How Literature Helped My Father and I Survive Life in a Cult

[Rocky]

This essay, written by a Professor of Literature, describes well life in a cult and how ideas break down the walls of isolation build inside the mind of members by cults of many varieties.

From Literary Hub July 6, 2017 by Rebecca Stott

When my father won the English prize at his grammar school in 1946 his teachers gave him a copy of Arthur Mee’s Book of Everlasting Things. He was seven. Though only certain books were allowed in Exclusive Brethren homes, my preacher grandfather examined the volume and pronounced it acceptable. “This was a serious mistake,” my father told me. “It would have been far safer to let me read Rover and Beano.”

“I knew there was a world outside the Brethren,” he said, referring to the closed Puritan sect into which he had been born, “but I’d seen nothing like this. The Brethren line was that literature, sculpture, painting and secular music—even human imagination itself—were all mischievous, frivolous and seductive distractions from the scriptures. The only important thing to God, we were told, was your reborn self in the Spirit.”

To my father’s surprise, sin, repentance and being-born-again weren’t mentioned in the Book of Everlasting Things. “A door opened up in the wall that had been built between me and “the world,”’ he said, “and I slipped through it.”
 

I have my father’s copies of Mee’s books on my bookshelves. They smell musty. The pages have yellowed. The Book of Everlasting Things, 352 pages long, contains extracts from great literature and art. The American Declaration of Independence sits next to Matthew Arnold; Henry Vaughan next to George Eliot. Later in the book there’s the best part of The Ancient Mariner, twelve pages of In Memoriam, nine pages of Samson Agonistes, Gray’s Elegy, five pages of Paradise Lost, the whole of Adonais—“in which, at the age of eight, I almost drowned,” my father wrote—a long passage from Robinson Crusoe, Shelley’s To a Skylark and Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, whole speeches by Demosthenes and Pericles, eight pages from The Odyssey, Cicero’s Essay on Old Age, Plato’s account of the death of Socrates, Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubábaiyát of Omar Khayyám, five pages of the Areopagitica, eleven of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and several passages from his plays.

My father, seven years old, was enthralled. He began to memorize the Shakespeare speeches anthologized there, rehearsing them in his bedroom when his parents were out—Julius Caesar’s “That was the noblest Roman of them all,” Twelfth Night’s “Make me a willow cabin at your gate,” “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” from Macbeth and “Come let’s away to prison” from King Lear. He fell in love with Emily Bronte, he told me on his deathbed, 40 years after he had left the Brethren, his eyes glistening with tears.

“The words of remarkable men and women,” he said, “began to swarm inside my head. Other feelings, other judgements, other passionate beliefs opened up to me as I read,” and then he quoted the lines from Keats’ “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” as he would do again many years later, often weeping: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”

“Soon I had a small library of pieces in my head,” he told me. “I could go there at any time, even when I was in a Meeting. I had a secret, non-Brethren compartment inside my head.”

By the time I was born in 1964, the fourth-generation of the Stott family to be born into the Brethren, my father had become a preacher. He had been to Cambridge, studied literature under C.S. Lewis, written poetry, watched Ingmar Bergman films, been reprimanded for his worldly ways and prayed over. Then things had changed. The new leader, a New York linen merchant, they called him the Man of God, had begun to turn the Brethren from a strict separatist Puritan sect into a cult. He had introduced hundreds of new rules that governed every aspect of Brethren family life: no pets, no wristwatches, no cinemas, newspapers, television, no eating with non-Brethren, no restaurants, no sports, no trousers for women, no skirts above the knee, no unions, no professional associations. If you didn’t comply you’d be excommunicated and then you’d never see your family again. Thousands of Brethren had left. My large extended family stayed in. There were suicides, breakdowns even, in one tragic case, a whole family murdered because the father wanted to save them from Satan. We lived in a world of fear and surveillance.

So there were no books in my house when I was growing up either. The family bookshelves contained ministries in shelves of color-coded volumes and a single set of encyclopaedias. All the books my father had bought in his university years were now long gone, burned on the garden bonfire or delivered to the local charity shop. Though those Shakespeare soliloquies were still echoing in his head, I did not know about them, or know even that such a man as Shakespeare had existed. We were living in Brighton in the 1960s. None of us had ever heard the Beatles or seen the footage of the moon landings.

I was compliant—girl children had to be. I was subject. I wore headscarves when I was told to. I kept quiet in meeting. Women were supposed to be seen and not heard, sit at the back, follow orders. But I was not compliant inside. I seethed with rage but also prayed to be delivered from the rage I felt. I was curious but there was no where to get answers to any of the questions I wanted to ask.

Fascinated by the man I’d heard my father and grandfather preach about who he said had been sent to earth by Satan to lead men from the Lord by telling them they were descended from monkeys, I went to look Darwin up in the family encyclopaedia volumes. I was six. Where the entry should have been there were only the stumps of two razored-out pages, pages my grandfather had excised as soon as the volumes arrived.

We were not supposed to go into the library at the ordinary preparatory school I attended. Our teachers, following my parents’ instructions, sent us out of most lessons so we did worksheets in corridors. When I was seven I crossed the threshold into the school library during school assembly, curious about the walls of books I had glimpsed there. I snatched a copy of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, hid the book away and read in stolen moments, about Jack, the young boy drifter who escaped with the three orphaned children to the secret island. Jack was outspoken, brave and bold. He told the children that grown ups were not always right. He taught them to trust their instincts. He persuaded me to trust mine. Over the following years Jack became a secret interloper inside my own head. He lead me to other stolen and secret books.

By the time my family left the cult after a sexual scandal involving the cult leader in 1970, and learned to live in the outside world that we had been told was run by Satan, my father and I had much to share: books, stolen, mused over, secret loves. We spent years telling each other about the treasures we had discovered and stored away in our heads.

By the time my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer I had become a professor of literature and was beginning to write novels of my own. My father had been to prison for fraud and embezzlement because he had developed a gambling addiction but he had also written four plays, volumes of unpublished poems, made films for the BBC and had performed in many amateur Shakespeare productions. On his deathbed he decided he wanted to watch all Ingmar Bergman’s films through “one last time.” There were fifty-eight. He managed to only eight.

A few days before he died he asked me to read him Eliot’s Four Quartets and recited, barely conscious, a series of poems by Yeats and, to my surprise, he asked for a favourite passage from a Salman Rushdie essay I had given him years before. “Literature tells there are no rules,” I read, barely able to speak for tears. “It hands down no commandments. We have to make up our own rules as best we can, make them up as we go along. And it tells us there are no answers; or rather it tells us that answers are easier to come by and less reliable than questions. If religion is an answer, then literature is an enquiry, great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds.”

School libraries, school prizes, teachers, Shakespeare, Jack, books. If I am a professor of literature now, if I have the privilege to write books of my own, it is not to question religious truths, or to preach scepticism, it is to make a plea like Rushdie did, for us to find ways to keep those doors open in our minds and those of the children we raise.

__________________________________

Rebecca Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts is available now from Spiegel & Grau.

 

[Twinky]

That's pretty awesome, Rocky.

I call to mind that all non-Way material was banned for 3 months after taking one's initial PFAL class.  And then discouraged thereafter.  On entering the WC training, all non-Way material was banned - permanently.

I know a bunch of ex Plymouth Brethren in my local area.  The women hated it and are glad to have escaped.  The men can't understand why the women couldn't have a voice, too (if women had a thought about something, they had to tell their husbands, who spoke for them).  Matter of fact, about 40 years ago, in a different area, I used to work with a woman, who would take her packed lunch to the nearby park and eat there.  On a couple of occasions, I went to talk to her and she would stop eating.  Very strict PB.  Sad.  Very quiet woman and never spoke up.  Now, I realise why.

There are a number of faith schools opening up in this country.  Faith might be Christian faith, or it might be Islamic, or any other faith.  They can set their own curricula within guidelines.  Fine - but do encourage children's critical thinking. 

It should be possible to examine good literature and draw from it.  For example, Shakespeare's plays endure because they continue to deal with enduring human problems - jealousy, lust, ambition.  Some of those themes could be considered in light of what could be done to overcome, say. jealousy.  Like, learn to communicate better.  The more open communication we have amongst ourselves, the better, in my opinion.

 

[Grace Valerie Claire]

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On 7/9/2017 at 3:36 AM, Twinky said:

That's pretty awesome, Rocky.

I call to mind that all non-Way material was banned for 3 months after taking one's initial PFAL class.  And then discouraged thereafter.  On entering the WC training, all non-Way material was banned - permanently.

I know a bunch of ex Plymouth Brethren in my local area.  The women hated it and are glad to have escaped.  The men can't understand why the women couldn't have a voice, too (if women had a thought about something, they had to tell their husbands, who spoke for them).  Matter of fact, about 40 years ago, in a different area, I used to work with a woman, who would take her packed lunch to the nearby park and eat there.  On a couple of occasions, I went to talk to her and she would stop eating.  Very strict PB.  Sad.  Very quiet woman and never spoke up.  Now, I realise why.

There are a number of faith schools opening up in this country.  Faith might be Christian faith, or it might be Islamic, or any other faith.  They can set their own curricula within guidelines.  Fine - but do encourage children's critical thinking. 

It should be possible to examine good literature and draw from it.  For example, Shakespeare's plays endure because they continue to deal with enduring human problems - jealousy, lust, ambition.  Some of those themes could be considered in light of what could be done to overcome, say. jealousy.  Like, learn to communicate better.  The more open communication we have amongst ourselves, the better, in my opinion.

 

Twinky, I can not even think what my childhood would have been like without books.  As bad as it was, I could escape through the magic of books.  Even after I took the class in 1978, I continued to read whatever I wanted; when I wanted to.  My mother didn't tell me what to read; no way was I going to let some man who didn't know me, tell me what to read. Besides, I thought the TWI books, were boring, and poorly-written. Books can be powerful; perhaps that was why VPW didn't want us to read non Way Material.  

 

[waysider]

Well written and insightful.

Thanks, Rocky.

[T-Bone]

On 7/6/2017 at 11:31 AM, Rocky said:

This essay, written by a Professor of Literature, describes well life in a cult and how ideas break down the walls of isolation build inside the mind of members by cults of many varieties.

From Literary Hub July 6, 2017 by Rebecca Stott

When my father won the English prize at his grammar school in 1946 his teachers gave him a copy of Arthur Mee’s Book of Everlasting Things.....(SNIP)....

To my father’s surprise, sin, repentance and being-born-again weren’t mentioned in the Book of Everlasting Things. “A door opened up in the wall that had been built between me and “the world,”’ he said, “and I slipped through it.”  (SNIP)
 

 

thanks for posting that essay Rocky !

I love that one line i highlighted in bold red....so appropriate for Grease Spot....makes me think of all those things our mind accumulates - things outside what is "approved" by TWI - and when some crisis hits - or we merely reach a tipping point - we leave 

[Grace Valerie Claire]

24 minutes ago, T-Bone said:

thanks for posting that essay Rocky !

I love that one line i highlighted in bold red....so appropriate for Grease Spot....makes me think of all those things our mind accumulates - things outside what is "approved" by TWI - and when some crisis hits - or we merely reach a tipping point - we leave 

T-Bone, can you imagine what our lives would be like today, if we had stayed??  My life today is wonderful, but I think of the people who stayed in Way World.  I wonder how happy their lives really are.

[T-Bone]

2 hours ago, Grace Valerie Claire said:

T-Bone, can you imagine what our lives would be like today, if we had stayed??  My life today is wonderful, but I think of the people who stayed in Way World.  I wonder how happy their lives really are.

Grace, your post made me laugh – because a long long time ago when I was in TWI, I would occasionally think about the future of my life and could not imagine a life apart from the ministry. Funny how it’s the opposite now – almost makes me shudder to imagine what if I never left…well, for one thing – we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Yeah and sometimes I think about folks that are still in TWI or an offshoot – for them maybe Grease Spot is like that door Rebecca Stott talked about – an opening in the wall erected by the cult…

 

 

 

psssssttttt hey there folks still living in way-world, how’s your escape plan coming? Ssshhhhh – don’t say anything about it now! I’m just trying to be friendly. Be smart about it…top priority should be the safety and security of you and your family; you owe the way international nothing ! we’re here to help.

Edited July 10, 2017 by T-Bone
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[Grace Valerie Claire]

7 minutes ago, T-Bone said:

Grace, your post made me laugh – because a long long time ago when I was in TWI, I would occasionally think about the future of my life and could not imagine a life apart from the ministry. Funny how it’s the opposite now – almost makes me shudder to imagine what if I never left…well, for one thing – we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Yeah and sometimes I think about folks that are still in TWI or an offshoot – for them maybe Grease Spot is like that door Rebecca Stott talked about – an opening in the wall erected by the cult…

 

 

 

psssssttttt hey there folks still living in way-world, how’s your escape plan coming? Ssshhhhh – don’t say anything about it now! I’m just trying to be friendly. Be smart about it…top priority should be the safety and security of you and your family; you owe the way international nothing ! we’re here to help.

T-Bone, I used to think I would be in the Way for the rest of my life, until I took the AC in the summer of 1985.  Boring, boring, boring!! I quietly left a few years later, and I am glad I left.  No more cults for me!!  One was enough to last me, the rest of my life.

[T-Bone]

11 minutes ago, Grace Valerie Claire said:

T-Bone, I used to think I would be in the Way for the rest of my life, until I took the AC in the summer of 1985.  Boring, boring, boring!! I quietly left a few years later, and I am glad I left.  No more cults for me!!  One was enough to last me, the rest of my life.

yup - so true for a lot of us.....it's funny because before I got in the way ministry, I had the typical Roman Catholic boy frame of mind - so thinking about who I was going to spend the rest of life with involved thoughts of just one other person besides myself – my future wife…I never intended to marry an entire cult....geeez Louise - having to remember that many more birthdays and anniversaries - it's mind-boggling  !