finished the novel about Bonhoeffer

I finally finished the novelization of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life, which I have been reading for over a month now.  I couldn't help it.  I saw a co-worker who reads a book in a day.  I used to be like that, but anymore I get so involved in the richness of prose and my own imagination that I can't help but slow down.   In this case, I was reluctant to plumb the tragedy to the bitter end.  Of course, I knew how it ended and that made it worse.  I have just spent one of the most interiorly intense weekends as I forced myself to finish the last chapters.  I know that I need to do some extended writing on it, but it will have to wait for a couple or three days.  In the meantime, I will continue to think on what I intend to write, keeping my dream of Ratzinger from a few days ago, uppermost in my mind.

visit to the doctor

I took yesterday off to try to figure out my next move---how honest should I be in my writing?  I still haven't answered that question satisfactorily.  But I seem to be phrasing the question better, and finding support from another Christian who was in a similar dilemma---Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I always have liked Bonhoeffer.  The Cost of Discipleship was the first Protestant classic I read that revealed the depth of spirituality to which I was accustomed in Catholic writers.  He writes with a felt urgency.  He is not accomodating God to his situation in the world; rather God is commanding him how to respond to his world.  And, as a Protestant would be, he is fully invested in the world--no running off to the monastery and visions for him.  I suppose there will always be room for saints who totally are wrapped up in the presence of God---and thus have little impact on the physical, mundane level of this world.  I no longer believe though, that such is a desirable model of sanctity, though I think it appropriate that there be periods of one's life when we are completely focussed on the divine.  I have gradually changed my mind based on two factors.  One is that I live in a world where humanity currently shows great contempt for physical, mundane world.  We are destroying the Earth;  our civil institutions and infrastructures have become veritable hells which breed and nurture violent, warped souls, who then attempt to salve their pain in drug addiction.  The politics of our nation, yes, America has been fostering this destructive and selfishly materialistic bent most efficiently since I came of age---with the Reagan revolution, and the churches have all been suckered into it.  So, I, like Bonhoeffer find myself at distant odds with those who claim devotion to faith and God, and put that devotion, quite blasphemously at the service of greed, corruption, lies and sheer incompetence, not to mention nationalistic and war aggrandizement.  I read an address by Granny D, ancient, wise activist that she is, and she hits it right on the head.  The religious right is fanatical in their politics, demonizing any who supports a prochoice option.  She says religious fundamentalists are  in love with the image of the unborn fetus because it represents their own unlived potential at the fullness of life.  They have sold their own fullness of life out, to live in a comfort zone of an authority cult.  For Bonhoeffer, that authority cult was the Nazis and the German National Church, oh yes, both Protestant and Catholic.  For me, that authority cult that impinges on me most directly is Catholic, but I know that the Protestants share the same dysfunction---all I have to do is look and listen at what I see and hear.  I've tried to make it clear that my faith vision is fundamentally different from that of the SLI and the Catholic Church but they don't listen.  They live in their self-cocooned world where they control everything, because they are controlled by their own need for authority---abbots, popes, a puffed up, swaggering, boy-man President...I am free of the need for such authority, but not of the pain and suffering caused by such authority, and yesterday was just another of that.

I went to the doctor for a pap smear---I haven't had one in over 3 years.  As I showered and drove, I felt that familiar dread that told me that evil awaited me once again.  There is no greater evil than that of being betrayed by people you once trusted, and it has happened so many times over the last few years, that I recognized the psychic sensation immediately.  So I sat down in the doctors office and tried to breathe, wondering how the SLI and their minions would torture me this time. 

First of all, they had the male PA try to exam me.  I have to say I picked up on his discomfort immediately.  He, unlike the priests of SLI, was a REAL man, which is to say that he respects female boundaries however they present themselves.  That is something that DD and WM know nothing about.  I got through that by just telling him that I didn't want to be touched by him.  So then (or after about an hour of being cold and nearly naked), I got the Pap smear.  I have never had such a painful, rushed pap smear in my life.  I'm a good judge of character, and I don't believe that the doctor was causing me pain through insensitivy (or the fact that I have a deep cervix).  It was like she was doing it on purpose, a suspicion completely confirmed when she went to feel up my rectum.  She seemed relieved too, when I pushed away. 

These stupid dumbasses--they have spent years webcamming me, and spying on me and my writing, and they still haven't figured out that pain and humiliation has no effect on me, except to make me more resistant.  That is not something they would understand, because these are a bunch of spoiled brats who never knew pain until they joined the religious order and experienced the artificial pain of contemporary religious life rejection. You stupid idiots.  You don't know what pain is.  Nor do you know how to motivate me.  You want me to have a realization of my cultic abuse.  You want me to remember being anally raped.  Well, guess what?  It won't happen in a doctor's office, with my own psychic dread telling me an ordeal is underway.  It will happen when someone I love sticks their finger up my ass in an act of love.  But that's something you can accept is it?  Love? Sexual love??? (OHG)  Homosexual, anal love--Never! Never!! Never!!!.  But then for all of your violation spying on me, you don't know me, and you most definitely don't know how to heal me.  So get out of my life, and let my homosexual lover in to come heal me.  Unlike you, I am not afraid of my sexuality or of loving.  Nor am I afraid of pain, suffering or death--as long as it is real, and not the artificial stupidity of your own patriarchal control and manipulation.  Poor sobs.  What are you afraid of?  The validity and healing power of homosexual love?  Too bad---that't the way it happens...

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?

Express yourself!

Well, according to an alternative healing book, a big part of thyroid health is expressing yourself.  No wonder my thyroid is so unwell.  I have quit expressing myself since I realized how heavily I would be punished for doing so.  Like the intellectuals of Communist Russia, I have been thrown in jail for daring to feel and believe what I feel and believe.  Of course the totaltarian thought and feeling police believe that they are doing what is in my best interest--"re-educating me" so that I conform to their model idea of who I am.  I know my reality is different, but my voice is stymied, out of fear of further abuse from SLI, DeBlassie& all their rich and powerful friends.  That these people are capable of abuse is undeniable--I just talked to Dave Denny yesterday under one of his false screen names he uses ti stalk me.  I recognized his controlling, fearful, and anima-alienated personality immediately.  But I have a choice.   I cannot stop these people from abusing me.  They have been doing it for years, and they have judges, police, doctors, and pharmacists as allies to administer the abuse.  I barely escaped jail this last time, and probably only did because of some intelligent people in the jail administration who know that I would be a marked woman if I went back.  They (and I) know why I would be a marked woman, and what that means.  That is something that my torturers have absolutely no conception of---what jail is all about.  They live in their little fantasy world where John of the Cross in the 16th century wrote poetry while incarcerated.  I will carry the abuse in my body and soul for the rest of my life, although if I am ever in a safe place---in the arms of someone who loves me--I might be able to cry it out.  I am not in a safe place.  My abusers and torturers spy and strip away even my most intimate thoughts and feelings, misinterpret them according to their model of who I should rather than the reality of who I choose to be, and then use them as a weapon against me.

Fact.  I am being abused.  Fact.  I am not able to stop it.   But I refuse any longer to be afraid of the abuse of power-tripping, abusive liars.  I cannot confront their lie and power directly, but I will strive to be as free as is possible in the oppressed state that I am in.  This is going to have to happen on a personal and political level.  On a personal level I am going to have to be as free and honest as I reasonably can (which is to say not completely).  I am in a totaltarian control trap that is as far from my God-given reality of freedom to be choose my own identity, as it could possibly be.  As in 1984, love is severely punished (unless of course, it meets with approval from the powers that be---i.e, is it open to procreation in every instance.  Bah!  What a crock of shit these religionists dish out to people in the name of Christ).  But I know I need love, and I know I need homosexual love.  I knew that last night when I saw Juanita with her girlfriend.  I was envious---they are allowed to love.  I am not.  But I have to make some kind of move, some kind of change, because that is what I know that my heart and soul needs to fully flourish.  There is also the political level.  I have to make some kind of stake and claim for homosexuality.  The damned Church, with their lies and legalism, is doing everything possible to destroy us.  They have already caused irreperable pain and suffering to me.  I have to do something to make sure that their power and resources do not continue to do this to my kind---those of us who sexually love our own gender.   I have to reclaim my voice somehow someway.  I will just have to keep at it.  I can't stop the abuse, but God willing, I will stop my own fear of their abuse from being another weapon they use to destroy me in the blasphemous name of God they invoke...

!

Can't stand it when I'm happy, can you?

So, are these people messing with my medication again?  I have been suffering serious depression(of a type and duration I never suffer....wanting to cut myself with a box cutter!!!!!--what's up with that?).  I've been getting headaches and have a psoriasis rash again---both of which is prevented when I am on true thyroid medication.  I did not take the medication last night and actually woke up feeling like a human being, for the first time in a long time.  Most  telling of all is the draining low energy that steals my iniative and drive.  When I feel like this, I can't remember how long ago that I felt normal.  But I see that today is Princess Diana's 8th anniversary of her death.  My life was stolen from me by the SLI (and I have never gotten it back)  when I lived at County Line Road, and I remember waking up to learn of her death there.  So...sigh....eight years, feels like 50.  I can't even remember what it is like to have a normal life without unwelcome religious fanatics interfering and manipulating and controlling my basic life decisions and choices.  As I am sitting
through this training class, I can't help but think how better suited I am to technical support, needing the intellectual challenge of a steep learning cuve, but I am not allowed to engage in employment that meets my needs.  At least I have no huge sexual drive right now---that's another thing that anti-depressants do to to people who are not depressed---steal their sex drive and makes you disgusted with your
body.  Of course, then, that would make me the perfect candidate to be a nun.  What a clever idea!  I could join the body hating zombies in their cassocks and habits.  There's only one problem.  I refuse to believe the lie that the Church puts on all of its members, but especially those poor sobs who suffer celibacy---that sexuality is hateful and cannot be freely chosen by any human being, but must be regulated by the "fathers" who know what is best for us.  Forget that.  I may not be free to live my life as I choose, but I will not enslave my mind to body hatred through their conditioning drugs.  I feel better already now that I'm getting rid of the patriarchal poison.....(no wonder I wanted to cut open my veins--I just wanted to get rid of the poison).....

A little bit freer

Well I am feeling a little bit more free today.  As a matter of fact, I am singing and dancing so I must be feeling pretty good.  I realize that partly this is because I took my righteous anger at being abused and turned it on my abusers rather than turn it on myself.  I also think upping my thyroid medication supplement has a lot to do with it.  I'm more and more certain that so much of my health issues---whether weight gain, or the cyclical, psuedo "manic-depressive" moods I had for years---are related to thyroid, and/or the adrenal gland.  I talked with the dr. today and she brought up the adrenal gland.  I haven't even told her what adrenaline does to me, yet.  But I know that she is on target and I know that going natural is the right way to go.  It angers me that I could have gone to her months ago, if I had been allowed to be in relationship with her other patient.  Instead I had to wait until I was desperate, with absolutely no alternatives, and fudge around the issue of how I was recommended to her.  Dr. Phillips would have recognized the organic roots of my "depression" and treated it successfully years ago while Paul DeBlassie and company prescribe jail as therapy and dope me against my consent. !!!!!! The stupidity and moral bankruptcy of those people is beyond belief, but no doubt there are still good, blind, deaf, and dumb Catholic sheep out there, ready to assist these 20th century Inquisitors in their endeavors.  So be careful Tita, and keep checking to see if they have put out another warrant for your arrest.  It's so amazing to me how my tormenters are responsible not only for creating the conditions that exacerbate my psychological depression, but actively prevent me from getting effective treatment (as if jail and pharmaceutical pills would have any ameliorating effect on the damage caused by patriarchal abuse---whether from my father or William McNamara's spiritual megolamania.  No, these are people who have imprisoned their minds and addicted their spirits through institutional religion, so they think that imprisonment and dope would make me more amenable to their warped version of reality...Ain't happeninggggggg.............

Struggling to be free

Well, as you can see, I am out of jail, but I have a more insidious enemy now---depression.  The one thing that gave me joy in life---talking to someone who I loved and who loved me has been stolen by the patriarchal love killers again, as they have hijacked my buddy list yet again.  There is no one online buddy who I can talk to, who knows and loves me.  This is a crushing defeat for someone like me who has so little in her life to give her joy as I continue to fight the totaltarian forces who have successfully denied me my right to be human--to choose my own identity and life and love---for eight years now.  Of course Tessa Bielecki is online giving her false sympathy.  I've seen that before--sold out patriarchal female giving out the impotent sympathy of someone who has no intent or power to act on their feelings.  She has turned over her ability to act to the priests who, in turn, have sold out their feelings to the need for power and control in their actions.  And me, well, I have successfully long endured being the victim of loveless, abusive powertrippers who torture me in the name of God, but tonight, I don't feel that I can hold out much longer.  If I cannot be free to live my life and love who I love, then I don't want to live anymore.  I know its possible that this is a hormonal imbalance caused by my low thyroid, and I know my thyroid is low because of the symptomology and low basal temperature, but the real reason is that I had to quit my thyroid medication when it was tampered with.   But there is no question that tonight I am suicidal.  I want to be free again God, free like you made me, free before I got involved with that horrific, homophobic, misogynistic cult of the Spiritual Life Institute, and the Roman Catholic Church.  I am a lesbian and I want to be a lesbian, and I want to live in a sexual relationship with a wild and supporting woman.  I want nothing to do with church or christianity, and I cannot break free.

I feel better already.  I hate to let those people know how successfully they have compromised my psyche, but you know, just writing this makes me feel better.  Why?  Because I'm still free in my mind.  They can impose limitations from outside but they can't stop me from being proud of who I am, and loving who I choose to love.  That's what William McNamara and Dave Denny can't stand---that I don't want to belong to their sick, inverted harem of sexually and psychically castrated women, and that is why they won't let go.  I am being punished.  But guess what---I am freer than you all are.  You cannot make me believe what I don't believe.  True, the rise of fundamentalist, dogmatic Christianity to political power has made possible a 20th century Inquisition where you torture my body and mind (yeh, being thrown in jail for six month, and an unwilling particpant in your webcam surveillance for years is psychological torture, you pigs), but you will not steal my mind to belong to your narrowminded, patriarchal religion that has corrupted the natively human spirituality that belong to human beings by birthright--not baptism, not first communion, not church membership or approval.  Your insistence on dogmatic orthodoxy and your controlling abuse has caused massive alienation and distaste for the spiritual life---but I stand in the forefront of an authentic spiritual revival and proclaim, "oh yes, there is salvation outside of the church."  Not only that, you are more likely to find it outside of the Church, as I did when I was 21 years old.  Well, I feel better now.  I know who I am and what I am called to do, and no, your plans for me are not God's plans for me.