, he will spend his days trying to figure out the trick to avoid the inevitable consequences of existing, and then berate himself when he fails yet again to save himself from the terror.

If the child had realized sooner that there was no way to avoid a beating, maybe he could have realized it wasn’t his fault. That the father needed to beat. To strike a child. To hear a child’s screams. And the father wouldn’t be denied, no matter what the child did. 

You get a guy that starts to relax around lunch, but then begins to tense up again in the afternoon. The time when school would end, and the boy and the father would cross paths. 

A boy who fears dinnertime, that limbo that occurs either before or after a beating or, sometimes, in between two beatings.

You get a man who collapses into bed with an ounce of relief that a day has passed, that the beatings are over, but nervous that another day will come. 

You couldn’t go to bed early, as a child. That was tried before. That gets more mockery, being dragged out of bed, laughed at for thinking it would save you from a late beating. Better to leave bed as a safe place and not attempt to hide there too early. 

And what of religion? 

That was the point of it all, right? To instill in the boy the preeminence and essentiality of religion? Evangelical Christian religion. 

Well, back to that terror fetish. Yes, there were the weird movies. Before the popular and tame Left Behindseries, there were the older movies with demons and guillotines and the mark of the beast.

And the horror plays in churches. 

You did not grow up in my evangelical tradition if you never saw demons drag a screaming mother into hell while her terrified daughter cried and begged for her. Very dark and very loud plays. 

Satan mocked the girl. Much like my dad mocked me. 

“Mommy! Mommy! HAHAHAHA!”

But then Jesus came and the girl forgot about her mom. 

Jesus did me no such favors with my dad. Or my mom.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. My dad liked that verse too. Maybe it was as important as the stoning verse. He mocked those modern theologians who tried to equate fear with reverence or mere respect. 

My dad mocked a lot of people. 

My dad  wanted us to know the verse meant terror. 

Terror of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. 

And God was a father. Think of him like your own father.

God subjected Jesus to torture and death. 

Just like Abraham was willing to kill his own son. 

Just like my dad was willing to kill me. 

*A central theme in Christianity is that a parent must be willing to kill their child if God so orders. The devout remain ready to plunge knives into their children at a nod from the Lord. They may even begin the process in advance of any instruction, just to show their devotion. *

That’s better. 

My father was everywhere in religion. The pastor of our church. A chapel speaker  at my Christian schools, the years I wasn’t homeschooled. 

And my father heard from God. Maybe God spoke only to him. 

He admitted that there were some good prophets in the world, who wrote some pretty good things in his magazines and newsletters, but no one in his life, that he met in person, could hear the instructions of God. 

Not like he could. 

This is likely why he tended to drive away everyone in his life. 

And taught me to do the same. 

My memories tried hard to delete my mother. 

To find good memories to keep, to string them together as a whole. 

To pretend she didn’t have a role in the recipe that made me. 

I almost believed it. For a long time. Decades. Despite my siblings telling me otherwise. But we could only talk about it sometimes. We couldn’t really face it all. Just bits and pieces. 

One liners. 

Nine kids, half always in some form of shunning or ostracism. Blacklisted in the community. The others desperate to bow and scrape. To remain in good graces to the angry one who could hear from God and his trusted advisor, Mom. 

There were summers, and there was homeschool. Fifth grade, ten years old to eleven. 

For these times at least, it was my mom’s reports from the day that led to the beatings. 

And she created my real self-doubt. The sense that maybe the thoughts in my head were what made me evil, regardless of what I did. 

The self-doubt she sowed when she tried to convince me that good people choose not to do anything labeled “bad” by the church and also don’t even want to do those things in the first place. 

My real theological questions, sincere, and aimed at learning, were classified as rebellious. 

In hindsight, after an education in philosophy, psychology, and law, I can see that she really wanted to live in a world that was simple. Without nuance, everything right or wrong, no middle ground. 

All theological questions answered, and social issues established for all time. 

An inquisitive child was a danger to that world. 

She employed my father to beat it out of me. 

In our modern internet age, we are aware of the prevalence of conspiracy theories. Very strange and horrible beliefs that spread through some communities. Before the internet, many of these types of beliefs spread through churches, via books and newsletters and gossip. These beliefs were largely hidden from mainstream society, however such a thing is defined, until they burst through and involved the state, such as in the case of satanic ritual abuse prosecutions. 

My mother believed that there were real witches who had real contact with Satan and who were among us in our towns and cities. A strange visitor who came once or twice to church was potentially a witch or warlock trying to curse the congregation. My mother believed that there was a direct connection between Harry Potter and actual witches who actually existed and actually fought against us for the devil. 

Supplemental to these beliefs were a host of medical and financial beliefs. Multiple times, my parents were scammed out of money through some scheme based on these fringe beliefs. 

And I can look back and see that I was beat and beat and beat so that I would stop questioning a worldview that was riddled with dangerous nonsense. Not a Christian worldview, but a specific rural Pennsylvanian Germanic Republicanish superstitious judgmental folk religion based largely on Christianity.

So, did it work?

Well, I wanted to be good. So badly, I wanted to be good. I returned to church over and over. And though I had terror throughout my world, it was never so strong and overwhelming as in church. It was as if I had returned to the dungeon of torture that was my childhood. To the grand courtroom that sentenced me to humiliating and painful death. 

I tried different denominations, different formats. 

I didn’t have the language of trauma and panic attacks back then. I just knew there was a terror, a burning in my chest as I sat in church, a command in my body to run, to run until a safe place could be found. 

But I kept coming back. I wanted to be good. 

I wanted to pray. To worship. 

Even to a God that was a father. 

Who demanded fear first, as a precursor to wisdom. 

But my body recoiled in terror at the church door. And no wisdom seemed to blossom from it. 

Rather, there were a wealth of tales to describe the beings that cringe as the church draws near. A whole mythology defining those who shrink from a view of the cross. 

This is the defining characteristic of the wicked. 

Or of wicked beings and creatures. 

The vampires and devil spawn of myth.

I had exhibited a defining characteristic of wickedness: fear of the church. And I could not rid it from my body. 

The fear wasn’t an excuse. It couldn’t save me from the judgment of friends and family, as I shrunk away from the church. The rich tradition of shunning and ostracism was available for anyone who began to exhibit the traits of an unbeliever. By not showing up when they were required.

I still snuck in to empty churches to pray and meditate, sitting alone in a pew. It was easier if there was no one to judge me. I missed prayer. I missed a community of like-minded people. 

I missed my parents. Love and fear all mixed together. 

I wanted to be good. 

But good works, volunteering and helping others, can be an endless burden, if relied upon to prove one’s goodness. It’s never enough. Any moment not doing good is proof that you can’t do enough. A goal to be good always requires just 25 hours a day of good  work. 

Did I say I missed my parents? I did, didn’t I. 

Fear and love all mixed up together. Intentionally. 

Is that why I went back to them? Crossed back 3,000 miles across the country, gave up my geographical buffer against them, and returned to them?

When the pain of death wouldn’t leave my bones, when the fear was with me every day when I woke, I felt myself breaking. 

Maybe the mandate of the fear in me would only be sated if I did its bidding.  

I never got a guardian angel, just an evangelical minder to point out my dangerous shortcomings. 

Is that a one-liner? Should I put it in quotes? 

I came back to make peace with my parents, to see if that would make the mind-numbing pain and confusion in my mind and body to just stop. Even if they had been cruel and wrong, I needed an alternative to death. They had created my death mandate. Maybe they could help me make it stop. 

But redemption doesn’t come that way. The wicked must repent. 

For all my repentance and proclamations of forgiveness, I couldn’t change them. 

And I could see it, finally. Their wickedness. 

My parents were wicked. 

The cruelty. It wasn’t from God; it was from them. Themselves. 

Selfishness and anger and jealousy and greed. All of these things.

It is a weird thing to realize your parents are wicked, and will not repent. 

Especially when your dad was supposed to be the most righteous man alive. 

Particularly  when he repeatedly resists attempts to repent and find forgiveness. 

And once I admitted their wickedness, I saw that their brand of Christianity was not monolithic, as they had led me to believe. It was a collection of localized superstitions and conspiracy theories, not endorsed with any coherence in the greater Christian tradition. 

The closer I got to my parents, the more my body reminded me that I was destined for death, and only death. That I deserved to die immediately, though the universe would accept pain and humiliation as a temporary substitute to a sentence of death. 

And when a person’s entire being believes- knows- that that person deserves to die, the only sensible action is to fulfill that mandate. 

To die. 

It hurts, every day. 

The sentence of death. 

The fear, the pain. Terror. 

The minutes are so long, filling hours of unbelievable duration, and then days beyond. 

I didn’t have the words before. But now I do. I don’t like to say then, but I must. 

My parents make me suicidal. I like to think I’d never kill myself, but who can know such a thing? The closer I get to them the more convinced I am that I must die. That I do a favor to those in my life by removing myself from it. 

I wanted a big extended family so badly. But now I know that without my family in my life, I am not suicidal. That those beliefs are false. Nonsense. That I’m Ok, I think. That I can live, and deserve to live. 

I miss my siblings. It’s not totally their fault, not all of them. But I can’t see them. They are powerful conduits for the worldview trying to kill me.  And my parents have not tried to grow, or change, or abandon that worldview. 

I won’t go back again. I’ve felt so foolish coming back to them once. I might not survive another return. There are more efficient weapons than two by fours in this world. 

More efficient killing devices than stones. 

I don’t want my body to command me to look for these weapons. 

I don’t want my body to be an agent for a worldview that wants to kill me. 

There’s hope, but in a new direction. A direction I tried to take. But I never stopped looking back, and so I never made it down the new path before, but now I will.

I’m surprised to find that God may be there, ahead, more than he ever was when viewed through the lens of my father’s vanities. 

That I don’t need to recoil in fear at the door of the church. That my body isn’t broken. 

It was doing its job to identify danger, to send me in another direction. 

I don’t deserve to die. 

*I don’t deserve to die. *

I’m starting to believe that. It took four decades. But I’ll take it. And move forward. 

[lengeman-temp]

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