Stranger Than Fiction, 12

In 1992 I was already well into the first half of my Thirteen Year Nightmare.  I was a thirty-six year old man living in a cramped drafty farmhouse with a woman in her later forties and another woman well in her sixties.  Both had suffered from bad marriages.  Dopey was a widow who had survived a philandering and emotionally abusive husband.  Dippy had it even worse, being divorced from an abusive bully who used to beat the crap out of her.  Guess who became the resident dumping ground for all their negative issues about men?

Dippy furthermore had to agree that if she was going to continue living with us then she would be expected to comply with some reasonable expectations: she was not to bring guests over without prior consultation with Dopey and me, and she was not to get emotionally or sexually involved with anyone we were seeking to minister to.  In fact, as an intentional Christian community we had all agreed to be chaste and faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ and the work he had called us into.

Dippy could hardly bear even reasonable guidelines and there were frequent emotional outbursts and verbal sparring.  I was no angel either.  Fresh from my mother's death and a lot of other deaths I was traumatized, as were Dippy and Dopey, and tended to lose my temper very easily and frequently.  It was a very hellish Christian community for the three of us.  We still tried to be faithful, meeting every morning and many evenings together for prayer and community consultation.  Some of these meetings were lovely and enjoyable and God's presence was strongly experienced by us together.  Other times they became battlegrounds.  And gradually we all became alienated from one another.

In one week I went through three deaths, a record: AIDS, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning.

I found employment as a peer support worker and was frequently caring for AIDS sufferers, putting me into yet more contact with death and dying.  Dippy found work with the same organization.  My reason for getting work was by means of role modelling, since we were still financially flush as a community.  But for me work was not simply a means for earning income, neither did I feel that it was adequate to justify what we were doing as a community as work, though it certainly was no cakewalk.  I also really wanted to remain connected to the larger community.  We were already ingrown and Dippy and Dopey both stubbornly ignored my warnings that we not turn into an ingrown cult.

I was going through some of my own changes.  I began to wear black and dark colours and felt somewhat detached and aloof from others.  I was of course traumatized but I opted to turn it into a fashion statement.  In the meantime we continued in our ministry of presence downtown and within limits of hospitality in our home.

Perhaps foolishly, we were all determined to make this work.