...It was Spirit that told me to begin working on this book just a year ago. It was Spirit that kept prodding at me, especially lately, to put my own story into words and put it out for all to see. That is what I am doing today. It is in very rough form, written mostly at one sitting, with edits here and there. It feels more important to share it than to wait to share it in "perfect" form. It feels important to make my own vulnerabilites visible. I pray it will inspire others to dig deep into the recesses of their psyches and find the courage and the words to share their own journeys...



The floorboards of the old front porch had been worn smooth by decades of traffic. They were uniform in width; one by fours, probably, narrow and painted in a light gray enamel. In retrospect, had I had the consciousness to notice them it might have occurred to me that there was, after all, some reliable consistency in my life. Then, however, even the sturdy porch didn't seem reliable enough to hold me. The balmy evening, sometime in summer, when I last sat out there blanketed by the deepening sky, was the night of my “second born again” experience, as I have come to call it. It was, also, a dark night of the soul.

Many years previously, in my early teens, I had visited my first “Bible Believing” Church, the kind of church that had morning and evening services on Sunday and prayer meeting mid-week. The atmosphere was warm and inviting, the people friendly, the informal chatter before evening service intoxicating. It stood in contrast to the rather formal, silent, distant atmosphere that filled the home where I lived. There was a vibrancy in the air and a sense of warmth that comes with close community.

During the service I felt “something” awaken in me; a sense of spirit, of soul, coming alive in my being. The minister said that God loved me and had a plan for my life. Like a feast to the underfed, the words filled my body, mind, spirit. At the close of the service, during the altar call, I “went forward” to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior and to embrace my first “born again” experience .. Yes!! I wanted this new life, this love of God, for myself. Of course, being a very pliant, accommodating young person, I also didn't want to “rock the boat” by standing out as one who refused to surrender to God. “Better now than later,” something in my deep subconscious prodded. “Do it now so people won't be looking at you wondering if you've been saved”, another intuitive voice told me. At the same time I managed to file in the back of my awareness, the threats of hellfire and damnation, hinted at in the service, that loomed over my immortal soul if I weren't saved.

So began a journey into the fundamentalist spirituality that I claimed as my own that night. It lasted nearly seventeen years. The church became the focal point of my world. Services up to three times a week were the substance of my social life. In high school I went to Bible conferences, teen gatherings, revivals, and church-sponsored parties instead of the worldly adolescent events and sinful proms. It was an insular sub-culture intended to shelter its young from “sex, drugs, and rock and roll”, along with card playing, dancing, movies and other unseemly activities.

Four years in a Christian University followed, and after that a Christian marriage and Bible-centered home. I loved the church, and I needed it to protect me from a world that frightened me, a world filled with questions, demands, responsibilities, and a pretty bad reputation in the Christian community. Our two babies were dedicated in front of the congregation, and we volunteered in the nursery and during Vacation Bible School Even now, I can listen to gospel music on the radio and return to the warmth of the life I knew.

Still, in the deepest recesses of my awareness an unsettling sense of restlessness was beginning to be make itself known. My idyllic world had cracks in its veneer and a different light began to shine through, a light that illuminated the “other side” of my love affair with the church. It was inevitable; sooner or later an early childhood of too much trauma and drama would demand attention and beg for healing that wasn't found in Sunday services. A marriage that probably never had a real chance of growing deep roots (and I had no deep roots within myself) began to grow shaky. A rigid theology, filled with authoritarianism and intolerance and patriarchal entitlement began to chafe my soul.

And then there were the “secrets” I had been obliged to carry ,along with shame, confusion, and fear; secrets that began accumulating at about the same time I “got saved”. These kinds of secrets that are still not talked about in (most) churches and denominations, not without a great deal of reluctance and painstaking working through the barrier of denial,.

When a family member, an openly professing “born again” church elder, asked me into the secluded spots in my home and his and showed much more than familial affection to me, he was reprimanded, and I was looked at with suspicion. The “affection” continued. I kept the secret. When a church family member, ten years older than I and engaged to his future wife, pulled me into the garage and molested me, no one was ever the wiser. I was a good keeper of secrets. Somehow, in my underdeveloped ability to face these violations in a straightforward manner (and sensing, wisely, that I would find no support in the church or anywhere else ) , I dismissed them as less than important. Indeed, I was complicit in their continuation; I was a broken child who would accept just about any kind of affirmation, no matter how skewed. “Even crumbs taste good to someone who is starving”, a good friend reminds me.

It my late twenties, my toddlers growing rapidly, my marriage failing with equal speed I was concerned enough to seek counseling and was equally concerned about finding a Christian therapist, since I didn't want to have to defend my belief system to a “worldly” therapist while beginning to face the confusion that was invading my waking and sleeping hours.

He was welcoming, kind, intelligent, concerned, not at all condescending; a father figure about the age my own father would have been had he not taken his own life many years before. With him, I could pour out my heart, or, at least, as much of it as I could access. I could speak of my mother's death when I was only four years old, of the instability of living with this family and that one, never having to worry about a roof and food, and never knowing where home was .. We spoke of the church, marriage and parenthood and my continuing restlessness. Perhaps we spoke of the “secrets”; I don't remember.

He listened, validated, looked at me without suspicion, and honored what I was saying. He held me in strong, paternal arms and spoke of his sympathy for young women who struggled so much to find themselves. He held me tighter and kissed the top of my head. He... left me with more “secrets” than I could bear and, eventually said, “even if you tell someone they'll never believe you; besides, I'm the one who is known and well regarded in this community...”

Sitting on that front porch, my life, marriage and soul in shambles, feeling totally alone and alienated in the world, I laid it all out before a God who felt a million miles away and like the only ally I had in the world. “If I go back there (to the church); I will die, one way or another”, I spoke quietly in my heart. “I no longer know what is real, what I can believe, who I can trust, if, indeed, any human remains trustworthy” The Bible, which had guided my steps for so many years, had been delivered by those who preyed on the souls of the vulnerable while not busying their minds praying for the souls of the lost. “Even if I burn in hell,” my desperate prayer continued, “tonight I turn my back on all that I have openly accepted for so long. From this point on, we have to start over, God, you and me working it out. As I continued to pour out my heart's intentions I felt a mix of both quivering fear at my audacity in confronting God and what I knew was the only hope I had to keep my spirit alive.

That prayer would eventually cause me to leave the church, my marriage and a confused, angry husband ,( who didn't know my secrets) the home we had made for our precious children, my friends, community and very identity and would take me through the “valley of the shadow of death” until past, present and future would to learn to co-exist in peace, in faith, in healing. Life, death, rebirth, renewal-the journey continues.

copyright Vicki Burns, 2004

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