Don’t Fear the Library

Good morning, subscribers. This post is a time-out from promoting Undertow as we lead up to its 7th birthday. Today, I want to tell you a little story about libraries. The other day in a Trader Joe’s grocery store here in Florida, I passed by a woman wearing a t-shirt printed with: “Don’t Fear the Library.” I smiled and said, “I love your shirt!”

You may have heard about Florida’s great big issues/fights/regulations about books and about libraries and about book bans, which even a year ago I did not imagine ever happening in this country. These troubles had not even crossed my mind. What, us? We’d never sink this low! Silly me.

Book bans, I thought, were over. They’d happened back in Medieval times, in Nazi Germany, and, I’m ashamed to say, in a fundamentalist cult while I was in it. Yes. I even witnessed book burnings—along with records, paintings, and items we believed contradicted V.P. Wierwille’s teachings—held by Way leaders, even at The Way International headquarters in Ohio.

Why go to a library?

To think, to learn, to breathe. Have you been in a library lately? Try it. Opening the door to a library and finding books inside to help me grow, often changed my life. Especially back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was mindfully disentangling myself from cult propaganda I’d accepted for many years. Those encounters with books back then, with the minds of the authors who wrote them, with new ideas tucked inside like presents, were tender years of transition for me. And during any transition, most people need support. Books and silence in libraries provided a supportive haven for me, a space I desperately needed. I started with the library in St.Mary’s, Ohio, near The Way headquarters. Then, after I enrolled in The Ohio State University, Lima branch, I hid out in that college library and continued healing.

I remember feeling liberated as I just walked up and down those aisles full of books. And, as if in a garden picking flowers, I opened all sorts of books and I read many of them. There in Ohio and later in Florida, I scoured books about cults, fundamentalism, art, literature, the history of the Bible, theology, history, religion, philosophy, poetry, geography, on and on and on, and “the world” I had feared in the cult and was told was ruled by the Devil, opened up to me like a long-lost friend. Fear melted away.

Knowledge is power

Recently I told a friend about some people my daughter’s age who have contacted me after reading Undertow. They tell me their stories of abuse, confusion, and pain while involved with The Way and/or its offshoots, and after rejecting that way of life. I do not reveal names, but I sometimes share their issues to help outsiders understand the problems with cults.

Unlike me, the parents (my peers) of these people in my daughter’s generation, did not leave The Way organization when their kids were little or before they had kids. They remained loyal to Wierwille and his teachings and raised their children into adulthood to revere him as THE man of God. Many of us who left know he was no such thing. He was a sexual predator, plagarist, and con. He manipulated believers to think certain ways to further his agenda of spreading his organization over the world. Heavy indoctrination like he perpetrated, sometimes called brainwashing, is hard to dislodge. Undue influence like he wielded, controls people for years and years. If you’re a survivor of any cult, you know that’s a gigantic understatement.

After I shared my deep concerns about cult damage in my daughter’s generation, my friend asked, “So, what’s the answer?”

“Education,” I said. I realize there’s more to it than that, like counseling and loving care, but to me, education is the bottom line.

To begin, a person can just walk into a library, stroll down the aisles, pick up a book, a flower-book. Read it.

Don’t fear the library.

Next time: October 21: “Making Waves with Undertow – Why I Wrote the Book.”

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene

Share this…

email

Facebook

Linkedin

Twitter

Print