Advent Ghost Town, Part One

For the longest time I was made to believe that something was fundamentally wrong with me. 

Not just that I was “imperfect” or even “sinful” but that, specifically, individually, deeply, at the core of my personality, there was a terrible, and probably irreparable, flaw.

That flaw can’t be explained in propositions like some kind of diagnosis, because it wasn’t created by propositions. It was created, virtually ex nihilo, by a person, working in all the demonic media available to him in order to paint, stroke by stroke, the picture of my unacceptable wrongness within me. Since it was created by him, it existed in some strange way as his own projected shadow seeping into my heart through any emotional opening I might yield. When he was at his worst and most creative, I could not keep that shadow from making its deep marks on me, even though I had formed such a callous to keep it out. I was like Ali, arms up, trying to rope-a-dope, only to find myself repeatedly losing consciousness, face down on the mat again and again.

—

For two years we didn’t celebrate Christmas – because, you know, we had moved to that Texas cult led by a Pentecostal rancher whose brief stint on TBN had so captivated my parents that they uprooted us from Miami, FL to settle in the backwater town of Jasper. At this church, which was slowly growing into a compound (church auditorium and school grounds bordering on acres of church-owned land ripe for further development), there had been a prophetic word from Brother Dawson about the evils of Christmas. It was pagan and worldly, he said, but not in the way that lots of young Christians think nowadays. No, Brother Dawson wasn’t interested in protesting consumerism or even the Roman/Christendom calendar – he was interested in control. So, a freedom, an indulgence, like Christmas needed to be taken away from his people in order to orient them rightly around the Truly Important Things. Things like coming to every 3-5 hour worship service (occurring at least twice weekly, and not necessarily on the same days/nights – wait for impromptu scheduling from the leadership). Things like joyful participation in authoritarian “discipleship” where the elders would “bishop your soul,” i.e., berate you and humiliate you into submission.

After all, Brother Dawson’s big important book (the one that got him on TBN) was about exactly that: the “merismos” (because Greek) or “dividing of the soul from the spirit,” taken (completely out of context) from Hebrews 4:12. The church in Marshall said that we all have a kind of split personality disorder, a “spirit” that wants to be in the presence of God and obeying God and in the word of God and doing holy things all the time, and a “soul” that uses intellectual pursuits and all those evil emotions and feelings to distract us from the Truly Important Things. (There is also the flesh or body that just wants to SIN, but separating that part was obvious – the soul was more subtle.) That soul needed to be bishoped, disciplined, chastised, corrected, all the time – and usually by Brother Dawson or one of the other elders – so that the spirit would continue to rule over the problematic personality.

Strangely, Texas was the first place I saw snow. Right around our first Christmas there, it flurried a few times and even showered. And there was all this ice. Icicles, black ice on the road, ice encrusting banisters and railings. And City Hall in the center of town was lit up in all white lights, a majestic sight to behold and Jasper’s statewide claim to fame. (It was second in importance only to the yearly summer Fire Ant Fair, attended faithfully by then Governor Ann Richards.)

For two years, Christmas was in the air, but we refused to breathe it in at the behest of Brother Dawson.

No tree. No presents. No carols. No nothing.

—

When you have endured multiple traumatic experiences in the church, and a period of emotional and spiritual abuse lasting throughout your childhood and, in different ways, into adulthood, Christmas, or the ecclesial season of Advent, can become nothing less than a ghost town.

It’s not just the memory of those two years in Texas when we didn’t celebrate it – years that marked the beginning of the worst season of dysfunction and abuse – but the tainted memories of the many years after. The season can feel vacant, haunted by these ghosts drifting amongst the debris. Perhaps it’s not unlike that season experienced by the nation of Israel when the prophets were silent, the city laid waste, the community adrift…and there was only the waiting. The waiting for a Deliverer to rebuild from the ruins.

Is that what Advent is? Waiting in the ghost town of a destroyed, distressed, forgotten city for the Deliverer to arrive?

We have all experienced the pain of human brokenness and even spiritual disappointment and desolation.

Is our Deliverer coming?

—

[Part Two]

[Part Three]