Quitting the Cult

In the Attic with The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

Welcome! You have arrived at the fourth installment of my house-built, book-driven, autism-fueled memoir-in-essays, At Home with Books. For the prologue and first two chapters, see the table of contents. If you like this essay, please give it a heart. If you think it would speak to someone, please share it with them! That is what my writing is for: finding the places where our stories intersect.

“To have lived it through and now be free to give
Utterance, body and soul–to wake and know
Every time that it’s gone and gone for good, the thing
That nearly broke you–
Is worth it all . . . ”

- Seamus Heaney, “After Liberation”

Once upon a time, the pickup truck bearing my best friend disappeared around the corner, and I stood on the cement front stoop of that little Asheville Cape Cod with its watching, waiting dormers, the window on the top right suddenly my place in all this world to lay my head. 

Twenty-eight years old and on my own, I breathed the summer mountain air and felt surprisingly less frightened than I had several hours before, crossing the river that felt like a Rubicon. I entered the front door and ascended the narrow, carpeted staircase to my bedroom under the eaves, a many-cornered room so perfect it still makes its way into my sleeping dreams. 

The 1920’s homes in Asheville, North Carolina, from the likes of the fantastical, turreted Biltmore estate down to cozy, two-bedroom cottages like the one to which I had just moved, favor the Craftsman style: every nook and cranny is put to use. The second floor that might have been an unfinished attic in this new home of mine had been built into bedrooms, eaved and angled. It was Bilbo’s Bag End lifted among the tree branches (its door and windows sadly straightened). It was the bedroom of Diana Wynne Jones’s young Christopher Chant, who wakes at night to walk around a corner of his room and finds unknown landscapes unfolding before him. 

My new room was so enchantingly, impossibly perfect that I remained in that fraught house much longer than I should have, given the roommate difficulties that swiftly arose. We housemates were not a good match, but I loved attics: their mystery, their awayness, the dim, dusty notion of them. 

I had never lived in a house with a true attic. Sure, there was an upper crawl space I never saw the interior of in the suburban Atlanta home where I lived till I was ten. Then the house of my teenage years, which had the kind of peaked, lofted room you think of, but it was all heavy heat and exposed insulation, boxed Christmas ornaments and artificial tree in one corner, bins of off-season clothes in another. I seldom climbed its rickety, drop-down ladder to poke my head through the hole in the hallway ceiling, dutifully heeding my parents’ warning: “If you step off a beam, your feet will go straight through to the room beneath.”

When I arrived at that first Asheville house and retreated into its high haven of a bedroom, I would have said I was looking for a change from the college town in which I’d lived for a decade. Could I have seen more clearly, I would have known I was actually seeking escape–not least from myself and the cult of confused thought I’d built up over the years. Who was I supposed to be? How was I supposed to be living? Why did it always feel like I wasn’t getting any attempt at walking through this life quite right? Why was I always looking over my shoulder for criticism that might bite and sting?

In the childhood chapters of his memoir Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis describes himself as the “product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.” I first read those words as an adult, but echoes of Lewis’s childhood playing, dreaming, and creating in an upstairs, house-length room resonate throughout his children’s books, like The Magician’s Nephew. 

At the beginning of that prequel to the Narnia tales, young Polly and Digory live in a connected row of late-nineteenth-century London homes. Digory is only staying there for a time; his mother is ill, and they have come to the city for medical care. He is from the country and finds the tall, narrow homes and their city environs dingy and boring, but his new friend Polly has discovered the attics. Off the two children go into a dark, raftered space that runs the length of the multi-house building. Pacing and counting their footsteps in hopes of exploring the empty home at the end of the row, they are careful not to fall through the spaces between. 

If you’ve read the story, you know what happens: they enter an attic one house too soon and find themselves in the workspace of Digory’s mad magician Uncle Andrew. Then the children are sent through a different sort of passage, to a place between worlds. The attics aren’t, after all, a secret place for childish adventure. Instead, they become the children’s path from a bigger Here to There. A doorway of sorts, unlooked-for, from one world and way of being to another. 

In my story, there was the attic I thought I wanted when moving to Asheville, a homebase for harmless new adventure, a refuge for some semblance of peace. And then there was the attic I actually needed, the throughway into a new mode of being, or seeing. But there is a third kind, too, and all the lasting stories of the world hold at their core this darker version of a place hidden away. 

During my freshman year of college in Athens, Georgia, ten years before the chapter of my life in the high Asheville dormer room, rumors whispered across campus. There were reports of women attacked while walking home in the dark. Some of the women died, and a certain terror housed itself in the minds of the women with whom I went to class and made sure to walk home afterward, two-by-two. It was the same year I found a measure of belonging in a student group that looked like friendship but felt like something worse.

At first, being part of a group– “Good kids,” the adults who met us said–was fresh air at the tail end of a lonely Freshman year. At first, the impossibility of the rules was hard to notice. After a childhood spent socially off-balance, always on the fringes of any group, it felt good to find a kind of membership, and the people seemed so friendly.

The rules actually helped. I had often felt confused about mores, and being told the explicit expectations for belonging was a relief. Daily prayer, Bible study, evangelism, and participation in meetings and events. I can do this, I thought. I hurled myself into the work. 

The sense of being hemmed in increased over the next several years, but I had long harbored that attic fear of stepping off any beam and falling through, of failing at any responsibility set for me, big or small, so I bought the message of this particular group nestled in the heart of my university campus, and I took on the task: in this case, evangelism. 

I cringed apologetically while handing slim religious tracts to complete strangers and hated myself. Or I didn’t do it and prayed I wouldn’t die in the night. The next morning, the same task would be waiting for me again, my own Rumpelstiltskin stack of hay piled impossibly to the ceiling. Shrinking inside my twenty-year-old self, I tried to follow the group’s rules, forcing myself into a way that wasn’t made for me and nearly suffocating beneath the particular pile of straw called “winning souls for God.” 

Over time, I began to see that I could never be good enough for full acceptance. It turned out this was neither a nice Christian group nor a place for healthy friendship, but the kind that said, “If you do this, but not that, you might make it to heaven.” The kind that is always watching. The kind that spouts rules like an old-fashioned computing machine, ream after ream of dot-matrix paper piled on the floor, too much information for a single human mind to consume. 

Had I known that many people who experience the world the way I do find a measure of belonging in high-control religion, I might have been able to make a clean break. At the time, all I could do was hop from one salvific roof beam to the next: Bible, evangelism, prayer, repeat, and don’t fall through, lest you lose your soul–all the time sensing that this was not a nice tower or a friendly attic. 

“We’re on the front lines!”

The college ministry leader barked at us in the meeting, sketching pyramid schemes that looked like plans of attack on a whiteboard with red marker. “You all spend too much time in the hospital, tending a wounded faith. Get back out in front!” 

In English class earlier my junior year, I had identified with Stephen Crane’s character Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage, the Civil War soldier who deserts his regiment, fleeing the fight, getting behind the camp, hiding in the woods. I would have been running away right alongside him.

“Get back out and fight!” the ministry leader had urged us. The battle he referred to was against the powers of darkness in this world, and fighting meant aggressively sharing our faith, gaining a growing list of souls we had saved. 

Later, I would hear the sardonic quip about how Christians are the only ones who shoot their own wounded. But in the moment, in the meeting with the whiteboard and the red marker and the shouting, the sense of threat was disorienting. It was clear I was doing something wrong, and the consequences were spiritual, dire, eternal.

Afterward, I hurried home alone in the dark, the awareness of campus assaults two years before still active in recent memory. Footsteps rang out behind me. I couldn’t outrun them. My heart leapt in my throat. A familiar voice sounded, low and critical. “We need to talk.”   

No physical assault, then. Only a spiritual one. 

Was I relieved the footsteps weren’t that of a different kind of predator, out to steal something sexual from me? In memory, I can’t be sure. My locked-in, lancet-windowed view of what constituted safety versus threat was limited; my trust in my own sense of right was colored by my fear of being wrong, by a history of failing to understand social nuance and meaning. 

“You are leading our sheep astray,” the leader said. “You,” he told me, “are the instrument of the devil.” 

I understood then. He wasn’t out to tell me I had failed at my private spiritual efforts, but that I was pointing others in the wrong direction. In his version of the story, I was the villain. Rumpelstiltskin run amok among the ministry’s precious lambs.

“You are leading our sheep astray.” 

Indeed, through a variety of circumstances the previous summer and friendships with a handful of sane, helpful people, I had begun to hear a message I had already heard but never understood: that salvation is a different story altogether. You can’t work your way there, roofbeam to roofbeam. I had returned to college for another school year–the last I would spend with that ministry–and told myself I would never again take that dark road to salvation by evangelism or any other task.

This sheer spiritual freedom felt like falling, but weightless and safe, and it became my own front line. I positioned myself on it. I held Bible studies in my top-floor dorm room, setting myself a new task, unapproved by the ministry leaders. It was a front line that felt more like a hospital, or the notion of home base I once heard a pastor describe in a sermon. He imagined a high stakes game of tag, and that’s what I was doing; I was calling my friends in, all of them I could find, calling them out of their own discomfort with that aggressive, embattled type of religion. I held meetings with other young women on cheap student rugs in bright dorm rooms on the uppermost floor and told them, “There is a different way.” 

I wasn’t ready to use the word “cult,” but I was widening my upper window view, and other students peered out of Rapunzel’s tower alongside me, wondering if letting down our hair to light in a new and truer land, one with fewer rules and more love, could be so easy. Some breathed a sigh of relief along with me and tossed their needles back into the pile of hay. 

But some didn’t, and the leaders told me I was the instrument of the devil, and the worst of it was that I half believed them. 

I half believed them because I have always, easily, allowed myself to be talked out of my own thoughts, opinions, beliefs. I half believed them because years later, after all the confidence with which I had fought against the imprisoning cult message, I could never quite let my membership expire. 

“You don’t really want that, Rebecca,” an adult in my life might say about this toy, that item of clothing, and my assent rings through my childhood. “That isn’t what you really believe,” any authority figure chides when I am honest about scripture passages that are emotionally difficult, and I hang my head in acknowledgement, false to myself.

Ten years after the ministry, in that room at the top of the little Asheville house, I would turn from reading or writing or job-applying and find myself mentally back in a damp North Georgia cold, hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a ministry team-building exercise. In that particular activity with the religious group, I had lagged behind, asthmatic, companioned by a friend who had twisted her ankle. We were left by the summit seekers and berated later for not pitching in, for not supporting the group by giving the uphill hike our best effort. 

Those memories fell on me and found a dark home. Maybe I still wasn’t trying hard enough. After all, here I was, jobless in a new town on the cusp of thirty years old. If you aren’t practiced in believing what you actually believe, any criticism can take root, even old ones. The world turns upside down, and a heavy pile of hay is uppermost. 

Before I quit the cult, I moved through my days and especially my nights in fear. What if the leaders who furrowed an unbelieving brow at my confession of faith were right and I was wrong? I would ask myself. What if my distaste for evangelism meant I was not regenerate, that my belief was insincere? There was a small voice inside me saying that to believe God is to be held in love, simple as that. Still, other voices had shouted louder. 

In my new home in Asheville, North Carolina, the old voices returned. I remembered climbing into my lofted dorm bed seven years earlier and lying awake for hours, hashing through whether or not my belief in God was real. Maybe, I worried in that high attic room, I was wrong about everything, even after all this time. Maybe I didn’t think what I actually thought. 

Who believes these kinds of things? Who worries in this way? Someone who has been told too often that her way of seeing the world is wrong. Someone who is in danger of building a house, an entire life, on that shaky foundation of another person’s certainty. Someone who meant to toss her cult membership card into the fire, but slipped it quietly back in her pocket like Bilbo Baggins and his precious, pernicious ring. Someone locked, even years later, in the worst kind of tower–the one in her own mind.

Continued in this post: “Quitting the Cult, Part II”

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