I remained close to the Christians in my new church, becoming particularly closely involved with a household community composed of other refugees from the Children of God, the cult that had swallowed up the Jesus People. It wasn't much different, still dedicated to Christian discipleship, evangelism, and living out the principals of the Gospels. They were also a lot longer on common sense and there was more openness to other ideas and integrating with the rest of society, despite the stodgy fundamentalism of the leaders. My own participation was peripheral and as a sixteen year old, not much was expected of me.
This community eventually died a natural death and I had my own issues of family and other stuff to take up more of my attention besides spreadin' the gospel around. I moved to Vancouver Island at seventeen to live with my mother and her horrible boyfriend, since I was not wanted by my also horrible father (Mom sure knew how to pick her men!) Following high school I had little option but to move on my own, first to stay in a very dysfunctional Christian household and within a couple of months to live in my own apartment. Unable to relate to the vacuum that the loss of Christian community had created in my life I kind of drifted along in my own solitary life, soon getting mixed up with some very scary situations. I was using drugs, nothing addictive, and I also was selling a bit. Yes, Gentle Reader, I was once as young drug dealer.
At twenty I moved back to Vancouver, following six months in Toronto. I had returned to my Christian faith and in Vancouver tried to reintegrate into the church. It didn't work. They became very conservative and had shifted very sharply towards the right and I was not made to feel welcome, though I did survive six months in one of their community houses. It was a household of six single males, five very narrow minds and I was only too glad to leave (they were unanimous in kicking me out. My crime? They simply didn't like me. I cooked, cleaned, bought groceries and tried to be a friend to homophobic idiots who didn't like me, especially the leader who admitted to being a closeted homosexual and seemed to have a crush on me, unreciprocated. I was honest, responsible and considerate of others and my personal morals, despite my recent dissolute adventures over the last year, were impeccable. I pulled my weight. But I was too "different."
I spent the next four months or so in a tiny house of three to four other outcasts from the church. We shared certain features in common: we were all above average bright, we were all gifted and we each had a strong streak towards independence. As fond as I was of these people, and grateful for the wider sense of community they helped open up for me, I had to move on and at the age of twenty-one, I again had my own apartment.
This loss of community created a gaping hole in my life. Despite my strong and stubbornly independent nature, I am the first to admit that I function at my best when I feel well-integrated into a community of close people whom I feel I can trust. I would be inclined to think of this as a universal need. I also believe that this frustration of community helped traumatize me, and I have been struggling for the past forty years to somehow reconcile this wound. To discover a healthy sense of community that will neither cast me off nor swallow me alive. Again, a universal need.
I think of the traditional societies of medieval Spain and of the Aztecs, most rather alike in their cohesiveness and the strict, unforgiving code and hierarchies they were governed by. Now, in our diverse, pluralistic, multicultural ambience of individual freedom and very little connection we all live as walking wounded, attached to our precious electronic devices instead of running the risk of connecting with the strangers around us. The way of life in earlier times was in many ways horrible and traumatizing, especially compared to our lovely, progressive louche way of life that we all take for granted. We are also much lonelier than our ancestors, and I really wonder, who has been really more traumatized?
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