Cat’s Spiritual Journey, Part X: When Babel Fell

(Genesis 11: 1–8, New International Version.)

My model was my coven of origin—the Coven On Wheels, or COW, which really had offered me the first sense of home and community I’d had since I was very young.

And COW was not a commune: we never had to fight over whose turn it was to take out the trash or decide what to watch on TV. And crucially, we were a collection of equals; those who joined might have more or less knowledge in a particular field of occultism, Paganism, or practical knowledge like herbalism, but each of us was well read on mysticism and religion, with extensive knowledge in many areas. We were all about the same age, from similar economic backgrounds, and with roughly equal access to resources.All of these things I took for granted within COW, and failed to note when they were absent from my own later attempts to recreate paradise.

I wanted to build and live in my non-hierarchical utopia right away. And I saw everything and everyone through the pretty haze of that dream. Our coven was to be a non-hierarchical utopian coven, our group house was to be a non-hierarchical utopian community, the Church of the Sacred Earth and the local Pagan community…it was all going to fit the pattern of the tiny, well-read, well-adjusted and select little group that had called itself COW.

Reality did not reflect my preconceptions all that well. The community Peter and I formed together was never very like the group that COW, in its heyday, had been.

Felicia was younger than we were. She was in debt up to her eyeballs. Peter and I, on the other hand, were established in professions, with bank accounts and even the beginnings of retirement savings. So we were not on an even footing around money.Peter was the beloved grandson of the owner of our home and I was his wife; Felicia was a tenant. So Peter and I had a marked advantage over Felicia in that part of our lives, too.

And when Felicia needed work, though it seemed logical all around to hire her to care for the increasingly frail Nora, that made her our employee–yet another power imbalance between us.With a Smith College education, Felicia was certainly bright and well-educated, but in the arena of Pagan religious life, we were not peers either: Peter and I had almost a decade of Pagan leadership under our belts which she lacked. By the time we founded our coven—which she was the first to join—Peter and I were each initiates in two traditions of the Craft. She had been active in student groups.

We thought of ourselves as non-hierarchical. But, in hindsight, that was awfully naïve of us. The playing field was not level, the resources were not equal, and even a very grounded and mature woman might have felt insecure at times. And Felicia was not very grounded and mature–she was only in her mid-twenties, and sometimes seemed much younger than that.

Felicia had a lot of twenty-something habits. She was a night owl. She did not save. Even after her bankruptcy, she continued to crave expensive things: restaurant meals, nice clothes and hairstyles, nights out and videos in. She joined a cat rescue, but couldn’t always afford the vet bills; she went to Pagan festivals, but couldn’t afford to repair her car. Nothing terrible, and, after all, we were living in a non-hierarchical and cooperative household, right? Peter and I did not mind sharing. We floated her loans as needed, loaned her our cars when hers was in the shop, and tried not to mind when the weeks she did the grocery shopping were more expensive and less health-conscious than the weeks we shopped, or when she couldn’t afford to pay her share of the rent or utility bills but could afford nightly forays to Taco Bell. We tried not to mind when her clutter overflowed from her room into the common spaces, or when repeated requests to change the litter box for her cats led to procrastination.

Felicia, in other words, was a high-maintenance kind of a gal. Nagging was not a part of my Pagan Utopian vision, but it became a daily–and fruitless–part of my life.

Like many people who are in positions of authority but haven’t acknowledged it, I had a prickly discomfort with not getting my way, but because I didn’t want to accept that I was not living in my non-hierarchical dream world, I couldn’t see the ways that it was legitimate for me to lay down ground rules. Felicia and I were not equals in terms of life experience, finances, and power in the household, whether I chose to recognize that or not.

Felicia and I were not equals in terms of our stakes in the household, either. If life in our group house soured, Felicia could choose to live elsewhere (as could Two Bears, who joined our collective about two years’ into our lives together). Peter, Nora, my daughter and I were stuck with it, for better or for worse.That fact needed, as a purely practical matter, to give Peter and me, as heads of the household, more recognized authority. That it did not, at least in Felicia’s eyes and my own, says a lot about how unrealistic we were. The theory was that all animals were equal.

The unsavory truth was, damn right, some of us were more equal than others. But I worked very hard not to recognize this growing realization. The result was increasing feelings of fatigue and bitchiness over not being able to will things into working out as smoothly and lovingly as they did in my imagination.So Felicia and I did not cooperate smoothly on matters of the household. Eventually, we began to bicker, politely, sometimes in ways anyone could hear and see, and at other times in covert, strained silences. The whole thing was like a low grade fever that never quite broke.

This went on for about four years. Felicia did not get easier to live with–she got tougher.

I’ll spare you the details. Probably everyone who has ever had a room mate has had the experience of this kind of escalating tension. But Felicia and I were not just room mates. We were coven mates, employer and employee and, landlord and tenant, family members caring for an elder and a child, and, I can’t help but suspect, surrogate-parent and angry adolescent child. There was just no room in our lives for either of us to step back, breathe, and let the tensions go.

It became intolerable. Nobody’s fault, really, but that’s what happened.

By that time, Felicia was deeply involved with her long-time partner, a man I will call Tony Stark.

Tony was very young–still a student at Hampshire College–and a brilliant physicist whose intellectualized atheism didn’t keep him from becoming fascinated with Paganism’s take on community.

He and Felicia quickly became very serious about one another, and by the time tensions were peaking around our house, Felicia was actually home very little. She had virtually moved in with Tony, the two of them unofficially taking possession of an unoccupied room in his dorm, and Felicia was coming by the house mainly to use our computer and washing machine, feed her cats, and eat. They were actively discussing getting an apartment together at the end of the school year, when Tony would be graduating, and it seemed certain that she would be following him to whatever school he chose for his PhD.

At the point I realized that I needed Felicia to move out, she and Tony were planning to bring her home over the winter break, to introduce her to his parents. And, yes, it definitely was that kind of “meet my parents” situation, with the added stress of all taking a cruise together into the bargain.

It seemed like a pretty good time to begin nudging Felicia out of the nest, in other words–but not the exact moment to lay a big new source of stress on her shoulders. I talked with Two Bears and Peter about what I’d realized–I don’t think either of them was remotely surprised–and decided to wait to discuss it with Felicia until after she returned from meeting the possible-future-in-laws.

Two Bears wondered if we shouldn’t frame the discussion around our eventual plans to renovate and rent out as a separate unit the downstairs of our house; Nora had died over the fall, and Felicia’s room, as well as the more usable of the two kitchens and most of the common living spaces, were in the downstairs half of the duplex. He was afraid that Felicia might not take things well. He was afraid she would take things personally if we let her know it was about the tension around the house, and not an impersonal financial force at work.

But I insisted on being direct. I said that it would be insulting and manipulative to pretend that there was no problem with our living together peacefully. Felicia was my friend, I said, and I owed her honesty.

Good instinct. Lousy timing.

If only I’d been wise enough to be more honest with myself, earlier, when I’d dug this pit to begin with; if only I’d been brave enough to be direct with Felicia, earlier, when the tensions were still manageable. If only we did not too soon grow old, and too late smart.

But I wasn’t, and I hadn’t, and we do. And after Felicia’s return, when we met as a house, she immediately entered a stony silence. Here we were, saying things like, there’s no hurry, we know it can take a while to find a good place to live; we’ll help with first and last month’s rent; you and Tony take your time–

–and Felicia sat staring at us, eyes narrowed to slits, visibly and even palpably hating us and wanting us dead.

It was awful. And it got worse.

Here’s what I want to explain to you, and don’t quite know how. What had gone before, in the petty provocations of daily life, was actually pretty blameless. People are like this, after all: we get on one another’s nerves. We love one another, but sometimes we make each other unhappy. That’s nobody’s fault, really. Sometimes, it just works out that way–especially when you’re young and idealistic.

But what came next, after we’d asked Felicia to begin making plans to move out, was different. While the day-to-day housemate stuff had no victims and no malice, just human friction, what followed was a concerted effort on the part of one human being to make another group of human beings as unhappy as possible.

I’m quite sure that Felicia saw it differently. I’m quite sure she convinced herself that we were bad people who were hurting her. But we weren’t. We worked hard not to cause her pain. We may not have been good at it, but that was the goal.

She, on the other hand, began genuinely trying to hurt us, and she succeeded on a regular basis.

C. S. Lewis wrote that “there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors,” and that is true. But it’s perhaps even truer that there are even more ways to give people a bad time if they are in their own home, and you are only a visitor–with a legally protected right to be there.

When Felicia tired of the conflict, she would go home with Tony.

When we tired of the conflict, we would hope for have a night free of incidents.

I could laundry list the daily events, but it would miss the point: if I listed the details around money, or manipulation, or the lawsuit, it would sound like something understandably awful, but it would mislead you. It wasn’t the money or the lies or the legal stuff that was really the terrible thing.

It was the being hated, every day, at close quarters, by someone we’d loved and trusted.

She sued us, she harassed us, she attempted to manipulate our daughter’s emotions, she took stuff that wasn’t hers. And when we tried to speak to other members of the community about it, she was right there, smiling sweetly and peacefully, and explaining that she “forgave” us the harm we’d done her. The fact that that harm was never itemized only made her seem sweeter, while we, clearly unhappy and angry, seemed to be the problem. Especially to a community that wanted this conflict to be without blame, and wanted our pain to just go away.

Even now, telling this story is hard for me in part because I don’t know how to tell it plain: part of the hurt comes from being hurt on purpose. And part of the difficulty in achieving a genuine forgiveness of wrongs done us comes from having turned to a community that was unwilling to acknowledge that wrongs had been done at all–that there could ever be such a thing as malice or deliberate hurtfulness on anyone’s part.

Here’s how I failed my community. I did, in fact, attempt to use them.

In the early weeks, as the conflict began to escalate beyond reason in our home, I found something cold and reptilian within me that remembered having been the one to introduce Felicia to the Church of the Sacred Earth and the wider community around it. And I found myself thinking, in harmony with abusive parents everywhere, “I brought you into this world, Felicia Hardy. I bet I can send you out of it.”

At that time, COSE and the wider community had listserves that were very active, and I became an email junkie. Self-employed, I could pry out time to hover by my computer, swooping down on each new email. And, as the news of the controversy began to spread, the temptation to massage and manage the information called out to me.

For a brief span of days, I found myself thinking about the ancient Irish bards, whose satires were said to raise boils on their victims.”Aha, Felicia,” I thought, “I’m the better writer of the two of us. Let us see whose words will shape this reality.” And I set about courting public opinion. Like a PR shuckster anywhere in the world, I began evaluating the field, finding those swing voters, and working manipulativly to try to bring them around to my point of view: Cat=good; Felicia=bad.

I remember the icy feeling of opening a new email from an “enemy,” and how my hands would tremble as I struck the keys. I remember the nagging feeling that I was letting too much of my life slip past me, waiting for the next message, the next opportunity to slip in a little more manipulation of my own, and I remember pushing that nagging feeling aside.

It actually didn’t take long before I was so disgusted with myself that I dropped the attempt to turn my friends into weapons. And though it was harder still to stop the mad, compulsive round of emails, I eventually managed to eliminate those, too. But it was the ugliest chapter in a particularly ugly story of my life.I did a lot of things during the six month siege of our home that I’m not proud of. I shouted threats. I swore a lot. I think on at least one occasion, when confronting Tony and Felicia, I was not only red-faced and shouting in my anger, but literally sprayed my invective. It was not a pretty picture.

But of all the things I said and did during this period of my life, it was the aborted attempt to use a spiritual community for personal vengeance that shames me the most. I was angry; I was ugly. I tried to use community, a force for wholeness, as if it were a weapon. I never want to do anything like that again.

So I dropped my attempts to manipulate public opinion. Felicia and Tony did not–they maintained a public cheer and veneer of goodwill that was more polished the more unhappy Peter and I seemed to be.

It’s hardly surprising that so many members of our community found us the less pleasant companions–though I was still bitterly disappointed that men and women I’d known intimately for years did not know my character well enough to know that I would not be so angry over trifles.

In any case, when the dust finally settled, and Felicia moved away, I was unhappy with myself, unhappy with my community, and unhappy with the prospects of Paganism as a way to change the world in any meaningful way. I felt bitter and alienated, and my dreams and ideals had fallen into dust, and I had no idea when or how I would ever manage to trust anyone outside my family and my coven again.The tower had fallen. My people were scattered. And in important ways, my community would not be able to speak to one another in a common tongue again.