(Return to Meandering Misfit – Links)
In the 1950s I was born in the U.S. to newly-arrived Russian immigrants who left behind a 20-plus-year impoverished refugee life in Iran. My maternal grandmother’s tale is a Bolshevik Revolution riches-to-rags saga. As a young woman with her two small children (my mother and aunt) guided by a hired smuggler, she sneaked across the guarded Russian border, trekked through Afghanistan, and settled into then-Persia.
My mother, a few years after arrival in the U.S., had renounced the family’s Russian Orthodox Church and fully converted to an all-encompassing evangelical Protestant-type English-speaking religion – the Lord’s Evangelicals, or LEs (name changed to protect the innocent people involved).
Towards my mother, I experienced a vast mixed plethora of deep and conflicting emotions that included revulsion, confusion, and rebellion; coupled with repressed fear, hate, terror, and anger. For how on earth could a good, loved-by-God child despise his/her godly and righteous parent?
Those abnormal feelings as a child/adolescent/adult toward my mother were internally and instantly dismissed as unacceptable, as impossible within my “flock of birds” of the LE society. The feelings stuffed down deeply, concreted-over by my fabulous, hardwired-for-survival brain. Those “impossible” feelings buried to near impregnability by her chronic, dogmatic teachings of selected LE Biblical tenets such as: honor your father and mother, rebellious children were stoned to death in ancient Israel, obedience to your parents is God’s will and required for survival of the upcoming Lord’s second coming and destruction of wicked humanity. Also, that survival required remaining within the LE organization and separate from the outside world ruled by Satan, etc. (After all, when the Devil tempted Jesus following his 40-day fast and enlightenment, he was offered all kingdoms of the world for one act of devotion — and Jesus did not deny the Devil’s ownership.)
That being said, however, to this day I do honor and respect the stories and wisdom of the Bible, as I do all the great sacred books of the world religions. Sacred book passages taken out of context are used to champion both hate and love, separation and unification.
That early-life grounding within the entire Judeo-Christian Bible, thorough and legalistic, did serve to bring forth from mind and heart beautiful reminders of comfort and healing during some of my darkest hours. (It is sometimes healthy not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as goes the adage.)
Additionally, included with my kindergarten teacher and maternal grandparents, there were people within the LEs, people of “sweet” heart, temperament and intelligence with whom I interacted – with lots of fun: dancing, parties, music, hiking, camping, wave-boarding, horse-back-riding, skiing, etc. Their kind, laughter-loving and genuine associations — that sweetness — in looking back, served as survival-threads that saved me from despair and kept me grounded.
On the other hand, it also kept concreted-over the quiet whisperings within of “you don’t belong.”