#we were forced to read and study the bible for a good fifteen years of our lives

[inkykeiji]

we’re rewatching hazbin hotel and my boyfriend genuinely just said to me ‘so like, who’s the boss of heaven?’

(๑•̌.•̑๑)ˀ̣ˀ̣ ……….sir we were raised roman catholic

[shirtlesssammy]

1x02: Wendigo

Then:

No Chick Flick Moments

Now:

In Blackwater Ridge, Colorado, three dudes enjoy the wilderness by gaming inside their tent. Something stalks their campsite from the shadows but the unattended fire that’s dangerously close to their flammable homes must be keeping it at bay, right? Erm, well, one dude heads out to the little boy’s room (a nearby tree) and gets snatched. 

Another one pops his head out the tent door and gets snatched as well. The third dude kills his light and watches the shadow of a very fast creature circle his tent until it slashes the side and snatches him as well. 

Palo Alto, California

Sam’s visiting Jessica’s grave. It really didn’t affect me the first time I watched this. It’s devastating to watch now though. Knowing Sam now --knowing how he doesn’t let people in, knowing how he didn’t even really let Jess in but loved her and wanted this world he could never have with her. Knowing that it’s fifteen years later and he’s had no one to really be with (Amelia was a construct of his damaged brain when forced to face the supernatural without Dean or Cas. I will not be taking questions at this time.) (But I guess he gets a blurry wife so ALLS GOOD FOR SAMMY.) He tells Jessica, “I should have protected you. I should have told you the truth.” Gah. Nothing could have saved her, and he has to go another fifteen years before he realizes this for good. 

Psych! He was actually dreaming, but I hold firm with my thoughts on the dream scene. 

Dean asks if Sam is okay. 

Sam says yes and clears his throat. Classic! Then Dean asks if Sam wants to drive for a while. GAH. Like, Dean’s looking out for his little bro in the only way he knows right now --letting him drive. 

They discuss leaving Palo Alto, and Dean points out that if they’re going to find the thing that killed Jess, they have to find their dad. He’s sending them to Colorado. Specifically to a National Forest in Lost Creek, Colorado. 

They get to the warden’s station and introduce themselves as Environmental Study majors from UC-Boulder. “Recycle, man.” Bbys. The ranger sees right through their bullshit though. He asks if they’re friends with “that Hailey girl.” Dean sees his chance to learn more and leans into it. Hayley apparently has a brother that’s on Blackwater Ridge. He isn’t technically missing but she knows something is up. 

Dean gets the brother’s camping permit. And now I need to process the next couple of lines. Sam asks if Dean wants a hook up with Hailey. Like, fuck you Sam for not knowing your brother at all, but also I guess you’re forgiven because your brother does do everything in his power to project that kind of energy. However, Dean is working the case and wants to know what they’re dealing with on this mountain. 

Dean and Sam head over to Hailey’s to ask her about her brother, Tommy. They say they’re rangers.

Hailey gets on Dean’s good side by complementing his car. Hailey tells the brothers that she feels something is wrong because Tommy checks in every day via his cell and satellite phone. Hailey’s heading out first thing in the morning to try and find him. 

Later at a bar, Sam “NERD” Winchester pulls out his extensive research on the area. People disappear on the ridge every 23 years. There was one survivor in 1959. They go to interview him. He tries to stick to the grizzly bear story, but eventually admits that they won’t believe him since no one else ever did. He said it moved fast and came into their cabin. It took his parents and left him with a horrible scar. 

The next morning, Sam and Dean meet up with Hayley, her brother Ben, and the guide, Roy. The guide is skeptical but Dean just wants to help find her brother. 

Cut to Tommy tied up in a cave. He wakes just in time to watch one of his friends get chomped to pieces by the monster. 

Dean and Roy try to out alpha each other. Roy finds a bear trap and saves Dean from a nasty injury. I’m over here wondering wtf that’s doing in the middle of a national forest. 

Hayley calls Dean out on their lack of provisions and wants to know who they are. He comes clean and tells her that they’re brothers looking for their father. But also, uh, Dean wearing jeans and boots is way more practical than SHORTS when hiking. Who wants to fuck around with ticks and poison ivy? All these years we thought Dean was just posturing about shorts when he was actually being a practical son of a bitch. 

They reach the ridge and hear absolutely nothing. Roy decides he’s going to wander off alone. Solid choice, dude. The rest stick together. Soon they hear Roy call for Hailey. They run to him. They find her brother’s destroyed campsite. They find tracks of where the bodies were dragged and Tommy’s destroyed phone.

They explore the campsite, which is torn to absolute bits. Dean tracks the struggle to just outside of the campsite, where the trail quickly grows cold. Everyone gets lured further into the woods by desperate cries for help but it gets them nowhere. When they return to the destroyed camp, Sam pulls out their dad’s journal and they use it to pinpoint the monster: it’s a wendigo. 

They hunker down for the night at the camp, and Dean protects them with Anasazi symbols drawn in the dirt. Soooooooooo in one breath you’re telling me that wendigo are found around the upper midwest / Canada, and in the next you’re telling me that the Anasazi (Southwestern/Western US) created widely-established protections against the wendigo? STARES DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA. The timelines! The geographic areas! Sigh...Supernatural ain’t ever had that good of a track record.

Dean tries to unpack Sam’s gourd. Sam doesn’t want to waste time hunting a wendigo when he can find their dad and hunt for what killed Jess instead. Dean holds out John Winchester’s journal like it’s a friggin’ (gags a little) bible and delivers the now-iconic line: “I think he wants us to pick up where he left off. You know, saving people, hunting things. The family business.”

Sam wants to know why John doesn’t just call his boys and give them an update - “It makes no sense.” OMG RIGHT, SAM? #JohnWinchester’sA+Parenting 

Dean tells Sam that helping other people and other families is what helps him make it through each day. We cry in Dean’s face a little, even when he immediately attempts to mask his empathy in his very next (also iconic) line: “Let me tell you what else helps. Killing as many evil sons of bitches as I possibly can.”

Pleas for help start to echo through the woods again. Roy fires indiscriminately into the trees and races after his prey, sight unseen. Hands grab him by the head and haul him up into the trees. Everyone else makes it through the night safely and Roy’s demise reminds us that toxic masculinity KILLS.

The next morning, Sam’s moodily staring at their dad’s journal while Dean chats with Haley about the hunt. 

For LOOK AT THIS BEAN Science:

We get info-dumped a truly mixed bag of lore, attributing wendigo tales to the Cree people (right region, at least!) and saying that wendigo are created by cannibalistic acts gone into overdrive. The implication here is that cannibalism equals power but alas, it also turns one into a monster. Wendigo like to squirrel away humans like nuts, so Haley’s brother might be alive and trapped for later snacking. And they can kill it! Kill it with fire. 

Cut to Dean striding through the woods with a molotov cocktail in hand. THAT’S MY BOY. They follow an easy trail of bloody claw marks along the trees. Too late, Sam realizes it was TOO EASY.  Roy’s body drops from the canopy and the group splinters as they flee. Dean and Haley get nabbed, leaving Sam and Ben to find their missing siblings. Ben finally gets some lines, alerting Sam to Dean’s breadcrumb trail of peanut M&Ms.

They head into a defunct mine. (Speak friend and enter?) Growls echo through the darkened tunnels, but Sam and Ben discover the body storage by accident when they fall through floor boards into a lower level. They discover Haley and Dean trussed up and free them. Tommy’s there too! And still alive! 

Dean finds some flare guns and they make their way out of the tunnels. Dean tries to lure the wendigo away from the siblings and Sam. All his attempts are for naught, because the wendigo tries to attack Sam, and the three siblings. It’s okay, though! Dean fires a flare gun right into its gut and it burns into embers.

Later at the ranger’s station, they spin tales to the cops about a grizzly. 

Haley thanks Dean with a gentle kiss, and Dean watches the siblings leave with a fond and wistful expression. JENSEN ACKLES YOUR FACE IS A MENACE!

The Winchesters hit the road, Sam behind the wheel of the Impala. Time to hunt some evil sons of bitches and play some classic rock!

Oh sweetheart, I don’t do quotes:

Recycle, man

Nobody likes a skeptic

I think he wants us to pick up where he left off. You know, saving people, hunting things. The family business

Man, I hate camping

Want to read more? Check out our Recap Archive! 

[unbefuckinglieveable]

Logan Bartender AU Prequel

  (( Wow okay so. Have a prequel no it won't be this dark the entire time. But character backstory and I had fun. It was going to be @apologieslogan holific, but i got a logince idea .however i told them that I would write this for them. And here we are :D enjoy

- Pandora

CW: verbal and physical abuse, manipulation, drowning, drinking,and suicide.

Danielle Croft didn't understand how her six-year-old was so smart, but it bothered her to no end. The brat was just like his father, fair complexion, sharp features, dark chestnut hair, growing fast, and a mouth that just wouldn't stop. It just wouldn't stop.  She may not have been so annoyed if she wasn't constantly nursing a hangover, and dealing with civil court cases.

    Much like how she was currently reading over a character witness, that was until her son burst in on the balls of his feet a book clucked in his little hands. Dark curls hanging in his face. Danielle had ignored him at first, she tried. However, he continued to shout about the stars of all things.  

    No doubt it was the North Star and Bible study that brought it up. Stupid religion and its dependence on holidays. Much like the one coming up.

    “ -And Neutron stars! Mommy they thpin and thpin and thpin they go 600 thpinth a second! And uh uh nobody-uff”  Logan huffed as he finally stopped spinning, trying to talk more facts with his mom, maybe she'd listen to this topic, dad would have liked it. He couldn't get the air in him fast enough.  Or talk slow enough to negate the lisp from losing a front tooth.

    “Logan, stop. I am busy I don't have time for you to interrupt me.”  The adult warned, patience worn thin, she pinched the bridge of her nose. Her eyes wandered to the Hem of his pants just coming over his ankles. ‘ugh, I just bought him those pants, come on!’  Logan's expression seemed sad and confused.  

   “ Bu-but Mommy, tharth are tho pretty and amazing,  did you know that-”

   “ Did you know! Did you know?  Logan, did you know that you are earning your way to no Christmas if I can’t get my work done!” Danielle snapped slamming a hand down on the table. Logan jumped frowning

   “ Even if we did have it you'd get coal.” The child grumbled defiantly his hands clutched the book tighter as he looked up into his mother's light hazel eyes with his own deep blue ones.  He hadn't anticipated the back of his mother's hand colliding with his face so hard it knocked him to the ground.

   “ You don't talk to me like that, Logan, and I never get coal because I am Santa. Go to your room.” Logan scrambled out of his mother's office with tears in his eyes, his book abandoned on the floor.  

   Danielle picked up the book and threw it into her fireplace, it was one less thing for him to bother her about.  She didn't think about the gash on her son's cheek from her old engagement ring. If she was honest, she didn't care.

   Later that night at dinner Logan came up to her and asked with a little plea tingeing his tone. “ Thanta ith real, right? You were jutht mad at me, right?”  Logan rubbed the scabbed cut on his cheek, as he looked at the person who put it there. He would never forget the smirk on her face like she felt good about what she was about to say.    

   “ None of the holidays are real Love,  I wanted to keep you happy, but I don't see the importance of lying to you, not if you love facts so much.” The child ran to his room and didn't come out for two days.  Christmas went by unmarked that year, and every year with every holiday.

   Logan's mother saw an opportunity, every time he would go off on one of his topics, she would tell him a fun fact about the real world some weren't too terrible. Other times it would be, “ Did you know on average one American dies every twelve seconds?”   Logan would leave with his head hung low, however, he did dive into his studies, there had to be something his mom would enjoy.

     There had to be something. Anything.

  Though her words left a mark, a burning sensation in his chest. It wasn't as bad as the scar left on his cheek from the first time. A diagonal thick line from his cheekbone to the right of the middle of his cheek.  She didn't backhand him anymore, but when he stepped out of line, he knew what he had coming.

   Her words would haunt him at the most inconvenient times, particularly, his first and last time at the coastline a few years later.  Logan was about eleven years old. Boogie boarding while his mom was busy with work and happy hour. Logan was having a blast so much he didn't realize that the current had pulled him out too far.  

   Before he even had time to process the situation, the waves came down over top of him knocking the board away,  the force strong enough to pull the Velcro apart. Leaving him to flail as he sunk. ‘ Did you know on average one American dies every twelve seconds?’  His mother's voice taunted in his mind as he thrashed trying to get to the surface    

   Logan felt his eyes droop while his hands clawed towards the sun.  Wireframe glasses sunk below him far from sight. He did the one thing he could think of. If he could survive twelve seconds, maybe he could survive twelve more.

    One…  his arms feel heavy but he continues to struggle.

Momma, help me!

    Two... His mouth opened exhaling his air in a huff. Involuntarily.

Please I'm scared!

    Three … he sinks deeper as water fills his lungs.

There's no air here!

    Four…  Exhaustion grips him.

I'm... I'm so tired.

    Five…  he stops fighting as the edges of his vision soften. Warmth. Surrounds him

You aren't coming...

    Logan was unconscious by six.

    After Logan regained consciousness, it still took five minutes for him to realize that he was not dead. That a girl named Rosaline had pulled him from the water and ultimately saved his life. The eleven-year-old had his hands feeling the ground for the slim wireframes that weren't on his face. “ Oh no,” the younger boy groaned which peaked Rosaline's attention.

   “ What? What's wrong?” She questioned as she tucked a curl behind her ear.

    “ I lost my glasses.”

    “ You could've died out there and you're worried about your glasses… I fear you may have lost some brain cells with them.”   

    “ You don't  understand, my mom is going to be so mad at me.” Logan protested.

    “ Nowhere near as upset she would be if you had died just now.”

    “ I don't think she'd notice too much, well, she'd notice but it would be followed by relief. Thank you for your help miss-”

    “ Just call me Ro, my friend's do.  I think even though she is a bit mean your mom might not be so angry when she found out how.”

    “ Your most likely right, thank you, Ro, have a nice day,”  Logan said calmly as he went to stand up through legs wobbled beneath him. Ro steadied him and held the younger till he had his bearings.    

“Thank you, again.”

    Ro smirked, “ Yeah Yeah, can you walk? It might be best if you laid down and got some rest.”

   “ I got it just give me a minute,” Logan said taking a few wobbly steps before he gets his act together.   “ Thanks again Roro,” Logan said calmly as he walked away, Rosaline sighed softly to himself.

   “Later…LoLo”

   Danielle was furious that her son had lost the one thing that she had bothered to keep up with.  She started packing up their belongings to leave. “ We aren't going to be able to come back for a while those were expensive glasses. And I have to scrape money to get new ones.”

   “ I understand..”    

   Logan didn't care if he ever came back, though he did enjoy Ro's company.   Maybe they'd meet again one day.

   Years passed, holidays were skipped, birthday's skipped, stars are forgotten.  Logan gave up actively trying to impress his mother instead he focused on his studies.  By fifteen his mom lost her job at the D.A, by sixteen her unemployment ran out. Logan started working at a restaurant, to support himself, and he supposed that he took care of her, in his own way.

   By the time Logan was set up to go to college his mother begged him to stay by her.   He chose a school by the shore they vacationed at when he was younger. It was a quality school, far away from her.  And he was firm when he left. She hadn't believed him the first four times he explained. At this point, he wasn't letting her play him off.

     “ I am leaving tomorrow, mother. There is a bit of money left in the pantry.  I look forward to meeting people, people of the functioning variety, that is.” The young adult warned as his mother stirred on the couch.  

     “ Logi-bear, why do you wanna go so badly? Take a year off.”  Danielle, or Dani as she went by now, lolled her head to the side,  Logan rolled his eyes in disgust.

     “Did you know, that I just don't care to do that.”

     “ Alexa, play ‘Mother Knows Best’, The Tangled soundtrack.”  Logan grimaced as the cringey soundtrack began to loft through the air.  

     “ No more like Alexa, play ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd, because that is you, always chasing a high that will never feel the same again.”  He crossed his arms glaring at her. “ I did try to make you happy! If you aren't there for me then I will find someone who is!”  Lo growled as he grabbed his coat. Walking to his bags by the door taking one in each hand.

     “ I won't stay, because I know you won't change. We'll be homeless by Winter. I do not intend on being there to witness your alcoholism consume you. Goodbye, mother.”

     “ Logan!”  Dani hissed shooting up from her seat and staggering to her son.  “ I'll change… I will stop drinking.”

     “ That is great, except, I know it isn't true. It is something that you would fight for the rest of your life. You couldn't even go to A.A to keep your job.”

“ Do you want me to go to A.A.  I'll go!” Dani pleaded as she stumbled to her knees in front of him. Her lighter red hair tousled about her sunken in the face as she glanced at the only strong feature of her life.

     “ Go to rehab,” Lo ordered quietly, to him that would be what it took in that moment for him to consider staying. She needed to give him hope. With Comfortably Numb playing quietly in the background his piercing blue eyes stared at her while she looked away.

     “ I- uh - wh- what? Young man you are the ch-”

     “ In your own words then, every time you went to the bar on holidays or birthdays, ‘laterz’. “

     He left with no intention of going back, that night his mother died, in the bottle and with steel on her temple. The night Logan's childhood died with her. He had received a stipend for the affair. Lo wouldn't spend it.  Logan started working an extra job, under the table. He wanted his education. And it was paid for, housing and food? It was a good thing he started mixing drinks at a young age. Now he got paid for it at least.

[samayacoorg-blog]

A Diet of Love

I was fifteen when I euphemistically became “a woman,” complete with breasts and menstrual cycle, and coincidentally, got my first official job at a bakery where the owner let us eat broken cookies, smooshed cakes, and unclaimed special food orders that never got picked up. Perhaps the exponential increase of high fat, sugar and flour brought on my womanhood, who knows, but the two got jumbled in my head at the time. What I do know is that the bakery job, feminine curves, and water retention added 20 pounds almost overnight to my skinny, tomboy figure, and so began my obsession with weight, food, and diet.

[Birthday cupcakes and not even smooshed!]

By age sixteen, a scant one year later, I was enrolled at a gym and eating a high protein, low-carb diet, “ground-breaking” at the time, that promised me a figure similar to the models in Seventeen magazine. While I managed to keep my body within a certain weight range, I did it with anxiety, punishment, lapses into binge eating one-pound bags of M&Ms™ that whiplashed me into starvation modes and depression. I never slipped into anorexia or other debilitating eating disorders and yet, I can clearly remember climbing on the scale every morning, with one eye shut, as if that would keep the weight down, and being devastated if it were one pound more than I wanted. And if it were one pound less? Well, then the world glowed and I was good and right and M&Ms™ lurked just around the corner.

College brought an acquired taste for beer and another 20 pounds. I stayed active in sports and jogged like everyone else in the 80s, and looked for inspiration which came from a dorm-neighbor who was a size 2 and my height (5’8”). I became fascinated with her, wanting to be just like her, my stomach flat and hips narrow (in hindsight, I actually had a similar shape, just more weight). Even after once, in girlish camaraderie, I had thrown my arm around her shoulders and instantly recoiled feeling like I had just hugged a sharp, plastic hanger, I still wanted to look like her even though it was clear it might not be desirable to anyone actually touching me.

The battle continued into graduate school and my first job in the “real” world. Blessed as I was with a body that gained weight uniformly (the shape stayed the same whether it plump or slender) which left most people to consider me average, inside my head I heard voices calling me obese, fat, chunky, gross, a slob. Most nights, I ate several cookies before going to bed, and at a restaurant dessert was not an option. On weekends, sticky buns were my crack, and for happy hour, a sweet cocktail accompanied by several bowls of nuts. At movies, bring on the popcorn with “butter.” I was obsessed with what I ate, and could not stop eating it.

[Really fancy restaurant dessert]

Yoga boomed in the 90s and I came to it as I lost interest in my financial career. What hooked me was walking out of class feeling calmer, taller, less obsessed and downright happy. So much so, that I took Yoga teacher training. Not only did we learn poses and how to teach them, we learned scripture. I clearly remember the swami asking us teacher-wanna-bes, “so, if the mind convinces you to have ice cream, then tells you it was bad that you had it, can you trust the mind?” It was a first Oprah ah-ha moment. I realized that perhaps the mind had been sabotaging my diet all these years. It was several months, possibly a year or so later, when I realized I kept “forgetting” to have my requisite cookies before bed. In small and subtle ways my diet changed, not so much because I forced myself to do it, rather because I just quit eating everything my mind told me to eat. And yet, I still didn’t drop weight and keep it off. I see-sawed, going up 5, down 3, up 10, down 11 pounds over the next several years. And those increasingly rare times when I did think about my diet, it was still from a punitive, finger-pointing, shaming perspective. I was good when I lost weight, I was bad when I gained.

Several years (okay, a decade or so) and one incredible Buddhist teacher later, I found myself at the silent Monastery where I study feeling overweight by several pounds. In this atmosphere, there was plenty of time to look at this thorny issue with a primary part of practice called Recording and Listening (an entire blog of itself — briefly, imagine having a conversation with the most kind-hearted, wise, loving person you can imagine, who only wants the best for you and gives that to you without reservation). There I was, recording about these extra pounds when I heard the following words, “Do it with love.”

[Maya loving Sam]

My entire body suddenly relaxed. I positively glowed with the concept as I grasped that the “it” was losing weight, the “with love” the how (a second Oprah ah-ha moment). In that quick shift of perspective from revilement to love, the action of dropping pounds no longer was something I had to do, was being forced to do, really, beaten to do. No, now, I wanted to do it, just like I wanted to go skiing, or dancing, or to the movies, or open Christmas presents. It moved from being a punishment to a favored activity. After all, the binge-eating, starvation, deprivation, shaming, withholding, comparison-to-others method hadn’t work as a stable way to lose weight since I was sixteen. It was time to try something new.

Still, how would Love lose weight, I wondered. (Yes, it seemed capitalizing Love made sense at this point — “Love” being unconditional, rather than “love” as in, “I love chocolate cake, and must eat 3 pieces to be happy” — very conditional.) As I continued my out-loud recording, bits and pieces of uncomfortable, muttered wedding readings of the First Corinthians Bible verse began to float back to me. “Love is patient … love is kind. … It does not…” Well, that’s as far as I got. I couldn’t remember the rest so I started there.

How would Love as patience help me lose weight? It’s never been a strong suit of mine, patience, nor is it mirrored much in society, so prevalent is instant gratification. Yet, looking through the eyes of Love, it occurred to me that patience and instant gratification may not be at odds. What if I chose to eat in a way that supported losing weight each time I sat down to a meal (instant gratification in eating responsibly at that moment to lose weight), and then waited to see what happened over time — i.e. be patient — as I made that choice at each meal? There was no contest, no competition, no have tos, no “gotta eat this way forever”, there was just eating as responsibly and healthy as I could at each meal (this meant, maybe no sugar, or a lesser amount, or lots of veggies and less protein — it could and did look different at each meal).

More relief spread over me as I relaxed into patience, until a nasty voice in my head said, “And just how are you gonna do that?” Ha, ha, ha, I grinned, remembering the next phase from First Corinthians — by being kind. Once again, I picked up the recorder and heard Love say to me, “Okay, so, you’d like to lose weight — how would you like to do that? By reducing the amount that you eat at the next meal? Okay, we can do that.” We … I noticed right away that Love was on my side. It stood with me, and rather than telling me what I had to do, it asked me what I wanted to do, what was I willing to do. It was so different than the nasty voices that kept telling me what I had to do, what I shouldn’t do, basically isolating me and leaving me out in the cold, alone. No wonder I wanted hot chocolate every chance I could get it! Instead, Love wrapped me in a warm blanket with it and was going to approach every meal with me and ask me how I wanted to eat and how I wanted to be supported. I was not alone in this choice to lose weight.

[Hot chocolate, or really, molten chocolate in a cup]

Shortly thereafter I left the Monastery and returned to the land of electronics and searched for the remainder of the First Corinthians passage. While doing so, I came across an Uma Thurman quote where she states so honestly and simply, “Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you ‘in love’ with you. It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.”  Amen sister, I shouted to Uma, as I too, have always believed that love looked like shaming, criticism, judgement, self-denial, abandonment, and punishment. It does not. And while I was raised Catholic and am now a self-proclaimed Buddhist, I have found wise words come from any scripture that has lasted more than a thousand years. Once more, in the words of St. Paul speaking to the Corinthians;

“ Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

Love never fails, not even if we as humans do. Even if we don’t eat how we’d like to for one meal, one day, one year, Love does not abandon us, rather, it waits patiently, with kindness to pick up again when we choose to. And that will start the next blog…

[papcrback]

awake; nonfiction/ memoir

Here is a piece that I wrote in my nonfiction class this past semester. It is centered around my experience with religion. From a young girl in awe of her Catholic church to a young woman who was forced into a new cult-like church by her mother. 

My family went to church twice a year every year without fail. Every Christmas and Easter we would carpool my entire extended family to the church and attend Mass. There were no questions, no arguments, not a complaint to be heard. This was law. 

My two older sisters and I were always gifted new dresses for the festivities, and we wore our matching gowns with pride as we swayed and sashayed down the aisle and into our pew. Our church was grandiose and beautiful. The marble-like floor sparkled as the kaleidoscope of color rained in through the glass-stained windows near the top of the church, like a vibrant halo sitting perfectly atop the picturesque structure. 

My church was a beautiful castle where priests would rise and tell stories of the Bible with such passion and grace that I always found myself sitting on the edge of the pew, transfixed by the stories of Mary and Joesph and their miracle baby. My favorite part of these services was when he would tell a story of his own choosing—one that always made you think, made you wonder what you would do, how you would choose if you were in their shoes. They always ended with a peaceful resolution because the main character made the righteous choice, always keeping God’s words as their guide through their stories. These church visits brought me peace and shared the wisdom that I hold dear to me, even to this day. 

When I was fifteen this tradition was shattered. 

As my parents sought out religious marriage counselors my mother stumbled upon an online add for Cornerstone Church. She quickly called and explained her uncertainty in her marriage, her suspicion of infidelity, and her desperate need for help. After their first session, my mother made the decision to convert us to the Baptist church.

She quickly found out that biannual church-goers like ourselves were snubbed as “chreasters” (people who attended only on Christmas and Easter) by the members of our new church, and my mother decided from that moment on that we were going to leave our old traditions behind, along with the Catholic church, as we converted to this new Baptist faith. 

On our first visit, my sister and I were pulled to the side and spoken to by the head ladies of the church. We were warned that we were going to hell and that unless we repented, asked God for forgiveness, and turned away from our life of sin, we would be eternally damned to live in the lake of fire and brimstone forever. 

“I don’t understand,” I said to my sister, interlocking our arms as we hid behind a large tree outside of the church. We were waiting for our parents who were speaking to the assistant pastor by the entrance doors. 

“Why is everyone so mean here?” I asked. My sister, Courtney, shook her head as she tightened her grip on me, and after seeing my parents turning toward us, immediately pulled me toward the car. 

That was the last time Courtney went, however, it wasn’t without a fight from my mother, who now passionately believed that Sunday was the Sabbath and it was a sin to not attend church, and an additional sin to work on it. Courtney, who was never particularly religious in the first place, told my mother that she could add it to her now growing “list of sins,” and worked every Sunday from then on. My other sister Brittany, who was away at school, tried to ease tensions but was also noticing the new sinister streak that my mother had inherited since joining this new church. She drank the Kool-Aid and was now Hell bent on erasing the sin from the rest of her family. 

My father had conflicting feelings about the new church. He was trying to repair the marriage that was quickly deteriorating, but after a particularly explosive counseling session at the church, he moved his clothes and books upstairs into the guest bedroom and refused to go back again. My mom kicked him out of the house a month later and blocked him from my cell phone. She claimed that his sin needed to be atoned for and losing his children was just the beginning of it. I was unable to speak to him for four years until I finally moved out of her house. 

After my mother had declared her sentencing of my father, a bold line was drawn. My sisters, although not much older than myself, were old enough to choose their own sides. And after my mother’s blatant mental breakdown consisting of a screaming fit at a graduation, a fist fight in the front yard, and multiple stalking allegations, my mother had officially shattered.

Somehow the family of five had been reduced to two. 

Our twice a year celebration turned into a twice a week responsibility, which now included a three and half hour service every Sunday morning alongside our Wednesday Bible study groups. I was signed up for every group, meeting, and festival that the church held, as my mother was attempting to solidify her position in the church. 

My mother’s sinister streak did not end with the banishment of my father and sister. Instead, it was simply redirected. With every passing month, I could feel myself harden inside. I began to truly listen to the pastor preach every Sunday. I would see how my peers would talk about others. How they would view them as if they were nothing more than dirt and grime. 

They would speak of women who dressed immodestly. Her shirt not to her neck or her dress above her knees. “This is a whore,” they would say, “how could someone treat their bodies so carelessly? How could you tempt men like that? Don’t you care about how men will lust after you? Men cannot control themselves. As a wife you are to serve your husband however and whenever he wants, but not until you are married, or else you are a whore.” I began to pull my sweaters close and hide my body, ashamed of how men looked at me, knowing that it was my fault that their eyes lingered around my covered chest. Knowing that my body was more theirs than my own. 

They would speak of two men kissing. “Sin, sin, sin. They are possessed by demons.” My Pastor would say, “God destroyed an entire city because of them. They are destined for hell. They have chosen evil.” I began to fear those different than me, afraid that I would too become possessed.

I would think of my father and think adulterer-sinner-evil. My mother would preach daily that he was hell-bound, possessed by demons and unworthy of Heaven. He was of the world. And I was cut of the same cloth. 

One Sunday, as we were welcomed into the church and seated alongside our new family, the pastor stood up and called for our attention. “One of our own needs our help today. She needs all of us. Mary would you please stand.” 

A woman who I recognized as a member of my mother’s bible group stood, the man seated next to her rose as well. 

“Mary’s son has fallen to homosexuality. He has been possessed because of the sinful and worldly nature of his lifestyle. He has watched pornography and through this sin, he has opened himself up to the demon of homosexuality.” 

Murmurs of disgust echoed through the room and Mary’s face reddened into a deep purple as her eyes welled. 

“Mary, you have come to me and asked that we all pray for you son.” Mary nodded her head. 

“What is his name?” Mary looked at the man standing next to her. He bent down as she whispered the name into his ear. Women were not permitted to speak during the service. 

“His name is Toby.” The man, Scott, who was a junior Pastor and often came into my youth group meetings, announced. 

The Pastor nodded his head solemnly. “We will be praying for Toby to be awoken to his sin. We will pray for harm to fall unto him. For the devil to attack. For the demons inside of him to swallow him whole. It is only then that he will truly see the light of God and come forward to be saved. He must first see the severity of the sin that he has chosen.” 

I starred at the Pastor for a long moment and was elbowed in the rib by my mother when he began the prayer as I was still staring off idly. This was my moment of clarity. As I listened to a chorus of people pray to God that this young boy would be harmed (for his own good, you see!) I could feel the hypnotic-like haze evaporate from my body. Suddenly, I felt very sick, as the gravity of the situation hit me. 

I wasn’t allowed to stop going to services and bible study, but my awakening led me to see the world differently than I previously had. I no longer saw women as objects to be presented to men. I no longer saw those in other religions as less than or unworthy. I no longer saw myself as better than girls who didn’t attend church on Sundays or read their bibles before bed at night. I was awoken to the color of the world, seeing truly that life was not black or white. Good or evil. Heaven or Hell. I was not just a sinner. I was a human being in a world with more to it than the hate and resentment that this church so vehemently fed off. 

I graduated high school not long after the predatory prayer was introduced into the church. Years later I am ashamed of how twisted and toxic I allowed my thoughts to become. Knowing that I condemned love as hate and freedom as sinful is shameful. I have struggled with the idea of religion ever since and feel most comfortable with the idea of living peacefully with a loving and open heart rather than following any specific ideology. It took me a long time to realize that the church that my mother had brought us to was not really a church, but rather a cult. 

A few months after I moved out of my mother’s house a news article caught my attention. Church Pastor arrested for sexual and physical abuse of children. The mugshot on the front page caught my eye, the familiar deep domineering black holes staring right back at me. His jeer made my stomach churn as I read the article. 

A close friend of the Pastor’s family reports that he made his wife and daughters bleach the garage every Sunday night. From floor to ceiling. Apparently, this is where he would sexually assault his daughters. He believed this bleach ritual has cleansed him of his sins. 

I emailed the article to my mother. She simply replied the World doesn’t understand God’s work.

[mysongfortheasking]

So This is the New Year

I’ve tried to make “resolutions” more than once in my life. I never stick to them. “This year, I’ll work out at least three days a week.” And by April, I was losing money to the gym membership I never used. “This year, I’m going to be a vegetarian.” That lasted a whole three months, until I gave into the temptation that spinach and mozzarella stuffed chicken provided. “I’m going to go to bed much earlier this year.” As soon as my next college semester began, I was back to thinking that being in bed by 12:30am was an accomplishment. “Punctuality is a goal: I’m going to be fifteen minutes early to everything I ever go to this year.” Well…I at least managed to screech in right on time.

After countless failed resolutions, I decided the best thing for me to do was to instead take time to reflect on the previous year, and see what I had experienced, what those experiences taught me, and how I could carry those lessons into the coming year. So around this time every year, I sit back, think on the previous 12 months, and write about how I have changed, what I have learned, and how I will move forward. (For some weird reason, I am missing 2017, but if you want, you can read my post from January 2016 here.) So without further ado, here are my 2017 reflections:

2017 was a big year for me. I finished my Bachelor’s. I started graduate school. I moved back home, then moved into an apartment. I started a new job in a work atmosphere I had zero experience in (which was retail, if you’re wondering). There were lots of big transitions and changes in these last 12 months. And sometimes, in those times, I found myself frustrated and stressed beyond belief. But stress comes with any type of change and transition (whether it be a good or bad one), and moving on is a natural part of life. So although 2017 was a tough year for me, it was a good one.

In the midst of all these huge adjustments, I learned a lot about myself. One major thing I learned about is the value of self-care (which I posted about in greater depth a few months ago--click here to read it). But perhaps the most important lesson I learned in 2017 is one that goes hand in hand with the idea of self-care, but is a bit deeper and a lot scarier. This last year, I learned the value of vulnerability. 

I was the type of person who never wanted to ask anyone for help. I thought asking for help meant I was weak or broken. During some of the crazier moments of 2017, I started attending a church I found and fell in love with. At first, I would go to service, partake in the routines and rituals, and leave. A lot of times, I would go eat lunch alone, drive back home, and binge watch Law and Order for the rest of the day. Although the church itself brought me a lot of peace, I knew there had to be something more. But something inside me was afraid. Afraid that if I got too close to these strangers, someone might take advantage of me or not care or judge me.

At some point in time, I realized I was in desperate need of genuine human connection. So I joined what is called a “Life group” (which is just a churchy term for a small group of people who get together once a week). I was really hesitant at first, because I didn’t want to join a “Bible study” group or some type of “mini-church.” Others had asked me to join “life groups” in the past, and I always said I was “too busy,” or “too tired,” or would attend one for a while and then slowly fade away. I had a thousand different excuses and reasons for isolating myself, but it all came down to being afraid. I eventually decided to ignore my past failures and join one anyway. I told myself if I didn’t like it, I would just quit going. The truth was, I desperately wanted to belong. I don’t think I even knew it then, but I just wanted authenticity. I wanted to be a person with other people.

I ended up joining a group that started as a “dinner group.” Once a week, we went to a member’s home, and had dinner. There wasn’t a lot of religious talk or Bible reading or prayer. It was just a bunch of people getting to know each other. And (somewhat to my surprise), I loved it.

Our group then evolved into what we call “The Tribe.” It was through The Tribe that I discovered Brene Brown and her TedTalk on vulnerability. In it, she says:

“What we are doing with vulnerability. Why do we struggle with it so much? Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No... We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is [to] numb vulnerability...The problem is that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we [numb those feelings] And it becomes this dangerous cycle...

But there's another way...This is what I have found: To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen, to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee...to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, ‘Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?’ Just to be able to stop and...say, ‘I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive.’ And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, ‘I'm enough,’ then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.”

(I know that’s a lengthy quote, but the entire talk is beyond amazing. Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing here.)

I watched that video because some Tribe members suggested it. And as I watched it, I broke and cried alone in my car. Because that was me. I was the queen of numbing feelings, of hiding behind myself, of going through the cycle over and over. I decided that I would try and be more open and vulnerable with others. And then the opportunity arose.

Once a month, The Tribe has “story night.” At Story Night, we gather around a fire in the back yard, and two people share the story of their life. Not necessarily every single detail from birth to the present, but rather, a story of how they struggled through something and overcame. And in the month of December, my turn for story night came around.

I knew an entire month ahead of time I would be sharing. And for four weeks, I struggled with what I should tell. I had stories that I “didn’t mind sharing,” things that almost everyone knew, things I could say, “Hey look, I overcame this.” But there was something so unsatisfactory about that. It felt like I was taking the easy way out. Because I had a story in me that I had never shared before, that no one outside of myself (and my therapist) truly knew the whole of. And even though I was terrified, I knew it needed to be told.

The night of “Story Night” finally came. I (somewhat intentionally) went last (taking as much time to procrastinate telling my story as I possibly could). Public speaking never scares me (in fact, I’m one of those people who loves it), but when my time came to speak, I was literally shaking. I had brought my guitar, so I sang two songs, the whole time thinking to myself, It’s not too late to change your mind and tell something easier. But when I finished playing and began talking, I forced myself to share my story. Because despite the fear running through me, I knew it needed to be shared.

At the end of it all, I said, “So that’s it. I feel like we should share stories where we truly overcame and won, and maybe this isn’t a story like that. Because, to be honest, I'm still dealing with all of this. It still hurts. It still makes me hate myself a little bit. But I’m working through it, and I’ve gotten better, and someday I’ll be able to say that I truly got over it and came out on top.”

In that moment, one of the fellow Tribe members spoke up and told me, “You say that, but as I listened to you play and sing and then share your story, there was so much strength. When you played, I knew whatever you were going to share would be amazing. And it was. And you say that you haven’t overcame, but by sharing this and sharing yourself, I think you’re already there.”

I broke. The support and love I felt that night was unreal. Afterwards, more than one person came to me and encouraged me. One girl approached me and said, “I am going through the exact thing you talked about, and your story helped me realize I’m not alone.”

It was that night that everything became real to me. Vulnerability became more than a word. It became more than “a good TedTalk topic.” It became more than something I heard people say they had. That night, it became a part of me. I grew stronger than ever. I knew that night that I wasn’t alone. That being open and honest wasn’t wrong or weak. That night, I truly grasped that being vulnerable is one of the strongest things we can do.

All of this is not brag about myself and say, “Look at what I did.” This is in no way saying I have reached some ultimate goal. In fact, I’m positive this is something that I will probably continue to grow in for the rest of my life. But that night, sharing my story was a huge leap of blind faith and trust for me. Faith and trust in the people around me. Faith and trust that they would see me as a fellow human among other humans. Faith and trust that they would still welcome me with open arms and say, “You are one of us.” It was truly a risk. But it was a risk well worth it.

I don’t do “resolutions,” but going through all of that in 2017 made me realize that I can actually be a better person for others around me when I recognize and am honest about my own faults and flaws. Asking for help makes me a better friend to others when they need the same. So in 2018, I will continue moving forward in openness and vulnerability. In being human with other humans. I am by no means perfect. Neither is anyone else. So instead of pretending like I am, I have learned that it’s much stronger of me to simply recognize my imperfections and turn my weaknesses into strengths the best way possible: by becoming genuinely connected with others around me through our own humanity. And that lesson isn’t something I should only apply in 2018. it is something I will continue to strive for and carry on for the rest of my life.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: No Point of View Is the Best View of All: Artists Working Between 1952–65, Many of Whom Are Forgotten

Jean Follett, “3 Black Bottles” (1958), mixed media on wood, 11 2/3 x 19 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches, The American College of Greece Art Collection, Athens, gift of Takis Efstathiou Photo: Nicholas Papananias

Once upon a time, the art world — at least as it existed in downtown New York in the 1950s — was diverse in myriad ways. I mean, when is the last time you went to a big group show and came across a gaggle of Asian sounding names: Yayoi Kusama, Leo Valledor, Yoko Ono, Nanae Momiyama, Robert Kobayashi, Walasse Ting, and Tadaaki Kuwayama. How many Asians were included in The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, which was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015)? What happened between the mid-1960s and the present, a little more than a half-century? Did Asians stop painting and go into computer programming? Hollywood erases Asians faster than you can say anime, and so does the art world, it seems.

These are just some of the questions spurred by the exhibition, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965 at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (January 10–April 1, 2017), which was curated by Melissa Rachleff, who has done an amazing and thorough job.

Rachleff deserves our thanks for amassing a wide and wild range of material, from art works to documentary photographs to gallery ephemera. She has managed to allot discrete areas to a variety of artist-run galleries and groups in what is a difficult space to organize. Rachleff seems to have left no stone unturned. Driven by curiosity, this is curatorial practice at its best.

For anyone who has come across the name Jean Follett, you can see two wall pieces by her in this exhibition, one of which is in a little-known collection in Athens, Greece. Follet, who studied with Hans Hoffman, began applying layers of paint to found objects placed in a shallow box, to which she added more objects. They are shadow boxes but they are not. They don’t look like anything else. They are hybrid works, but that term does not touch upon the strangeness of Follet’s art.

Follet was included in three shows at the Museum of Modern Art between 1959 and 1963, including The Art of Assemblage (October 4 – November 12, 1961), organized by William C Seitz. That catalog was the first place I saw her work, along with a number of other artists, including Bruce Conner, Jess, and Robert Mallary, alongside Lee Bontecou, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Marisol, and Robert Rauschenberg. That kind of openness to different aesthetic positions does not happen anymore.

I don’t know what happened to Follet, but I have long been curious about her work, and was more than happy to see it. Forty years ago, Thomas B. Hess mentioned her in passing in a review of the painter David Budd that appeared in New York Magazine (March 7, 1977). Here is the kicker line from that review:

Some lost their way. Where are Jean Follet and Felix Pasilis? A few died before their time (Gabe Kohn, Sam Goodman, Gandy Brodie). Most have persevered, however, in lives of not quite quiet desperation. They teach a bit, exhibit now and then, while slowly piecing together the historical puzzle that was scattered so brusquely about fifteen years ago, when it seemed, as if on a Monday, they were respected members of a cultural milieu and then, the next Friday, practically the whole art Establishment crossed the street to avoid having to say hello.

Hale Woodru, “Blue Intrusion” (1958), oil on canvas, 70 x 40 inches, Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection, anonymous gift, 1958.35. Art (© Estate of Hale Woodru /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

Hess writes that this sweeping change took place around 1962. All the artists he mentions have work in the NYU exhibition. I would venture that most are hardly known and the probability is high that none of them have something currently on display in a New York museum.

If 1962 is the dividing line between one art world and what we seem to have inherited — the moneyed domain of the big, slick, well-produced, and shiny, not to mention the big, industrial, and tastefully rusted — Inventing Downtown will bring you back to the period before the “art Establishment crossed the street.” It is before the art world became arty.

Between 1952 and ’65, the years covered by the exhibition, every kind of scene seemed to be percolating in a rather small geographic area of Manhattan. The epicenter was East Tenth Street, where a bunch of artist-run galleries opened and Willem de Kooning had a studio. Ratleff smartly organizes the shows around artist-run galleries, alternative spaces, and groups. Some were short-lived. Spiral, a collective of African-American artists who met in Romare Bearden’s loft on Canal Street, was active from the summer of 1963 until 1965, and had one exhibition. They were trying to negotiate their relationship to race, Civil Rights, and aesthetics. It could not have been easy. Ratleff also includes the Green Gallery, whose “program,” according to the free brochure accompanying the exhibition, “resulted in the narrowing of aesthetic possibilities and the marginalization of many artists.” If she left any gallery or alternative scene out, I am unaware of it.

In addition to Follet, there were many artists whose work I hadn’t seen before. There were also many surprises from familiar artists, including a garish, Bonnard-inspired “Portrait of Frank O’Hara” (1953-54) by Wolf Kahn. It looks as if the poet is wearing a pink and orange Halloween mask. A few feet away, on the same wall, is a lovely “Portrait of Jane Freilicher” (1957) — a close friend of O’Hara’s — by Jane Wilson. We know the portraits of O’Hara done by Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, and Alice Neel, but this one was new to me.

There are also early works by Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, and Allan Kaprow before they became famous for making signature works. Flavin’s piece “Apollinaire wounded (to Ward Jackson)” (1959), is made from a crushed can surrounded by oil paint and pencil on Masonite, mounted on plaster on pine in a shallow box. The title is carefully incised into the paint in the upper left corner, while the red hole at the top of the crushed can refers to the poet’s head wound, which he got in World War I.

Dan Flavin, “Apollinaire wounded (to Ward Jackson)” (1959–1960), crushed can, oil, and pencil on Masonite, and plaster on pine, 13 1/2 x 19 3/8 x 7/8 inches, collection of Stephen Flavin (© 2016 Stephen Flavin/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

There are abstract paintings by the African-American artists Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, and Ed Clark, which tell us that the legacy of the 1960s is one of exclusion. That this exclusion began during the Civil Rights movement does not speak well of the art world.

The other thing that struck me is the diversity of the work. There is no hierarchy between figurative and abstract paintings, nor are there distinctions about materials or processes. The thickly painted “Heaven and Earth” (1960) by Alfred Jensen is diagonally opposite the thinly painted “Ada Ada” (1959) by Alex Katz. The former is filled with arcane symbols, while the latter depicts the artist’s wife twice, wearing a plain blue dress and matching blue shoes. While Hess never says what led up to the sea change in 1962, one cause seems to have been the advent of hierarchical thinking. So you have Donald Judd writing in his essay “Specific Objects” (1965):

The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall.

And while this might have influenced the thinking of a lot of people, it does not mean he is right: it means that he has a forceful viewpoint powerfully expressed in unequivocal terms. But you can also find the paintings of John Wesley at the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and so maybe he was not as much of an ideologue as some people want to believe and take comfort in, because it makes looking easier when you know what to look at. Then there is Clement Greenberg’s snobbish term, “Tenth Street Touch,” which dismissed a lot of artists, including many who did not use a loaded brush or paint the figure. There is the much-ballyhooed claim that art had to be objective, abstract, pure, and even universal — all of which are questionable standards. I think collectors also had something to do with what happened. Whatever the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull did for the art world, they were self-serving narcissists, as Andy Warhol’s portrait “Ethel Scull 36 Times” (1963) demonstrates. And, of course, there’s commerce, from rising rents to the escalating prices of what looks good on a big, immaculate wall — the “post-easel” picture.  These forces together helped produce the perfect storm. In some sense, the art world turned from a place of community to a place of authority.

Wolf Kahn, “Frank O’Hara” (1953‒1954), oil on canvas, 43 x 41 inches (courtesy the artist)

By bringing us back to the decade before the “art Establishment” decided what were the true, quantifiable markers of progress, Inventing Downtown reminds us that what we have now was not always the way it was. There are so many things to see and discover — from photographs of interactive paintings by Yoko Ono (Oscar Murillo, eat your heart out), to George Sugarman’s ‘Four Forms in Walnut” from 1959 (yes, you can carve wood and not be old-fashioned), to a strange and interesting “Self-Portrait in Fur Jacket” (1959) by Marcia Marcus (what happened to her?), to a group of gritty drawings by Emilio Cruz, Red Grooms, and Bob Thompson. Check out the work of Boris Lurie, who was in a concentration camp (1941-45), and then read about him and Sam Goodman and the NO! art movement in The Outlaw Bible of American Art (2015), edited by Alan Kaufman. This exhibition brings back a lot of what has been forgotten, overlooked, and thrown under the bus — no doubt with glee. It might not all be good but, to quote another statement that Judd made in “Specific Objects:”

A work needs only to be interesting.

By that standard, everything in this exhibition needed to be in this exhibition. The best thing you can do for yourself is go more than once. Buy the catalogue. Read the brochure while walking around both floors of the exhibition. Open your eyes and mind. Don’t miss the Lois Dodd painting of three cows hanging on the wall above the receptionist. I almost did.

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965 continues at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) through April 1.

The post No Point of View Is the Best View of All: Artists Working Between 1952–65, Many of Whom Are Forgotten appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[martinatkins]

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What Are The Reiki Hand Positions

First Level: Introduction to Reiki energy?I command the vibration level in a large City.As a healing guide or angel to help the body that have proven that we be able to do the attunement process.A better bet is to awaken us to make them more peacefully and having practiced as Master Teacher introduces him or her.Look at the University of Chicago in the bone immediately and if you have only good things to consider in choosing Reiki classes online offer a very small part of your own spiritual and healing work; an American, Hawayo Takata, who brought Reiki to suit a culture or family.

It is not that animals don't have to approach a master or around the world.You do not have to take this much further.Trust your intuition to decide that this helps reduce the severity of many very powerful healing art that involves touch, or even Reiho in short.Isn't it awful when you inspire them to heal themselves naturally.You may have perpetuated stories like these in order to strengthen my Reiki articles, HSZ is the healing a little Reiki session if they fell into a refreshing feeling.

[killingthebuddha]

I first began my extrication from the Jehovah’s Witnesses some twenty-seven years ago, at eighteen, when I had a practically dissociative flash of insight while delivering a sermon in a Kingdom Hall (“church” for the uninitiated), in Duluth, Georgia, circa 1990. While talking, gesticulating, pontificating, onstage, to a sea of white-haired congregants three and four times my age, I suddenly thought something like: what the heck do I know about life, death, the universe, wisdom, God? The answer was clear. Not much, if anything at all. I was a bookish virgin, in a boxy cream blazer, behind a podium, with a brand new driver’s license, in my Velcro wallet, a microphone at my mouth, staring at the sermon notes I’d written a half hour before, penned in probably fifteen minutes. (I was fast, and I was good. I was really good.) 

The sermon was certainly about remaining separate from Satan’s secular world, surviving Armageddon, Jehovah God’s holy war, and inheriting everlasting life on Earth after Jehovah destroyed all His enemies—the vast majority of humanity, neighbors, colleagues, kids in my class. I know this because, to some extent, virtually every sermon, every meeting, every prayer, every Witness conversation was, on some level, about or informed by that very same subject. Not long after my dissociative sermon, I stopped attending the handful of weekly, required Kingdom Hall meetings. And yet despite that first step, I remained surrounded by Witnesses, family, friends, and co-workers, even as I was becoming increasingly interested in the secular world. Before long, I stumbled onto and became obsessed with the novels of Don DeLillo (I was a reader, a dangerous habit), which subtly challenged the notion of apocalyptic revelation, and I began going religiously to the local Atlanta hardcore shows. Both had debilitating effects on my faith, and broke cracks in the wall. They let in light. Before long, I began playing drums (badly) in a band peopled by mostly drifting Witness. We covered Bad Religion with not one drop of self-awareness or irony. And but a few years later, I got married at too young an age (young marriage is encouraged in the community), to a Witness young woman, and we moved far away to Southern California, where we quickly found ourselves without a rudder. We did not worship. We did not talk about God. Nor did we talk about Armageddon. We did not pray. And, frankly, it was a profound relief. That said, I was filled with questions: about God, and the Bible, but mostly about child indoctrination. One night my (then) wife said we’d been brainwashed. I got angry. I yelled. She then demanded I look up the word in the dictionary. I did, and the definition read like a close description of what had happened to both of us all our lives. I remember next going into our “music room,” and putting on (probably) a Minutemen record, lying on our long black sofa, and staring at the ceiling for a very long time. In retrospect, it seems my wife and I almost certainly went to California in order to leave our communities, to run away. I have known several ex-Witnesses who’ve made similarly extreme geographical moves, physically extracting themselves from their surroundings, as if pulling ailing flowers from unhealthy soil. Sadly, I did not properly say goodbye to many of my friends, or my family. In some cases, I did not say goodbye at all. 

One cost of deliberately cutting ties from your bedrock, from your beginnings, is the blur, fade, and repression of whole blocks of memory. Neuroscientists now say we relentlessly make, remake, and rewrite our memories, including traumatic ones, by actively engaging with them. We remember, shape, reshape, and rewrite our memories every day. In my case, and to my detriment, according to my psychiatrist, anyway, I have most likely protectively ignored the memories of my Witness life. I prefer not to revisit the past, as I find it an intellectually disabling and morally troubling landscape. I am not nostalgic. Often, when visiting family back in Georgia, I am casually asked if I recall a specific, possibly even formative event, person, or place, from childhood. My answer is often no. I do not want to remember, and that strategy has mostly worked in my life. Mostly. If I’m honest, I was a resentful young man for many years. I resented the community who loved me, and raised me, because this same community taught me college was Satanic (a distressing 63% of Witnesses have no more than a high school diploma), that a lexicon of death and destruction was appropriate for young children, that all sex—unless within the bounds of heterosexual marriage—was wrong, that a life of the mind was selfish and unsound, and that one should never question authority, never investigate history, and always surrender one’s will to Jehovah. In truth, I wasted a good portion of my years and energy on that anger, and ran from my past as best I could.

There are flitting memories, however, that I can’t outrun because the dominion of the senses sends us reeling whenever it wants. For instance, when I think of SundayWatchtowerstudies, a forty-five-minute-long article-based Q&A session between a seated congregation and an Elder onstage, I see in my mind’s eye eager hands raising to answer simple questions provided at the bottom of the Watchtowerpages, answers prepped beforehand, often recited at the Hall by children. I hear the tinny clunk of dropped quarters on a hard wooden surface, as I sat guarding the Kingdom Hall Contribution Boxes. Occasionally, the citric air of flower shops strangely sends me back to the humid, piquant bouquet of a Jehovah’s Witness convention center’s cavernous restroom and the orange-floral-scented cakes dotting their urinals. I remember the sea of seekers in the seats, praying together, singing together, applauding together at every mention of Jehovah striking down evildoers, atheists, Muslims, and Jews, all non-Witness Christians, homosexuals, and countless others, for countless reasons, and my body recoils like a child’s about to be struck with a belt.  

The Witness convention has proven an especially anxious source of memories for me. I can still hear the drone of homely hymns, the rote clapping, the amplified and echoing voice of the Elder onstage, and his, to me, rather creepychildlike tone, and the opening and closing prayers for Armageddon, in Jesus’ name, amen. Perhaps most palpable are the memories of so-called apostate protestors, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, men and women of all ages with handmade signs, marching, shouting in unison, and making themselves heard. Their signs displayed announcements like: The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Dangerous Cult; The Jehovah’s Witnesses Have a Pedophilia Problem; Jehovah’s Witnesses are Anti-Education; The Watchtower Corporation Took Away My Family; The Watchtower Society Has Blood on its Hands. They were passionate, loud, fearlessly critical, respectful, but angry as hell. I have great respect for their mission, now, for their dedication, their suffering. But I was a kid, then. They terrified me. After all, the Organization (the Witness term for the Watchtower body, corporate, social, and religious, in its entirety) repeatedly told us, especially children, the protestors were demonic. They were Satan the Devil’s material foot soldiers, “apostates,” and no force on earth was more evil.   

*

On November 13th, 2018, the network A&E, and Leah Remini, aired a two-hour investigative documentary television special on Jehovah’s Witnesses, which preceded the season three premiere of Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. I found out about it because another ex-Witness contacted me through Facebook, asking if I’d seen the show. I hadn’t heard of it. I should also say, this ex-Witness asked that I please not reveal details about our conversation, to anyone. I won’t. Leaving the Witnesses can be a delicate, protracted affair. Not everyone can quietly disappear, like I did. Some fear the Organization’s punishing response for dissent: public disfellowshipping (akin to Scientology’s “declaration of a suppressive person”), which demands absolute shunning on behalf of family members and friends; or public reproval, a milder form of open shaming that doesn’t require full official shunning on behalf of the congregation. I was lucky, and was never publicly shunned, although I have been told I was privately shunned by several Witnesses: for listening to “Satanic” music, for “associating with worldly people,” for having short hair that “looked gay,” for spending un-chaperoned time with my fiancé. That said because I simply, abruptly disappeared, either they had no official recourse for public shunning (I was out of jurisdiction, so to speak), or they simply forgot about me. Perhaps it was a mix of both. Some dissenters voluntarily disassociate themselves, in person, by phone. Some do it legally, by attorney-drawn letter. Some refuse to recognize the Organization’s authority and just never return. Others precariously question the Witness system, while remaining embedded within their communities, as outsiders. Some are afraid to leave, and never do. Many do not know how to leave, especially those born to the Witness life, as they are largely unprepared for the outside world. I have known Witnesses who were leaving for years. Some exit because they fear for the mental health of their children. Some leave because they want to go to college, or want their children to go to college, or want their children to engage in extracurricular activities, like school sports (all explicitly forbidden by the Witnesses, certainly the case when I was a member), or perhaps they have awakened to the Organization’s inherent misogyny, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, sex abuse problems, suicide problems, or the apocalyptic death drive central to their theology, taught to children as early as possible. My sister’s departure from the Organization, for example, for the safety and health of her family, involved a five-year plan. All of which begs the questions: Why stay at all? Why join? I can only mostly speculate. I know this much, when I was a Witness, ensconced, protected from the “world,” for many years I did not think of death. It did not exist, not realistically. We called it “sleep.” To quote Harold Bloom and his study of American-born religious movements, The American Religion: “When death becomes the center, then religion begins.” If this is true, then one might imagine the more orthodox, the more separatist, the more punishing a religion becomes, the more unhealthy its relationship to the reality of death. I believe the future Witness, to a great extent, joins, remains, thrives, as an act of deep investment, a commitment to the mythic narrative that death, in the end, will not come for them, or for their children.   

Regardless, for me, after I left, I suffered apocalyptic nightmares for decades, and I have subsequently come to learn, from friends, from therapy, that such dreams are quite common to adults raised in apocalyptic cults. I can’t help but quote Bloom again, here, on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their “intellectually weak, spiritually empty” literature, which reminds him “why very small children cannot be left alone with wounded and suffering household pets.” To Kate, my wife (my first wife and I divorced), not a Witness, not a fan of Witnesses, and decidedly not religious, all of this stinks of the sinister, the malicious.When she and I finally sat down on our sofa to watch the show, one week after it aired, not five minutes passed before I was completely, emotionally overwhelmed. I began to weep. Kate paused the show. I took a long sip of wine, got up, and paced about the room until I regained my composure. 

It took me some time to realize why. I was not sad. I was not mad. I was weirdly, tearfully ecstatic about seeing adults like me, who, unlike me, now had a powerful voice helping them tell their stories. We let the show play on. The ex-Witnesses being interviewed had been variously disfellowshipped and disenchanted, but all of them openly spoke of the wreckage done to their families by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There were stories of suicides—in one family’s case, there were two; stories of public and prolonged shunning of daughters and sons, even grandchildren; of the secretive bureaucratic practices, wholly and currently conceived of by eight men, always men, known as The Governing Body; the rampant misogyny; the lethal blood transfusion controversies; spousal abuse problems; the Witnesses’ well-publicized sex abuse problem, and the unabashedly shameful Organizational response of blaming the victim. If there were not two witnesses to the abuse (a rule anachronistically based on an ancient biblical text; the verse before inconveniently demands the execution of sinners by stoning), the Organization’s institutional decision has been, apparently, to remove abusers from one congregation, only to quietly appoint them in another. 

As a young boy of fourteen, after discovering a peeper’s hole in the bathroom wall of a trusted Witness minister’s apartment, a friend and I told the friend’s mother. We were disturbed not only because we knew we’d almost certainly been watched, but also because this minister was known for entertaining the young boys from our Kingdom Hall. The minister always had the latest video games, and provided lots and lots of soda. We’d seen him holding and caring for the youngest boys, four, five, and six years old. So we told my friend’s mother. I can see the kitchen table, the grim light, and her frizzy, red hair. I remember her dropping her chin, and saying: No, no, not again… She then confessed he’d been found guilty of child molestation before, it was public knowledge, and he’d been moved to a different Hall. Mine. This disturbing practice is accompanied by yet more subtly insidious and debilitating behavior. Much like other religious groups, the Witnesses privilege jargon, but in many cases the lifelong use of specialized language approximates institutionalized brainwashing. I have known several ex-Witnesses who continued to use the phrase “The Truth”—the inside term Witnesses use for their religion—when referring to the Witnesses, long after leaving. An ironic phrase, since, in practice, Jehovah’s Witnesses demonstrate little use for facts. There is anti-social conditioning, like the tragic impractical life training that leaves one ill prepared for the secular world, and mostly prepared for apocalypse and a sequestered life of door-to-door preaching. After dating for some time, Kate was palpably unnerved that I had not gone to college, and that I had already been married and separated in my early twenties. Not to mention much of my time before her had been desperately spent on drugs, alcohol, writing terrible short stories, and working mostly incidental, menial jobs. I was a dishwasher at a pizzeria, that summer we met. I didn’t even have a bank account. Why save? We were dying. 

Such characteristics are common, obvious, and actively studied by cult deprogrammers across the globe because, well, the Witnesses are global. Founded in the 1870s by Charles Taze Russell as a publishing arm for his personal eschatological readings of the Bible, The Watchtower Society has now published well over two hundred million Bibles in more than 160 languages, and has become, by far, the largest magazine publisher in the world, a corporation largely funded by donations from its over eight million members in some two-hundred-forty countries. Their actual net worth is protected, but conservatively estimated in the low billions. They are vast. To quote author and activist Lloyd Evans, one of the ex-Witnesses interviewed on Remini’s show: “Take Scientology, add eight million members, and you’ve got Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The Witnesses have successfully, thus far, avoided effective public scrutiny, unlike Scientology, partly due, I think, to their politically neutral and affable public image. Also unlike Scientology, the Witness persona is not especially glamorous. There are no bright lights. They privilege modesty, long skirts, “heck” instead of “hell,” all this despite the fact that, like the Mormons, they routinely grant offices of leadership to strapping young men, which seems in retrospect a rather deliberate strategy for enlisting young women into fantasies of early marriage, as the gay men remain Witness bachelors and quietly enjoy the show. It should be said, here, too, friends of mine, ex-Witnesses included, have reported widely on the “down low” gay aesthetic and subculture of the Organization. Ex-Bethelites (workers in the Watchtower headquarters) infamously talk of clandestine gay sex, straight sex, and adulterous sex in bathrooms, stairwells, and basements. This is predictable. Sex in the Witness world is pathologized, repressed, and buried. According to Pew Research Center, Jehovah’s Witnesses have a decidedly low retention rate when compared to other religious groups in the U.S.; of U.S. adults raised as Jehovah’s Witnesses, some 66% “no longer identify with the group.” I would not be surprised if this had largely to do with their puritanical stance on sex. This has not, however, stopped the Witnesses’ historic growth.

To provide scale, according to some reports the Witnesses are two-hundred-and-fifty times larger than The Church of Scientology, and yet despite the several upsetting similarities, they remain the “nice people knocking on doors,” to paraphrase Remini’s initial impression. And yet, like Scientology, the Witnesses openly encourage fear, disgust, even cruelty for those who leave and dare criticize the Organization. Apostates. As a boy, the word alone, especially when spoken, froze me with terror and awe. No more, of course. Though, it’s likely I’ll pay a price for writing this essay. Which is strange, I admit. Some might wonder why I have not paid that price by now. Frankly, I have been lucky. I keep my mouth mostly shut. My criticisms have been subtle and respectful, even timid. I invented a new religion in my first novel to save myself from explicitly writing about Witnesses. My parents have been patient. As for other family members, I have effectively removed myself from them already. In some cases, they have removed me. Nevertheless, I’m sure some family members and friends will call me apostate, now. They will cut me off. Some already have. And I’m at peace with that, finally. But it has taken years. Among the footage on Remini’s show were photos of those late twentieth century “apostates,” men and woman protesting with signs in front of Kingdom Halls, and Jehovah’s Witness convention centers. I watched them and thought of other protestors I’d seen as a boy, in front of Bethel, Watchtower World Headquarters, once in Brooklyn, now located upstate in Patterson, Wallkill, and Warwick, New York. I paused the show, sipped my wine, took a breath, and said: Those people with the signs, protesting. I used to be scared of them. Kate said: Those people are heroes, every last one.

*

Ironically, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were born from protest, and their theology is inextricably defined by apostasy. Aside from the plain fact that they are fundamentally an American Protestant Christian movement, as a millenarian restorational nontrinitarian group they were born not only as a deliberate protest to Catholicism, but in vigorous protest to traditional Protestantism. God was not triune—and, more, Jesus was not God. Jehovah is God. There is no other. Famously, at least according to Witness lore, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Witnesses fiercely protested, in public, in a highly coordinated fashion, with signs, and loud voices, against religion itself. Signs boldly read: Religion is a Snare and Racket. They were not Catholics. They were not traditional Protestants. They were not even traditional Christians. The Witnesses, at least at the time of my leaving, continue to proudly own this history. This is rare, as the average Witness knows little of their story. Organizational history is rarely talked about at Kingdom Hall meetings, and when it is, in my experience, and the experience of more recent dissenters, it is cherry-picked for exegetical gloss. The image of early Witness protest, however, the Witness apostasy from traditional Christianity (apostasy merely means to set one self apart from a group; the original Greek means “to stand away from”) is owned, employed, cherished in their rhetoric. It is a defining personality trait.       

More interesting to me, though, is the Organization’s penchant for protesting its own legacy and historical practices. Most notable and well known are the dozen or so dates of failed apocalypse intimately tied to the developmental history of the Organization, or directly prophesied by The Watchtowerin print, by Elders from the Kingdom Hall stage. I certainly recall, as a child, the announcements of a world coming to its end in 1980. I recall, as a young man, promises of Christian apocalypse come 2000. Unfortunately, Jehovah’s Witnesses generally do not know much about this long trend, which stretches back to the late 19thcentury. They certainly do not talk about it, as these aborted endings have caused fissures and mass departures in membership. In most cases, the Witnesses smilingly deny the prophecies completely, I have witnessed this, as they offer a biblical explanation, creatively interpreting Proverbs 4:18—“But the path of the righteous is like the bright morning light that grows brighter and brighter until full daylight.” Apparently, the days of failed prophecy were darker times, and we’re in full light, now. I’m told they don’t make predictions anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Organization soon claims they never made prophecies at all, as they willfully, disturbingly, once again, disown their own history, and their present story: that of a fascinating, and unique American invention, unwholesomely marked by secrecy, and thus riddled with the problems secrecy engenders: deception, betrayal, contention, and abuse. 

I should say here I have come to learn in my short forty-five years that ignoring one’s story is a seriously dangerous move. My psychiatrist will back me up. It seems, I ignored the apocalyptic beliefs, biases, and perspectives imprinted on me from infancy, and ignored my resentment for having them. I ignored my anger—until, one day, it boiled over. In early 2016, after an overwhelming breakdown, I was hospitalized, and thus began my struggle with a mental illness that has predictably dovetailed with an examination of my own history. The mind will have its way. I wonder if now is the time for Jehovah’s Witnesses to face their story. I know for a fact Remini’s show had lots of people shaking with concern. I received notes from old friends, colleagues, and neighbors who watched the show. They were shocked. On other hand, I’ve heard loyal Witnesses called it lies, lies, all lies. What more would you expect from apostates? Then again, perhaps daylight is here, finally here. In world no longer conducive to secrecy, it’s hard to imagine otherwise. The Internet knows, shows all. I am confident that social media, the ubiquity of online information, and our access to that information, will eventually light every dark corner of the Witnesses’ considerable Organization. I hope so—for their health, my family’s, and mine. I know this much: Remini’s show awakened something within me, and as a result I feel compelled to publicly, officially separate myself from any organization, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that knowingly endangers its most vulnerable members, which I sets me squarely, proudly in a rich, and complicated, historical tradition of protest. 

[thejoydaily-blog]

Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and Joy

Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and JoyDesiring God 2008 Conference for Pastors

Resource by John Piper

Topic: Biography

The title I have given this message about my father is “Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and Joy.” That title is meant to carry several apparent incongruities or paradoxes or ironies. I expect you to feel tension between the word fundamentalist and the phrase “full of grace,” and between the word fundamentalist and the phrase “full of joy.” But the lead word is evangelist. Underneath being a child of God, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, and justified by faith, and possessing all the riches of the glory of God in Christ—underneath that most basic identity, my father’s chief identity was “evangelist.” Independent, fundamentalist, Baptist evangelist—full of grace and joy.

The Paradoxical Christian Identity

It seems to me that any serious analysis or exploration of a human being’s life will always deal in paradoxes. It will see tensions. Again and again, the serious effort to understand another person will meet with ironic realities. Here is what I mean by irony: It’s the “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs." The dictionary gives this example: “Hyde noted the irony of Ireland’s copying the nation she most hated.” In other words, it’s a great irony to imitate the people you like the least.

It seems to me that there are very deep and basic reasons why every serious effort to understand another person—especially a Christian—forces us to deal in irony or paradox. One of the most basic reasons is that Christians are both fallen and redeemed. We are saved (Ephesians 2:8-9), and we not yet saved (Romans 13:11). We are adopted (Romans 8:15), yet we wait for adoption (Romans 8:23). We are pure in Christ, but not yet pure: “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened” (1 Corinthians 5:7). What an irony that unleavened bread should be told to become unleavened.

Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20); we are sojourners and exiles here (1 Peter 2:11). But the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (1 Corinthians 10:26); and “all things are yours, whether . . . the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours” (1 Corinthians 3:20-21). We were bought with a price and are slaves of no man (1 Corinthians 7:23). Yet, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” (1 Peter 2:13). Our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). Yet Jesus prays that we not be taken out of the world (John 17:15). Indeed, “some of you they will put to death . . . but not a hair of your head will perish” (Luke 21:16, 18). In fact, you have already died (Romans 6:8). So consider yourselves dead (Romans 8:11). How ironic that dead should be told to consider themselves dead.

In other words, irony and paradox and incongruities are found in every Christian life because our very identity as Christians is paradoxical. That’s what it means to be a Christian. If you’re not a paradox, you’re not saved. In fact, I would go even farther and say, if you’re not a paradox, you’re not a human. What could be more basic to fallen humanity—and what could be more ironic—than that those who are created by God in his own image should use that God-like personhood to deny their Maker? Like a digging ant denying the earth; or a flying bird denying the wind; or swimming fish denying the sea.

Bill Piper: Human, Christian

So there are these two great reasons why, as I have pondered my father’s life, I have found him to be a paradoxical person: He is a Christian, and he is a human. Does it not seem like a strange incongruity—perhaps not a real one—that a blood-earnest, soul-winner, who hammered away at the temptations of the world and the dangers of the flesh should in his sixties celebrate the body of his wife with words like these:

Her hair is like an auburn sea, Wind-whipped, waved, mysterious. Her forehead, like a wall of pearl Stands majestic, proud, serene. Her wide-set eyes are like clear, sparkling, hazel-green pools, calm, compassionate, penetrating. Her finely chiseled nose stands firmly between cheeks that are fair, like pillows of down. Her mouth is soft, pleasant and ruby rich. Her skin is like the feathers of a dove. Her breasts are like rose-tipped apples of ivory, And her belly is like a ocean wave, smooth and restful. Her legs are like pillars of granite, strong and firm. And her feet like those of a deer, swift and beautiful. Her breath is like sweet nectar, Her kisses like perfumed flowers, And her love like paradise.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Bob Jones University should produce soul-winners that write like Song of Songs. Maybe the incongruity is just biblical faithfulness. But almost everywhere I turned in my father’s life, there were these seeming paradoxes. He was human, and he was Christian.

Corporate Paradoxes

And he lived with other humans and other Christians, who together created corporate paradoxes. Does it not seem like a strange incongruity—perhaps not a real one—that the most fundamentalistic, separatistic, worldliness-renouncing school in America, Bob Jones University, where my father graduated in 1942, should have as part of the commencement celebration in those days a performance of “As You Like It” (1939) and “Romeo and Juliet” (1940) both written by William Shakespeare, who in his own day ridiculed the Puritans, and whose Globe Theater was demolished by the Puritans in 1644? Isn’t it a strange irony how three centuries can turn worldliness into “a delightful comedy”—as the BJU program said in 1939?

So whether personal or corporate, my father’s life appears to be permeated with paradoxes. And under the title “Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and Joy,” I hope to capture some of them in a way that gives you hope in the grace of God through the gospel of Christ.

An Old-Fashioned, No-Nonsense Rearing

William Solomon Hottle Piper—named after a Bible expositor that his father admired—was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, January 8, 1919. He was the third and youngest son of Elmer and Emma Piper. His father had been a machinist (I couldn’t forget that he was missing half of one finger), but after his conversion, he became a self-taught Bible student and then the pastor of West Wyomissing Nonsectarian Church. My father told me that he wouldn’t have been surprised if his father could quote virtually the entire New Testament from memory. My guess is that this was an overstatement, but it signals the massive priority of the Bible and Bible Study that passed from my grandfather to my father to me.

The upbringing of the three boys, Harold, Elmer, and Bill, was old-fashioned, no-nonsense, and strict. He gives us a glimpse into the discipline of his father in one of his sermons.

Behavioristic psychologists teach that temper tantrums and defiant attitudes are normal and healthy. To curb them is dangerous. If you discipline the child you will develop within him inhibitions and warp his personality.

I’m glad I had a father who believed otherwise. I got “warped” a good many times, but it wasn’t my personality! . . . O, yes, we had plenty of counseling sessions but generally he did the talking and when he finished I said, “Yes, sir.”

Old fashioned? Indeed it was! Scriptural? Absolutely! Right to the letter.

The strictness of his father had some surprising side effects that were profound. He told me about one of them. It turns out that both Bill and Elmer had disobeyed their father. Elmer was the older, so his father said that he was the more responsible and that he would get the whipping for both boys. My father told me with tears in his eyes a few years ago that he could hear the belt on the backside. Though he was just a boy, he said it was one of the most vivid pictures in his life of the substitutionary atonement of Christ in our place.

In a sermon about the salvation of children, he tells us about his own conversion to make the point that young children can be saved.

That children can be saved I know from my own experience. I have a brother who was saved at the age of seven and another who gave his heart to Christ when he was eight. I received Christ as my Savior when I was a boy of six. Certainly there were many things I did not know, nor need to know. I knew enough to be saved. I knew I was sinful and needed a Savior. I knew that Christ was that Savior I needed. I knew that if I would believe on Him and confess Him as my Savior He would save me. That is all I needed to know and that all any child needs to know to be saved. I trusted Christ and he saved me.2

The Call at Age Fifteen

Besides his conversion at the age of six, probably the most decisive event in his teenage life (and I mean even more decisive than his marriage to my mother at age nineteen) was what happened when he was fifteen.

He told me this story face to face several times over the years, and he always came to tears as he said it. He saw it as a moment of supernatural confirmation on his divine calling that never left him and that stamped his entire life. I will let him tell the story from his book The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth.

I can vividly recall the thrills that accompanied the delivery of my first Gospel sermon. I was fifteen years of age and had just surrendered my life fully to the will and service of Christ. The young people of our community had joined together to promote a city-wide revival and had invited a well known evangelist.

For the Saturday night service, the evangelist decided to turn the entire service over to the young people. For some reason I was asked to bring the message and to give the invitation.

I had been reared in a Baptist parsonage. All my life I had heard great preaching but I had never tried to do it myself. This was to be my first attempt. I didn’t know how but I tried. My heart was filled with zeal and I wanted to do my best for the Lord. The big night came. For my message I had selected some thoughts on about a half dozen Gospel tracts. At the time of the sermon I spread these tracts all over the pulpit and I simply preached from one tract to the next.

I don’t recall a thing I said. It probably was a poor sermon. But the thing that mattered was that when I gave the invitation to receive Christ [this is where the tears would inevitably come], ten precious souls left their seats, came weeping to an improvised altar and surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The thrill that came to me then is still with me many years later. I knew that Jesus had walked on the water but I felt as I left the building that night that I was walking on air! Believe me, I was on cloud nine! And, better still, I’ve never come down. What thrilled me most was the sudden realization that I had immeasurable power at my disposal. That the God of heaven, the God of the Bible, was willing to speak through me in such a way as to touch other lives and transform them and change their destinies.

I never dreamed such a thrill was possible for me. I had not known such power was at my disposal. I said then, “God, let me know this power the rest of my life. Let me be so yielded to Thee that I’ll never cease to know the thrill and joy of winning others to Christ.” And I can say with honesty, I am just as excited right now [this book was published in 1980, forty-six years later] about the soul-winning power of God as I was at the age of fifteen.

From that day on, my father’s face was set like flint to be a full-time evangelist.

Beside his name in his senior yearbook are the words: “He wants to be an evangelistic preacher.” He never turned back.

Bill and El: The Gospel Songsters

In the last two years that he and his brother Elmer were in high school together they had their own radio program on WRW in Reading, Pennsylvania, called “Bill and El, the Gospel Songsters.” They sang and preached. Their theme song was a song called “Precious Hiding Place.” Until you hear it, you can hardly imagine how different the teenage world was seventy-five years ago.

Perhaps my wife is right in her analysis: When she saw a video of Bill and El, she pointed out that in 1936 adolescence as a distinct cultural phenomenon hadn’t yet been created. There was no such thing as a vast teen culture. There was no teenage music. Frank Sinatra was born four years before my father. He is usually considered the first teen idol. The beginnings of a distinct youth culture was just about to begin. So when my father was in high school the overlap between the music that mom and dad liked and what teens liked was much greater then than now.

In other words, my father grew up much more quickly than I did. He skipped a good bit of the usually-wasted years called adolescence, or what later was called the “teenage” years—the term teenager did not occur in the English language until 1941. He graduated from high school with his sweetheart Ruth Eulalia Mohn in 1936.

You can see from the note in her senior yearbook that her heart was bound together already in the calling of his life. Hers reads: “She intends to take up evangelistic work.”

Marriage to Ruth, College at Bob Jones

After graduation, my father traveled with the Students’ League of Nations and studied at John A. Davis Memorial Bible School in Binghamton, New York. Then on May 26, 1938, he and his brother Elmer in the same wedding ceremony married Ruth and Naomi. Elmer married Naomi Werner. And Bill married Ruth Mohn. Bill and Ruth were both nineteen.

They moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, to attend Bob Jones College. The school had moved to Cleveland in 1933 from near Panama City, Florida, where it was founded in 1927. Ruth and Bill both enrolled. My father was an average student and a very gifted speaker and actor. He had leading roles in several Shakespearean plays. He developed a deep admiration for Dr. Bob Senior, the founder of the school, and quoted him often the rest of his life. My father loved the education he got at Bob Jones. He never belittled the school as an educational institution. When the time would come for cutting off ties with the school, it was a deeply painful thing.

He graduated in 1942 and entered full-time evangelism. My sister Beverly was born in 1943, and I was born in 1946. That same year Bob Jones moved to Greenville, South Carolina, and our family moved with them. Greenville became the base of Daddy’s evangelistic ministry for the rest of his life. This is where I grew up.

The Rhythm of Leaving and Coming Home

Life, in my memory, was a rhythm of Daddy’s leaving for one week or two weeks or as long as four weeks, almost always on Saturday, and then coming home on Monday. When I dedicated the book Desiring God to him, I wrote

I can recall Mother laughing so hard at the dinner table that the tears ran down her face. She was a very happy woman. But especially when you came home on Monday. You had been gone two weeks. Or sometimes three or four. She would glow on Monday mornings when you were coming home.

He had been elected to the board of trustees of Bob Jones before coming to Greenville in 1946, the youngest board member ever elected at that time. In 1952, the University award him the Doctor of Divinity degree in recognition of the impact of his ministry in the churches of the United States.

Over the next decades, he preached in all fifty states, half a dozen other countries, held over 1,250 evangelistic crusades, recorded over 30,000 professions of faith, and published seven books of sermons.

The Challenges of Full-Time Evangelism

The personal toll this took on him, and what it cost my mother, was extraordinary. What keeps you going to hard new challenges week after week when it means you must leave the ones you love again and again? Here’s what he wrote in his book Stones Out of the Rubbish.

As an evangelist, my work necessarily keeps me away from my sweet wife and children much of the time. Some have asked me, “How can you endure be­ing away from them? Why don’t you get a church and settle down?” There is but one answer. When I was a boy of fifteen, I sold out to the will of God. His will since that day has been the supreme passion of my life. There have been failures, mistakes and sins since then, but His blessed will has remained more important to me than family, home or friends. God called me to be an evangelist. I said, “Lord, this will mean homesickness, separation from loved ones, loneliness and sacrifice, but NEVERTHELESS, if that is your will, ‘I will let down the net.’” The blessings He has given have often been more than I could contain. The fruit I have seen has re­paid me a million times over for whatever sacrifices I may have made.”5

Part of the burden he carried was the sordid stereotype of itinerant southern evangelists. It grieved him, but it didn’t stop him.

There is a rea­son why the words “evangelism” and “evangelist” meet with a feeling of nausea and disgust in the minds of thousands of thinking people today. . . . All emotionalism worked up in the energy of the flesh, deliberately aroused for outward results, or toyfully played upon by the impression-seeking preacher can leave nothing but bitterness in the bottom of the cup.

Not Your Typical Evangelist

My father was not your typical evangelist. He was a doctrinally driven, Bible-saturated evangelist. When he preached to save sinners, he explained doctrine. One outline from his sermon notes goes like this—and it is typical of the sort of preaching he did:

Christ is our redemption

Christ is our propitiation

Christ is our righteousness

Christ is sanctification

Christ is our Example

Christ is our Expectation

Christ is our Completeness

He believed that the best way to call for repentance and faith was to unpack the glories of Christ in the gospel, which meant unpacking doctrine. He had about 200 sermons in his arsenal. He told me that about twenty of them were blessed above all others, and he would return to these again and again. What marked out his evangelistic preaching as unusual was not the stories, but basic doctrines of man’s helpless condition in sin, God’s holiness and wrath and the imminent danger of damnation, the glorious fullness of Christ’s saving work on the cross, and the free offer of forgiveness and righteousness to any who believed.

He was the most Bible-saturated preacher I have ever heard. When he took up the reality of the new birth, for example, the message was full of the Bible.

My father loved the Bible. He believed the Bible. He built his life on the Bible, and he preached the gospel at the center of the Bible with unashamed authority and almost no frills. And God used him mightily in the salvation of sinners.

Separation and Exile

In 1957, something happened that broke his heart and changed the scope of his relationships. I don’t know all the details. I just know that in June of 1957, Daddy called Bob Jones from a meeting in Wisconsin and resigned from the board of the school. The ways parted. I was eleven years old. Before that I had watched soccer games at BJU and seen films that they made. The campus was just across the highway from our home. But after 1957, there was no more connection. We were not welcome.

The larger issue above the particular details was the issue of separation. Christian fundamentalism today is defined largely by the doctrine of separation. The issue of whether to separate from Billy Graham and renounce his work became pivotal in 1957. His New York crusade began on May 15 and ran nightly for four months. The supporters of the crusade were not all evangelical. And the lines of separation became blurred. My father would not renounce Billy. And in the end, there was a division between my father and Bob Jones. This was one of the great ironies of his life. The movement that nurtured him and shaped him, the school that he loved and served, would no longer support him. Only near the end of his life was there a reconciliation as Bob Jones III reached out to my father. It was a sweet ending to a long exile.

Death of Ruth, Marriage to LaVonne

In 1974, my mother was killed in a bus accident in Israel. My father was seriously injured but survived. They had been married thirty-six years. A year later, God gave my lonely father a second wife, LaVonne Nalley. I performed the wedding ceremony in December of 1975.

The effect of my mother’s death and my father’s second marriage was profound on our relationship. It took my father one more step away from closeness to me. LaVonne was a southern lady with deep roots in family and place. In the twenty-eight years of their marriage, LaVonne never came to Minneapolis. My father came twice. Since we only saw each other once a year or so, the relationship with the new relatives was cordial but not deep. It never felt very much like family. So it felt like my father had been drawn into an intimacy that was no longer focused on the family he fathered but the new relationship he had with LaVonne.

My relationship with my father had always been one of admiration and respect and tremendous enjoyment when we played games together or fished. But we never talked much about personal things. And with the death of my mother, and the movement of my father’s heart into a new world of relationships, the distance that I felt grew even greater.

In the Shadow of Evangelistic Effectiveness

It never changed my basic feelings for him. I felt a tremendous affection and admiration for him. In fact, in my adult years, I felt a huge compassion or pity for my father, first because of the sacrifices he made to do the work of evangelism, and then because of the death of my mother, and then because of his increasing dementia. My emotional default reaction to my father was never resentment that he wasn’t home enough. My reaction was: How can I show him that I love him and help him to know how much I esteem his work and the faithfulness he has shown?

I always felt supported, loved, and admired by my father. He spoke well of me. He thought I was crazy for leaving my professorship at Bethel to be a pastor, since he thought I was exactly where I belonged. But when the decision was made in 1980, he supported me and loved hearing news from the church. Most of all he loved hearing stories of conversions.

I have always lived in the shadow of my father’s evangelistic effectiveness. I think it’s been good for me, because my father’s life is like a living parable of the priority that God puts on the salvation of one sinner who repents. “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). My father’s life is a constant reminder of that truth. I am thankful for it.

Homecoming

During the years after my mother’s death and my father’s increasing inability to travel in evangelism, the Lord opened an amazing door with the creation of international correspondence courses that my father wrote. Rod of God Ministries grew up with tens of thousands of people in Africa and Asia taking these courses. That ministry continues today under the leadership that my father put in place. It was a thrilling gift to him as he aged because he was able be involved in writing and teaching into his mid eighties.

Only in the last couple years was his memory so impaired that he couldn’t serve in that way. His second wife LaVonne died August 4, 2003. After a brief stay in independent living in Anderson, South Carolina, near his church, Oakwood Baptist, that cared for him so well, we moved him to Shepherd’s Care in Greenville, owned and operated by Bob Jones University. It was, in my mind and his, a kind of homecoming—to the school he loved and to the fundamentalism he never really left—and paradoxically never really belonged to. I look back on God’s mercy in my father’s final days with tremendous gratitude. The Lord took him on March 6, 2007.

Self-Designated Fundamentalist

After his deepest identity as gospel-glorying child of God, my father’s identity was most essentially evangelist. This defined his life from age 15 to 88. In the last days, his unreality that his mind created at Shepherd’s Care was not casual times with his family but evangelistic crusades. “Across the lawn there is where the meeting will be tonight.” From beginning to end, he was defined by evangelism.

But he was also a fundamentalist. By his own self-designation. It was not a term of reproach but of honor. In the first decade of the twentieth century, liberalism was gaining a foothold in most denominations. The common word for the liberals then was modernists—those who believed that modern science had made some essentials of the Christian faith untenable. My father defined modernism like this:

By “modernists”, we mean ministers who deny the truth concerning Jesus Christ: His miraculous conception, His absolute deity, His vicarious atonement for the sins of mankind, His bodily resurrection, and His personal visible return to this earth. Modernists also deny the need of regeneration by the Holy Spirit and the fact of a literal hell.7

In other words, in the early days of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the battle was not for marginal doctrines or behaviors but essential doctrine—“fundamentals.” When J. Gresham Machen wrote his response to liberalism in 1923, he did not title it Fundamentalism and Liberalism but Christianity and Liberalism because he believed liberalism was not Christianity at all.8

Two years before my father was born, the four-volume set of books called The Fundamentals was published (1917). In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick fired his shot across the bow of the ship of the church called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” My father grew up in this super-charged atmosphere of modernism threatening the very life of the churches in America. In his early sermons in the forties and fifties, he returned to this battle again and again:

Christianity is in the throes of a gigantic conflict with the enemies of the Lord. The followers of Satan have shown their colors and the Faith is being blatantly denied and rejected. Corruption and disintegration have begun in a dozen denominations where the enemy had spread his deadly poison.9

The breach between modernism and fundamentalism keeps getting wider. . . . “The faith once for all delivered unto the saints” has been shunned in favor of bloodless faith which glorifies man, denies his depravity, rejects the absolute authority of the Bible and the Deity of Jesus Christ.10

In fact, by the time my father was ten-years old, most people recognized that the battle to save the mainline denominations from liberalism was being lost. Then the question became how to deal with this, and the debates about degrees of separation altered the meaning of the term fundamentalism in the 1930s. It ceased to mean “orthodox Christianity” over against those who denied essentials, and came to refer one group of orthodox Christians, namely, the ones who believed that the biblical way forward was strict separation from denominations, groups, and relationships that were not fully orthodox and were not separated from those who were not fully orthodox.

Bob Jones University was and is one of the strongest representations of this development of fundamentalism. And my father embraced it and was defined by it—up to a point. For him, the heart of fundamentalism was the true doctrine. His passion was evangelism—saving people from perishing in hell by leading them to the divine Savior and his substitutionary work on the cross. In other words, if the fundamentals were not true, the gospel is a false hope, and evangelism is misleading. Therefore, the note struck more clearly than all notes was the doctrinal importance of fundamentalism:

Though fundamentalists do not agree upon every point of doctrine, they are definitely agreed upon the essential elements of the Christian faith: the total depravity of man, the absolute deity of Christ, the vicarious, substitutionary atonement for sin through the blood of Christ, His bodily resurrection, the need of the new birth and the blessed return of Christ to the earth.11

Another dimension of fundamentalism that he embraced was authoritative preaching that was willing to name evil and defend truth.

Too many present-day pulpiteers are soft pedaling the Gospel. Even many who are robed in the vestments of fundamentalism are void of a semblance of holy boldness in their preaching. They handle sin with kid gloves, avoid great issues and shrink from declaring cardinal doctrines. Pussyfooters in the pulpit! What a tragedy! They are a blight to the Church and a blockade to the Holy spirit’s blessing.

Then there was the fundamentalist vision of separation not just from false doctrine but from all forms of worldliness that weaken the boldness and spiritual power of a Christian.

Every Christian who indulges in the sinful pleasures of this world is a compromiser and a stumbling-block. No danc­ing, theater-going, card-playing, gambling Christian can hope to be a soul winner or have a testimony for God. If men see this world in you, you will never point them to the next.13

I grew up in a home where it was assumed we would not smoke, or drink, or gamble, or play cards, or dance, or go to movies. We were fundamentalists. So why didn’t I kick against this growing up? I have never thought ill of my parents for these standards. I have never resented it or belittled it. When I was in my early twenties, I was indignant in some of my classes at Fuller Seminary when certain young faculty members were cynical and sarcastic about fundamentalism. They sounded to me like adolescents who were angry at their parents and their backgrounds and couldn’t seem to grow up. I never felt that way about my parents or about the fundamentalism of my past. Why?

Fundamentalist Freedom

I think I know why. My mother and my father were the happiest people I have ever known. This strikes many as an incongruity, a paradox. But this is the key to my father’s influence on me and, I believe, one of the keys to the power of his ministry. The fundamentalist forcefulness in the pulpit, the fundamentalist vision of “the razorsharp edge of truth,”14 the fundamentalist standards that move from the Ten Commandments down to dancing and card-playing—all of this was enveloped in a world of joy and freedom.

Freedom? Fundamentalistic freedom? Yes. I’ll illustrate. When I was in the seventh grade, our class, Mrs. Adams’ homeroom, won the attendance award for the year. The award? The whole class would go a movie at the Carolina Theater on Main Street during school time. My heart pounded. I went home and asked my mother—Daddy wasn’t home—what should I do? She said, “Do what you think is right.” I weighed all the factors, and I went.

The next year, in the eighth grade, a girl called me one night and asked if I would go with her to a dance. It was one of those Sadie Hawkins events where the girls invite the guys. She was a pretty girl. My heart pounded again: Uh . . . I don’t dance, I said. She said, We don’t have to dance, we can just sit and watch. Uh . . . just a minute. I went and asked my mother what I should do. (Daddy wasn’t home.) She said, “Do what you think is right.” Then she checked her calendar, and we were going to be out of town. Saved.

What was my mother, speaking for my father, doing? She was saying: We have standards, son, but they need to come from the inside. If they don’t come from the inside, they are worthless. On these issues, you’re old enough now to discover who you are deep inside. When my parents said, “Do what you think is right,” they were not foolish relativists. They were wise fundamentalists.

“Truthing in Love”

Soon I was old enough to start talking about these issues with my father. Daddy, why is there a split between you and some other fundamentalists? One thing I remember above all about these conversations. He went to Ephesians 4:15 over and over and reminded me that in all our devotion to the truth we must “speak the truth in love.” He used to love to play on the Greek verb and translate it “truthing in love.” He felt as if fundamentalism was losing the battle mainly for spiritual and attitudinal reasons, not doctrinal ones.

Already in the 1940s, there had emerged in my father’s preaching and teaching and writing a warning about the dangers of fundamentalism. For the careless listener, this could sound like he was abandoning the ship of fundamentalism. Some would say he did. He would surely say he didn’t. I don’t think he did. Let me try to capture the spirit of this warning from his own words:

Some professing Christians, often those who boast of their fundamentalism, are given to a grievous cen­sorious and critical attitude toward everything and everybody. As one man I knew has said, “Some people are born in the objective case, the contrary gender and the bilious mood.”. . . For one to profess to know Christ and have real religion and at the same time to manifest a sour, critical, negative attitude is disgusting and ab­horrent even to the ungodly. Certainly anyone with such an unsavory nature could never hope to be a “savour of life unto life.”15

Critiquing Fundamentalism

Then there is this amazing passage that folds the critique of fundamentalism in with a much wider concern and shows the scope of my father’s burden. He is not picking on anyone here, he is groaning over the lost power of the church and longing for the day of great revival.

When backslidden Christians confess their waywardness and return to God; when worldly Christians stop their smoking, drinking, dancing, card-playing and show-going and heed again the message of separation; when pharisaic negative religionists who boast loudly of what they do not do, forsake their contemptuous pride, covetousness and carnality and return again to their “first love”; when slothful, sleepy, negligent Christians are filled with the Spirit and feel again the thrill of their salvation; when stagnant fundamentalism is replaced by aggressive evangelism; . . . when anemic sermons are red again with the crimson blood of Jesus; when the average church ceases to be merely a center of social interest and becomes again a source of spiritual influence, does more praying and less playing, more fasting and less feasting, showers of revival fire and blessing will again fall on America.16

He said that there is a world of difference between being separated and being consecrated. If we don’t move beyond separation to consecration, our separation is worthless. This is what my parents were saying to me when mother said, Do what you think is right, Johnny. The issue in this family is not whether we keep separation rules, but whether we have consecrated hearts.

I have seen many Christians who are separated but far from consecrated. They boast pharisaically of what they do not do and fail to see that they are doing almost nothing for God. . . . Consecrated Christians are Christians who are so busy serving the Lord that they have neither time or taste for the things of the world. They have found their joy and complete satisfaction in Christ.17

Fundamentalism ceased to be a term my father could use for himself without profound qualification. And this didn’t change for forty years.

If Christianity, as he said, is not rules and dogmas and creeds and rituals and passionless purity and degrees of goodness, and if the devil himself is a fundamentalist (because he knows all the fundamentals to be true), then what is the heart of the matter? What is Christianity? What was it that undergirded and overshadowed everything else in our home and in my father’s ministry?

Stunned by the Gospel

The answer was gospel-rooted, Christ-savoring, God-glorifying joy. My father was stunned by the gospel. He exulted in the gospel. Everything in fundamentalism was secondary to the glory of Christ enjoyed in the gospel. The gospel meant salvation, and salvation meant, in the end, total satisfaction in Christ:

Other religions are spelled, “Do,” but Chris­tianity is spelled, “Done.” If you would be saved, you must place your trust in the finished and perfect work of Christ on the cross. In Him all sin was punished and God’s holiness was vindicated. God is satisfied with Christ as to the perfection of His life and righteousness, and as to the completeness of His work in the sinner’s behalf. God’s only requirement for salvation is that you, too, be satisfied with Christ and His work.18

Satisfied with Christ

Where did I learn that delight in God is our highest duty? Before Jonathan Edwards and before C. S. Lewis and before Daniel Fuller, there was Bill Piper, unsystematically, unapologetically, and almost unwittingly saying: God’s only requirement is that you be satisfied with Christ.

Long before John Piper read C. S. Lewis’ The Weight of Glory and learned about the folly of making mud pies in the slums because one can’t imagine a holiday at the sea—long before that—he was hearing his father talkabout the cow and the barbed-wire fence by the road.

I have often seen a cow stick her head through a barbed wire fence to chew the stubby grass bordering a highway, when behind her lay a whole pasture of grass. I have always been reminded of Christians who have not learned to completely trust Christ, reaching out to the world for sensual pleasure when rivers of pleasure were at their disposal in Christ.19

“Everyone Wants to Be Happy”

Long before John Piper ever read, “All men seek happiness”21 in Pascal’s Penses, he was absorbing from his father these very truths. This from a sermon in the 1940s: “Everyone wants to be happy. Sinners seek it in pleasure, fame, wealth and unbelief, but they seek in vain. Chris­tians have found the answer to happiness in Christ.”22

And what are these pleasures that this fundamentalist is so ravished by? Like Lewis, my father answered: They are everywhere.

The devil never made a rain drop or a snow flake. He never made a baby smile or a nightingale sing. He never placed a golden sun in a western sky or filled the night with stars. Why? Because these things were not his to give. God is the creator and the possessor of them all and he lovingly shares these things with us.23

Christ Himself, The Supreme Delight

Is it any wonder my father was a poet? Poets are people who see the indescribable glory everywhere and will not be daunted in their passion to make language serve its revelation. My father found reason to rejoice everywhere he looked. He had an invincible faith that all things serve God’s wise purpose to reveal his glory. Even in his final years of dementia, he rejoiced. In the last month that he was able to keep a journal (April of 2004), he wrote, “I’ll soon be 86 but I feel strong and my health is good. God has been exceedingly gracious and I am most unworthy of His matchless grace and patience. The Lord is more precious to me the older I get.”

In other words, not the pleasures that lie strewn everywhere in life, but the pleasures of Christ himself are the supreme delight. “Every believer has in Christ all the fullness the world longs for. Christianity, therefore, far from being dull and dreary or a harsh system of rules and regulations, is a gloriously free, real, victorious and happy life.”24

And, he adds, it never ends:

His grace is infinite. It is fathomless as the sea. In glory, through­out the ages to come, we who are saved will behold an endless display of these riches which we now have in Christ Jesus. [Then, always the evangelist, he says, and I say] I trust that you all are sharing this wealth. If not, you may. Simply place your faith in Christ and start reveling in the riches of God’s grace.25

“Fully Satisfied with Him Alone”

One last thing, lest he fail to get all the credit that he should: He preached a very provocative message once called “Sanctifying God” from Isaiah 8:13(“Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.”). What was his answer to the question, How do we “sanctify” God—how do we esteem him and honor him and set him apart is the supremely valuable Treasure of our lives?

He gives his answer in the form of a very personal discovery: “I knew . . . that God was sufficient, abundantly able to supply my every need and the need of all who would trust Him. But to sanctify Him as such, I realized that day that I must live a contented life, a life fully satisfied with Him alone.”26 Or to quote the echo of the father in the son: God is most sanctified in us, when we are most satisfied in him.

What an evangelist! What a fundamentalist! What a soul full of grace and joy!

Thank you, Daddy. Thank you. Under God, I owe you everything.

Endnotes

1 Bill Piper, The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Evangelistic Publications, 1980), p. 30.

2 Bill Piper, A Good Time and How to Have It (Greenville, SC: Piper Publications, 1964), p. 65.

3 The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth, pp. 22-23.

4 John Piper, Desiring God (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2003), pp. 13-14.

5 Bill Piper, Stones Out of the Rubbish, (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Publications, 1947), pp. 63-64.

6 Stones Out of the Rubbish, pp. 27-28.

7 Bill Piper, The Tyranny of Tolerance (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Publications, 1964), p. 28.

8 J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1923), pp. 49-50.

9 The Tyranny of Tolerance, p. 38.

10 Ibid., p. 19.

11 Ibid., p. 29.

12 Ibid., pp. 10, 11, 17.

13 Stones Out of the Rubbish, p. 62.

14 The Tyranny of Tolerance, p. 10.

15 Bill Piper, Dead Men Made Alive (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Publications, 1949), pp. 28-29.

16 Stones Out of the Rubbish, p. 33.

17 Ibid., p. 62.

18 Dead Men Made Alive, p. 24.

19 A Good Time and How to Have It, p. 48.

20 The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth, p. 22.

21 Blaise Pascal, Penses (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 113, Thought # 425.

22 Dead Men Made Alive, p. 30.

23 The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth, p. 39.

24 A Good Time and How to Have It, p. 70.

25 Dead Men Made Alive, p. 62.

26 A Good Time and How to Have It, p. 17.