MY DIVORCE AND THE COMMUNITY OF JESUS

Here on this blog I have spent at least a decade talking about divorce and yet I have never spoken directly about why my marriage ended in divorce.  My divorce took place as a result of religion.  That's right.  In a way, you can say God came between my husband and me.  Actually, I shouldn't say God.  The truth is, a religious cult came between us, and that cult believed that it was speaking for God.  So to a certain extent, my first way of putting it was correct.

Originally, I lived out of state, but I came to live in Connecticut when my ex and me agreed to live together for a year and see if we were compatible.  After a year, if everything worked out, we agreed to get married.  During that year, I began to attend a nearby Church that was within walking distance of my home, and before long my ex came along with me.  I had understood that while my ex was brought up in a religious household, during his entire life as an adult and while I had known him (ten years) he had shown no interest in religion at all.  Still, he was the great great great great grandson of a famous Baptist preacher who eventually founded Gordon College in Massachusetts.  In contrast, I was brought up in an family of agnostics who did not attend Church, although I was deeply religious in my way.  My father came from a German Jewish background and his family had been decimated by the holocaust.  This made him skeptical of any kind of religious faith.

Before long, we were swept into the life of the Church and pretty much every social activity we went to was Church related in some way.  I began to attend bible study for women each week which the Senior Pastor of the Church was leading.  This is when I first heard mention of the Community of Jesus which was founded in 1970 by two Episcopal laywomen--Cay Anderson and Judy Sorenson.  In the Church library there was a large collection of cassettes of talks given by the two women who were founders of the Community of Jesus.  The Pastor would encourage us to listen to the tapes and recommended their content. Furthermore, the Pastor talked about visiting the Community of Jesus in Cape Cod, Massachusetts where the group had its headquarters.  He spoke about staying overnight there and how nicely people were treated.  He acknowledged there were complaints about children being abused by the Community of Jesus, but he insisted such accusations were all nonsense.  He laughed it off in scorn as if it were hardly possible that this occurred.  

It was a full two decades later when I saw the Canadian news report on the abuse of children in a Community of Jesus related high school, Grenville Christian College.  This was a school which educated students from pre-school through high school  Quite recently, five former students from that school won a lawsuit against the administrators of the school for the abuse they experienced there.  In the 2020 decision, the judge stated, "I have concluded that the evidence of maltreatment and the varieties of abuse perpetrated on student's bodies and minds in the name of Community of Jesus values of submission and obedience was class-wide and decades long."  Not only that, there have been reports from people who grew up in the Massachusetts Community of Jesus compound that as children they were taken from their parents, passed around from family to family, and forced to do hours and hours of manual labor.  So the reports of abuse weren't nothing as the Church Pastor implied.  

The first few years I was in the Church I was surrounded by warmth and attention.  After a year, my ex and I decided to get married and the following year I had a baby, my oldest son.  When he was born, I literally received a card of congratulations from every member of the Church.  During Church choir practice, which I attended every week, a group of young girls would take the baby and care for him until choir practice was over, with no expectation of reward or compensation.  I could literally do no wrong.  The Pastor of the church provided couples counseling and individual counseling for me free of reward or compensation.  When my son had his first few birthdays, over half the people who came to celebrate were Church members.  Before I knew it, our pediatrician, our accountant, our real estate agent, our primary care physician--you name it--were all Church members.

But as time went by, the situation darkened.  I have always been deeply Christian, but my faith has not been unshadowed by many doubts and dark nights of the soul.  And I have left my faith only to come back, and then leave again, then return, etc.  I have always been frank about my thoughts on this, and I was quite open in the Church regarding the ups and downs of my faith journey.  In contrast, my ex, who never previously had any interest in Christianity, pretty much turned into a holy roller.  In time, my frankness about my doubts and hesitations led to ostracism. Instead of the warm embrace I was originally welcomed in with at the start of my attendance at this Church, I found people criticizing my shoes as being too expensive, etc., and taking offense at what I thought and intended to be harmless remarks.  At Church meetings, I often found myself sitting in a corner on my own.  At one point, I was assisting in a fundraiser for a youth group.  We were selling fancy bread in the social room, when I was approached by a deacon of the Church.  He insisted that fundraising was like having moneylenders in the Church.  He ordered me on the spot to take the kids, the table, the boxes of fancy bread and sell them outside the Church building on what was a cold, windy day.  It was harassment of this nature that occurred repeatedly.

Meanwhile, my ex-husband received the Church's whole hearted embrace.  He was appointed to the Board of Trustees and other Church Committees.  Before long, he was down at the Church all the time attending various Church functions.  This meant that I was at home with very young children alone while my ex was participating in a bunch of social and business functions at the Church.  I didn't think much about what this meant until one evening, it concerned me that since my ex was going to a meeting right after work, he might not have had dinner.  I therefore wrapped a plate with a nice chicken dinner in tin foil and brought it down for him to eat during the meeting.  Instead of being appreciative of my effort, my ex was angry and annoyed.  What I came to understand later was that what my ex had been telling people was that I didn't feed him.  My ex was using his opportunity away from me at the Church to tell stories about how I was a bad wife and was abusing him.  This was remarkable given that not only did I assist unpaid in our home business, but I was taking care of our children pretty much alone as well.  My ex didn't so much as change a diaper.  As soon as the ink was dry on our wedding certificate, he reverted back to an attitude towards our respective roles that was more suitable to the Edwardian age.

At that time, which was the early and late 90s, there were a few books out that presented married life in a form that would have made Phyllis Schafly proud.  The prototype for these kinds of books, which you might recall, was "Fascinating Womanhood" by Helen B. Andelin published in 1963. Many copycat type books came out in the 1990s and pretty much advocated that under God you be obedient to your husband and focus on becoming a good housewife and mother.  They advised you to spend all day cleaning and baking, and always meet your husband at the door looking sexy and ready to go and etc.  Somehow, not long after my marriage, Church members made sure to pass that book along to me.  It tells you just exactly how that particular Church viewed women and their role in society. Too bad no one reminded them of that part of the marriage ceremony that goes, "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." (Mathew 19:6). Still, you wouldn't have observed this conservatism from superficial conversations with Church members. I had joined a Church denomination which is known as one of the most liberal in the United States.  However, every congregation is allowed to interpret that freely among themselves.  Nothing was written on the walls, and you wouldn't have heard it directly in a sermon, but somehow it was a very present sentiment.  The fact that I did not feed my husband was damning.  And the accusation was somehow taken as a fact, because my husband said it, and he was a man.

At one point, I became really public about my complaints.  I spoke up about the how controlling the Church was and how it felt as though Church members were interfering in every aspect of my life.  I felt as though the pastor was violating appropriate boundaries when he provided counseling for me and my ex. and I decided to stop going.  Apparently, news spread that I had done this and before long I had people outside the Church coming to me speaking about the Community of Jesus, and how they had been bullied and decided to leave it.  I did not know at the time that the reason I was hearing from them was because my Church was so closely associated with the Community of Jesus.  I was still new to the situation.  The divide between my husband and me continued to grow and I had the impression that Church members felt that we were unequally yoked and that while they thought my ex was wonderful, they could do without me.  Eventually, I decided that I wanted to leave the Church and I spoke to my husband about it.  To my shock and surprise, he told me that the Church was more important than I was.

By then, we had three children and so it wasn't that easy for either of us to leave the marriage.  So it took another eight years before we finally ended up with a divorce.  During that time, if my ex had a disagreement with me, instead of working it out with me, he went to the Church to complain. Even worse, there were times--, rarely, I will admit--that if we began to get into a heated conversation, my ex would literally fall on his knees and begin to pray out loud.  At Church, my ex found a ready and willing audience for all of his anger and unhappiness. It is my belief that the ministers in the Church provided him with extensive counseling at the Church, but I was never included or officially informed about it. To them, he appeared more credible to people given his ancestry. There is a theme that runs within some Christian traditions that holiness is generational.  As he spread more disinformation about me, I became more isolated and unhappy.  It didn't help that I had a Jewish background which made me easier to dislike.  The subtle sneers I was subjected to regarding Jews, or Hebrews as they were often called, made me feel terribly uncomfortable.

I was reading an article written by blogger Carrie Buddington, former victim of the cult, on the common attitude that continues to prevail in the Community of Jesus and its associated Church communities. She said, "It was about receiving correction from everyone around you, confessing your sins constantly, and being absolutely obedient without question."  As a woman, I felt it was about disempowerment, and accepting the role of second class citizen.  Ultimately, I was not able to tolerate that and this is why our marriage broke down.  There is more to this, and I may speak about it in the future.  But in a nutshell, this is basically what happened.  Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing.  The Community of Jesus was certainly that for me.

For more about the Carrie Buddington and her experiences in the Community of Jesus, see the link below:

https://www.amazon.com/Exquisite-Torture-Life-Christian-Cult-ebook/dp/B0BWVMKW2B?ref_=ast_author_mpb