09.17.07
Turning by Denise Thompson-Slaughter
My comments showing my impression of how the stages unfolded in this person appear in bold type. MPJ
I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing: Mom was raised an unchurched Presbyterian with a teenage fling as an Episcopalian; Dad was a lapsed Catholic. Raised ten years in a Southern Baptist neighborhood outside D.C., then eight years in a Catholic neighborhood, I sampled both religions. I was very curious about religion since I’d witnessed actual physical violence and invective hurled against practicing Catholics who had mistakenly moved into the Baptist neighborhood, and I attempted to read the Bible and comparative religion texts at a ridiculously early age.
Stage three conversion:
Then between the ages of 17 and 26, ( slow evolution from one type of belief to another. This is typical of stage 3 or 4 conversions, which happen slowly versus stage 2 conversions which are usually very sudden) I went from being a believer to being agnostic to being an atheist, ignoring the moments of illumination I’d already experienced. I was fond of saying: “five years ago, I would have staked my life on reincarnation; now there’s nothing I would even stake my lunch on!” Wary and skeptical, I was more concerned with the damage of family-, gender-, and international politics than with metaphysics or spirituality. (skeptical, principled, truth-oriented) This was the Vietnam-Watergate era, when the “generation gap” was gaping wide and our highest authorities had lost their credibility. I read that religion had been used to control the masses over the centuries, and I heard people say that churches had done more harm than good. There are strong arguments for this; and like many other people, I confused religion and spirit and mistook the all-too-fallible representatives of the churches as spokesmen for God. When priests, pastors, and rabbis urged people to pray for victory in Vietnam, I remembered “Thou shalt not kill” and the Sermon on the Mount. Lacking the maturity to separate the wheat from the chaff, I decided our churches were full of hypocrites and gave up on organized religion. That disillusionment led me to not even want to think about God..
I relegated to folklore the sacred texts I had earlier read so thirstily, and I buried deep in my subconscious many experiences of preocognitive dreaming and other strange mystical occurrences I’d had when younger. At 24, when my short-lived marriage broke up, although I definitely wanted the marriage to be over, I was overcome with a irrational fear that I was going to die. Then early one morning in the guest bedroom at my parents’ house, trying to rouse myself for the now 45-minute commute to work, I was suddenly aware of the presence and the flannel-shirted arms, wrapped comfortingly around me, of a close friend who had died years earlier. “You’re not going to die for a long time,” he said. “And when you do, I’ll be there to meet you.”
I had dreamed about him a couple of times since his death, but those dreams never felt real like this one. It seemed so realistic, I was convinced that it was true. Further, the psychological effect that vision had on my life seemed to be an organic sort of proof that I couldn’t fake. I surely wouldn’t have been able to resurrect my self-confidence and zest for life based only on a dream that I felt might have been wishful thinking. I remembered then that my grandmother had told me about the spirit of her father coming to comfort her when her oldest daughter died. And shortly after that, my younger brother confided that he had seen the ghost of our great-grandmother not once, but twice. But how could I reconcile my lack of spiritual belief with this new evidence that the personality survived death? My cynical atheism developed a little crack in it. A hesitant agnosticism sprouted and began sending out tendrils of growth, seeking the light. (beginning of stage four conversion)
At one very low point a couple years later, too depressed even to go to work, I dragged myself out of bed one afternoon to make a cup of tea. I heard a flapping sound on the back porch and noticed the wind had blown the screen door completely open, and a bird had flown in and become disoriented. The bird was bashing itself from screen to screen at the wrong end of the porch. Without even stopping to think (and with an energy and logic I didn’t think I was capable of at that point), I ran out the front door. Sprinting through the March mud and rain, I ran around the house to the far end of the porch and popped out at the screen where the bird was, frightening it into turning so it flew down the other end, where it finally saw the open door.
This little rescue made me feel much better. Instead of continuing to wallow in the meaninglessness of life, I decided that, if life did have a purpose, maybe it was just to get through it while doing as little harm and as much good as possible. I also decided that it didn’t matter if religion was a crutch: only a fool would be too proud for crutches with both legs broken. Years later, I realized I was the blind bird and that that was my moment of turning; I wondered who had set me free. (mystical interpretation)
New evidence was once again able to get through my psychological defenses; the more willing I was to have eyes to see, the more I could see. By the time I visited a new boyfriend who had gone off to graduate school in Princeton—a place I had never been but had frequently seen in great detail in dreams—my skepticism about any reality beyond the one I could see had crumbled into dust. Although I hadn’t gone so far as to start praying yet (regarding prayer as a childish begging for favors), I definitely accepted that there was more going on here than met the eye. If there were spirits and precognition, there must be another realm and another concept of time to explain them. Maybe that even meant there was a God—but what sort of God? I admired Jesus greatly, but I couldn’t get behind the idea of the angry, vengeful God in some parts of the Old Testament. It went against the Golden Rule and everything I had taken to heart from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Of course, I am now more aware of the history of mistranslations and textual assaults on Scripture over the centuries. (Then again, maybe the deity communicated with a violent tribal society in the only terms it would understand. I imagine Gandhi would currently make little headway preaching to al-Qaida, for instance.)
While in that state of suspended faith and nagging theological questions, I happened upon Doris Lessing’s science fiction/metaphysical series Canopus in Argos—Archives. It made religious mysticism seem quite plausible scientifically: God as a loving, healing frequency, the “Source-of-We-Feeling” that could be tapped into some times more easily than others—and could be deliberately blocked by evil vibrations from elsewhere. Its very unorthodoxy made it appealing to me. Recovering at the time from ankle surgery, I had just finished two weeks’ worth of doctor-prescribed pain pills and found I could no longer sleep without them. My biological clock was completely out of kilter, and I would lie awake for hours after my husband went to sleep. Even if I slept in a different room, all I could do was read half the night, lying there with my leg in a cast. It wasn’t the first time I’d suffered from insomnia, but it was the worst.
I had learned, some years earlier, about different brainwave frequencies, and how some were used for one thing while some were used for others. I had heard a lecturer say we could imagine our brainwave frequencies as being similar to the display on the radio: different stations came in or broadcast at different frequencies. I tried to imagine a prayer-frequency; it was rather high in my conceptual range. One late night I decided to try it. I simply addressed myself to “The Forces of Goodness in the Universe” and said a version of the Lord’s Prayer. I was asleep before I hit “amen.” It worked again the next night, even though I went to bed earlier, and the next, and the next. I didn’t know if I’d found God, but I sure knew I’d found a cure for insomnia! I’ve rarely had a problem getting to sleep since.
Eventually, I laid down my pride and started praying for other people and, occasionally, when absolutely necessary, for personal healing or support. When we decided to adopt a child, I prayed for a baby. Within three months—we hadn’t even finished the paperwork—the adoption agency gave us our first child. In fact, five weeks earlier, at the end of our tenth anniversary weekend, it suddenly came to me that “our child” had been born—and I knew it was a boy. It turns out that he was born on our tenth anniversary, prematurely. Later, when I prayed for a severe and inexplicable pain in my back to go away, a single trill of bird-call instantly cut through the middle of the night, and the pain was magically and immediately gone, never to recur. Many prayers were answered during that period—not always in the way I expected, however, which demonstrated to me the old saw that you must be careful what you pray for. I continued also to have precognitive dreams and many synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) (noticing these synchronicities and coincidences may be typical of stage fours) in my life.
I read avidly about different religions, mysticism, and other spiritual awakenings. (seeking truth, open to wider understandings, typical of stage fours) In the 1980s, my husband and I both read about Quakerism, due to some historical research he was doing, and we realized that we had the same beliefs and values as Quakers (and we remembered this undogmatic group as one denomination that had universally opposed the Vietnam War, although we later learned that Mennonites, Brethren, some Catholics, and others did too). We started attending Friends’ Meetings in New Jersey. I felt very close to God—whoever or whatever that was—in Friends’ silent worship, and I have been a Quaker for about twenty years now. Prayer, meditation, and yoga have helped me to know God also: gradually I began to recognize the actual presence and support, as well as to appreciate the Spirit’s sense of humor and justice—and even the trials sent to me. I can’t imagine how I did without God all those years, although I was young and healthy then—even if terribly depressed!
MPJ said,
September 18, 2007 at 10:02 am
from Denise Thompson Slaughter - the author of this story:
I read your “Religious Development for Dummies.” It’s brilliant; thank you for putting it out there. I imagine you are also familiar with Deepak Chopra’s book How to Know God, which gives seven different levels for understanding the sacred. I’d also like to recommend a book on spiritually transformative experiences (STEs) that was very helpful to me. It’s by a Canadian M.D. named Yvonne Kason: A Farther Shore (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1994).