Sterling Bank Speech
One of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received was 17 years of chaos and insanity.
When I was three months old, my dad joined the Herbert W. Armstrong cult, known as the Radio Church of God. We moved from Arkansas into the church enclave deep in the northeast Texas piney woods. By the time I was eight, Dad - an auto body repairman with a fourth grade education - had become a violent alcoholic pyromaniac. His rage and bitterness came from not becoming a minister and getting the money and power that came with it. But he didn’t want to leave because it was a lot more fun to make his co-workers in Christ miserable. By then Mother, who had dropped out of high school in her sophomore year, had become a true believer. She didn’t want to leave the bosom of the church or Dad. I didn’t free myself from the clutches of the cult and my dad until I was a senior in high school.
Yes, crazy as it sounds -- that life was a gift.
By the time I got to college, I realized that surviving terror, abuse and poverty had made me strong and resilient in many ways. The law professor who screamed that “girls can’t be trial lawyers” was nothing compared to Dad and the church. The tough judges, greedy partners, obnoxious clients – piece of cake.
Anger simmered in me but I didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, I used it to fuel my drive for success. By damn, I was going to show everyone that I was just as good as the people who had normal, middle class lives. No one was going to step on me because I was poor and from the wrong side of the tracks. I was a tough, take no prisoners kind of lawyer. The dark side of my ambition was the that suit of armor I wore to keep me from feeling pain kept me from feeling love.
Later I began to appreciate another aspect of the gift -- when you grow up in a sewer you can either let it drown you or shovel out the mess and use it as life’s fertilizer. All of us who have lived in a cesspool at some point reach a juncture in life where the past comes back to haunt us. Then there are three paths:
- fall apart and never recover
- refuse to listen to the soul’s voice when it tells you that you have work to do and amass material stuff and power, or
- start the painful, difficult, beautiful journey to awareness of who and what you are
I’ve thought about the life I would have today had Dad not flipped the radio dial to the World Tomorrow broadcast. I see myself living in a nice, new double-wide in the Ozark foothills of Arkansas, married to a teacher at the local high school and playing the piano for the choir at my fundamentalist church. Which is a perfectly fine life but not for me.
Then, not too long ago, I recognized a gift that I’d been using for most of my life but didn’t see until it dropped on me, like a large rock.
Hang in there with me for a minute while I wax philosophical. We’ll get to the story in just a minute.
Here’s what I learned - our reality is framed by our culture. In other words, our concepts, habits, skills and institutions at this time and place create boundaries and norms. THE RULES.
We benchmark ourselves by them.
We treat them as though they are truth.
We are told that fulfillment comes from power, money and professional achievement. More is better. The harder you work, the more you get and the happier you’ll be. The higher you climb on the ladder, the more fulfilled your life will be.
In the middle of the night when we’re tossing and turning, worrying about all the things that are going on in our lives, that little voice inside is whispering – it’s a lie, it’s a lie.
But in the light of morning, we pretend we never heard anything and get back on the track we think we’re supposed to follow.
Today I want to challenge you to adjust your cultural lenses. It will change your reality.
I know this is true because I lived the first 17 years of my life in a culture and believed its version of truth. In the Armstrong cult I had panic attacks, sleepless nights, hallucinations, vomiting, tears and migraines over my failure to perfectly follow its playbook. I worked myself sick trying to fit a model of behavior that turned out to be the control mechanism of a hierarchical society.
Fast forward 20 years. I lived in a totally different culture and believed its version of truth. I had panic attacks, sleepless nights, hallucination, vomiting, tears and migraines over my failure to perfectly follow its playbook. I worked myself sick trying to fit a model of behavior that turned out to be the control mechanism of a hierarchical society.
Three years ago, I lived in a more exclusive version of the culture I’d been in when I was in my 30’s and I believed its truth, its definition of success. I had panic attacks, sleepless nights ...
Duh! I was going around in circles.
The only way to escape was to figure out why I was drawn to these environments and reacted to them as I did.
That meant that I had to remember all of those things that I’d blocked from my memory. I had to recall and understand the culture in which I had grown up.
When I was 10 years old, I knew that on the Feast of Trumpets in 1972 those of us who were judged to be worthy would be divinely transported to Petra in the Jordanian desert on planes that were not airworthy, to live in caves, fed by God on manna like the children of Israel until Jesus Christ returned in 1975. While we were hidden away, almost everyone on earth would be killed in the ultimate holocaust.
I knew it was true because Herbert W. Armstrong told me so and Herbert W. Armstrong got his messages directly from God. My parents, my teachers, my neighbors, my playmates believed it, too. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t believe it. I’d heard from ministers that people on the outside didn’t believe what we believed and that was why we had to stay away from them. They could cause us to lose our eternal souls and burn in the Lake of Fire.
I knew that God was a jealous God. A bearded white man sitting on a throne somewhere up there, taking delight in watching mankind screw up. He demanded perfection. Any little slip-up was all it might take to keep me off the plane to Petra. There were terrible drawings in the booklets and magazines showing the awful consequences of getting on the wrong side of the Big Guy.
My life’s ambition was to get to Petra.
I knew that it was a sin
- to go to a doctor or take medicine
- to question any church teaching or any message from a minister
- to celebrate Christmas, Easter or birthdays
- to eat pork or shellfish or crustaceans
- to watch TV or read a novel or play with other kids on the Sabbath
- to be alone with someone of the opposite sex until you were married
- to wear makeup or dress immodestly
- to eat even a crumb of leavening during the Days of Unleavened Bread or to take a sip of water during the Day of Atonement
- listen to any music that wasn’t approved by the ministers
But it was okay to drink. Even for kids. You just couldn’t get drunk and that meant anything short of comatose.
In my ten year-old world there was nothing unusual about two ministers appearing unannounced at our home during the day to check for cleanliness and adherence to the dietary rules. And to make sure Mother was wearing proper attire even when scrubbing the toilet.
It never occurred to me that everyone didn’t have their bank accounts audited to make sure they tithed 30 to 40% of their income to the church.
I knew that women were subordinate to men. I would never work outside the home or get an education. Many ministers lacked high school diplomas and the only education that was accepted was one acquired from Ambassador College – the church’s school.
The most I could aspire to become was a minister’s wife. I expected that when I married, my husband would hit me from time to time when I veered off God’s path and needed a loving reminder of the error of my ways. Regardless of what hubby did to me, we were married for life. Divorce wasn’t allowed except in rare circumstances and, if divorced, you could never remarry or have sex ever again unless you made up with the ex.
There was no doubt in my mind that everything a minister did was directed by God. Anyone above me in the pecking order – and that was everyone – had the authority to tell me what to do or beat me or question me about my body.
I also knew that I wasn’t as good as everyone else because my Dad was a drunkard, jailed for beating up people other than Mother, walking shoeless down the middle of the highway at night, and setting fires. Earlier that year, he’d tried to burn the Armstrong’s King Air and liked to set fires in our backyard at 2:00 in the morning.
When I was 13, my cultural lenses abruptly changed. My mother, my two younger brothers and I escaped from Dad in the middle of the night, wearing only the clothes on our backs. We took nothing with us. My father had become progressively more violent and dangerous – to the point of actually tossing lighted matches in the gas tank of his wrecker to terrorize us. If we’d stayed in Big Sandy, he would have killed us.
For the first time, I was thrust into the real world. Tossed from the cocoon of the church into a place filled with doomed unbelievers who followed Satan’s ways. Peeples Jr. High in Jackson, Mississippi wasn’t easy to navigate in 1968. Particularly with one change of clothes – which was an old, long, homemade skirt worn with a frilly, high-colored white blouse – and living in a $45/month rent house and later in the projects. The church gave Mother $200 from the widows and orphans fund and that was all we had to live on. We weren’t allowed to take anything from the government.
For my first 13 years, my truth and reality were creations of the Armstrong cult. To each of you, hearing for the first time what I was taught, it isn’t truth. It’s pure, unadulterated bullshit. But for me, it had to be truth, it had to be reality because it was all I knew. And, everyone around me drank the same Kool-Aid.
It was only when I was exposed to something else that I began to ask myself questions. When you’re a teenager, trying to survive in a new environment, all you want to do is fit in. Even though there was a church congregation in Jackson that met in a VFW hall and there were plenty of people watching to make sure I was following the rules, there were 8 hours a day when I was surrounded by non-believers.
But slowly the weight of the new culture picked away at my beliefs. Like a sweater with a loose thread you begin to pull.
When our minister’s daughter told me to roll up my skirt once I got inside the school building so I didn’t look like a freak, I did it. Even though it was a sin. I started picking at the thread.
When I was humiliated at having to quiz the lunchroom ladies about whether there was pork in the green beans or the hamburgers were cooked on a grill where bacon was fried, I decided that if I didn’t know something had pork in it, then I wasn’t sinning by eating it. I was now pulling the thread a little harder.
I started wondering why it was a sin to ask questions.
How was it that the nice kids who befriended me were going to be tortured and die excruciating deaths just because they didn’t follow Armstrong’s laws?
When I saw the ocean for the first time at the Feast of Tabernacles in 1968 at Jekyll Island, Georgia, I asked myself how God could destroy a creation as magnificent as this earth in a handful of years.
When I got my first crush on a gorgeous blonde, California surfer-boy, I wondered what could be wrong with talking to him without an adult listening in.
The unraveling thread was becoming longer and longer. As my perceptions changed, so did my truth and my reality.
When we moved from Mississippi to Louisiana, I had to deal with a minister in the Shreveport congregation who delighted in tormenting teenagers. For some reason, I was in his cross-hairs. When I was 15, he called me into the back of the day care center where we had services and ordered me to sit directly across from him, our knees almost touching. Looking me in the eyes, he asked if anyone had ever touched my breasts. My vagina.
Any questions I had about his mental stability were answered when I was 16. That was when he pulverized a dozen heads of cabbage with a cat of nine tails to simulate the Crucifixion.
The fall of my senior year of high school, when I was 17, I broke the Sabbath by going to a debate tournament in South Louisiana. On the way home, we were in a very bad car wreck. All of us kids were okay but battered, bruised and sore. The next day two ministers appeared at the house and asked Mother to bring me to the living room. I thought they were there to anoint me with olive oil and pray for my healing. Instead, they said, “You’ve broken the Sabbath. You can’t come to church anymore.” I said, “Get the hell out of my house.” They turned to Mother and said, “Control your rebellious daughter.” She said, “You heard her. Get the hell out of the house. If she’s not good enough for the church, then I’m not either.”
It was over. Finally over.
But it a complete transition into the world didn’t come easily. I didn’t have answers to lots of questions. Is Saturday the Sabbath? Is it okay to keep Christmas and Easter? Where do you draw the lines with sex? Is God the way He was portrayed by the church? If I don’t believe Armstrong, who or what should I believe?
I realized that what I had believed to be true for all my life was a false perception but I didn’t have the emotional energy or maturity to engage in philosophical thinking. So I slammed the door on everything I’d known and jumped right in the middle of what I thought was mainstream culture. I knew I wanted power, freedom, money and professional achievement. I wanted to color inside the lines. I wanted to be normal.
So, I decided to become a lawyer. You can laugh now.
The interesting thing about my decision is that it was radical. There was nothing normal or mainstream about a 20 year-old girl from a poverty-stricken, uneducated family applying for law school in 1975. Particularly in the Deep South. But I didn’t know that.
Once I got out of the Radio Church of God and its constraints on women, I figured I could do whatever the hell I wanted.
I hadn’t been exposed to the new culture long enough to really understand that a woman’s place in society at that time wasn’t much different than that taught by the Armstrongs. It didn’t feel that way to me because I was no longer prevented from getting a good education or working outside the home. And I knew I wasn’t going to have to put up with a husband who whacked me in the head. I wasn’t afraid or daunted by being one of 8 women in my law school class. I knew I could do it and, by damn, I did.
I learned how to look, act, talk, live and play like a lawyer. I knew the playbook for success as a lawyer by heart – associate in a big firm, followed by equity partnership, followed by head of the section, followed by becoming an adjunct professor of law with lots of speaking and writing, followed by powerful position in a big company. I checked off the achievements one by one.
I worked harder than anyone around me and billed more hours. I tried and won cases in court that no one thought had any chance of success. My salary doubled three times in seven years. I married but my husband was out every night chasing women, so I had plenty of time to devote to my career. I bought a house in River Oaks that I couldn’t begin to afford and drove a new Mercedes. My clothes came from Neiman’s and I went on exotic vacations.
I’d followed the cultural rulebook on fulfilment to the letter but I was miserable.
When my husband left me for another woman for the third time, I imploded. For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to show anger – real anger. The throwing coffee cups against the wall, rip the bed apart, drive the car 100 miles an hour toward a tree angry.
During this time, a tiny ember of something deeper began to appear. A longing for something that mattered. Love? And dare I say it – laughter. I figured out that there were dimensions to life I’d never been exposed to and I wanted to explore them.
So, the journey toward awareness began. I read books, starting with basic self-help and graduating to those with complex religious and philosophical themes. I began to work with Pittman McGehee, then the Dean of Christ’s Church Cathedral and later a Jungian analyst. I tried church for about a nanosecond but couldn’t do that. Church was a place of pain and humiliation for me. But I was comfortable with prayer. And I found God in nature. Years passed in pleasant progress. I learned the mental and physical benefits of exercise. I took up gardening and photography as hobbies.
But I hadn’t lost any of my drive or ambition. I was still chugging forward, climbing new mountains in the legal practice.
Then, I hit the wall again. It was a good thing I had begun to awaken and find a different strength than the one that drove me to be a successful lawyer. Because I needed every ounce I could muster.
Married to a carbon copy of my dad, trying to shield my son from violence, working harder and harder to make more money to pay the massive bills my husband was generating, dreading walking inside my home each night because of fear and the fact that it bore no evidence of my personality. A punitive work environment where I was praised one minute and screamed at the next. Seeing unfairness and abuse heaped on people all around me but unable to effectuate real change.
Panic attacks that sent me to the emergency room. Migraines. GI problems. Insomnia. Exhaustion. Depression.
In the midst of these dark times, I was awakened at 2:00 in the morning by an inner voice that told me to get up and write. I followed that voice and began what is now Matches in the Gas Tank.
I wish I could say that writing the book magically cured me of all my neuroses. Alas, no. The best I can do is to be a work in progress every day of my life. Writing the book was a cathartic experience. It forced me to stare down the acts that played over and over in my nightmares. Once I stared them down, they disappeared. When I decided to look for a publisher for the book, I was scared out of my wits. How could I share all of this embarrassing stuff with my peers? No one would want anything to do with me. Thankfully the opposite has happened. I’ve finally become open to loving and receiving love – just because I feel a connection, not because someone can do something for me.
I want to share a few things I’ve learned.
The only person holding you back is you.
Everyone has a story.
The most exhilarating thing you can do is follow your heart.
Each of us has a calling. That little inner voice will help us find it, if only we will listen.
Kids keep us young and exhausted.
If you don’t love yourself, no one else will.
Positive actions create positive results.
If you’re miserable, decide to make a change then give yourself time to find a way out.
Hold on to your dreams. Make them happen.