SLI

How did I first get involved with such an abusive religious community?   I was a youthful, recent college grad and volunteer in Southern Colorado when I first met them, and their youthfulness and dedication inspired me.  It also helped that I was full of self-hatred towards my own sexuality, and wanted to control it through celibacy,  so that in many ways I fit right into the model of a Roman Catholic religious seeker.  It didn't take long though, to see the serious deficiencies.  For one thing, there was the cult of personality around their founder William McNamara, who they considered a saint, but I considered a spiritual egotist.  As I read his books, I was further put off.  His spirituality, while powerful, was clearly tainted by the lack of humility and the broad, all-encompassing vision of love and grace.  He (and as his community always trumpeted) thought he was a great saint.  I know that people who think they are saints are actually compromised by the devil.  He and his band of monks and nuns never realized that.    Instead, it was clear that he was a macho, male-chauvinistic monk who thought he had untrammelled power to do whatever he wanted, and that included psychological manipulation and coercion to form people to be like him, not like Christ.  I have heard him preach on the gospel, "Do you not know that the Father and I are one," and realized that this guy actually inflates himself up to a divine incarnation here on Earth. What was especially interesting was that the day he preached on the particular gospel, the liturgical reading was actually from Jesus' words, "Call no man Father."  For all his legalistic adherence to rubric, he did not want to preach on that topic, because he is insistent that he be called Father.  I escaped from him, and the Spiritual Life Institute once.  The psychologist who was helping me to recover from the depression caused in part by my encounter with him, actually knew of McNamara and his abusiveness towards women in his community.  When she first heard that McNamara and the SLI were the community I had been involved with, her first penetrating comment, was "What did he do to you?"  Well, I wish she were still around, because the stories I could tell....of the incredible violation, abuse, power-tripping that I have suffered at the hands of this community now going on for eight years.  My God, how muchlonger do I have to pray to you to be free of these enemies?  How much longer am I denied the right to be sexual and to love?