Church of the Poison Mind

The beginning of the end, February 2002

I was visibly trembling as I fastened my seatbelt. Just another nervous flyer outwardly. We all know it’s the safest way to travel, and a short hop over the North Sea from Amsterdam to London isn’t going to kill anyone. I had no choice anyway.

‘The doctors say if you don’t come now, you’ll never see her again,’ my brother had said on the phone.

And so here I was on a British Midlands flight to England so I could say goodbye to my grandmother. The only thing is that God wants to kill me. He wants to take me down, and if that means taking a planeload of seemingly innocent people down with me, He’s quite prepared to do that. He’s a loving God, but he’s also jealous and vengeful. You cross him, and he’ll wipe you out so fast you won’t know what happened until you open your eyes on Judgement Day to hear all those good things you did, your prayers, your years of devotion, your faith - none of it matters because you were wavering in that faith on the day you died. And now Satan and his demons are waiting to escort you to the blazing fires of hell, where you will suffer for eternity. That’s the punishment for doubting this huge omnipotent God, for not trusting in those He anointed and appointed over you.

My deception had still gone unnoticed, but God knew. God knew that I spent every hour at work when I had nothing to do trawling the internet, reading articles about cults, and reading testimonies of those who had left cults. God knew that I would go to the toilet and send up a silent prayer. Show me, God. Am I in a cult or not? He saw me sweat; He saw me agonise. And He still hadn’t answered me.

I was buckled up now, and the engines were revving. Svelte young women in immaculate blue suits and red neckties went through the motions of the safety demonstration. Everyone ignored them as usual. Rain battered the windows, and I was anxious for the time that I could pull down the blind, try and pretend that I wasn’t in a tin can at an uninhabitable height. We took off, the plane roaring into the air, the buildings of Schiphol shrinking before my eyes until they were nothing more than miniature boxes on the rain-soaked land that I had made my home when I was 19.

We flew into thick cloud, the metal tube vibrating slightly, the view from the windows obliterated by whiteness.

‘Please do not get up, we are flying through an area of light turbulence.’

But the shuddering of the plane was nothing compared to the quaking of my mind. A perpetual rollercoaster of fear, anguish, and the occasional rational moment where I would think, ‘yes, this is a cult,’ and then ask myself, ‘so what are you still doing here?’

I looked around at my fellow passengers. Balding businessmen, a young woman with a child, and dazed-looking teenagers, their drug-addled brains no doubt still recovering after a weekend in Amsterdam. And I prayed - God, do not destroy all these people just because of me.

Born again - 20 May 1990

Rebirth. It’s a strange concept. Birth must be such a traumatic experience. That’s probably why we don’t remember anything about it. Can you imagine? Chilling in amniotic fluid for nine months, being fed every day, wanting for nothing, soft, soothing sounds when you flail your arms and legs, and then suddenly you are thrust, pushed through a passageway that doesn’t even seem to be wide enough to hold you. Emerging into the bright light, your barely seeing eyes struggle to make sense of the shapes and forms. An onslaught of unfamiliar sounds, deep voices, beeping machines, a sense of urgency, so different from those gently spoken words that floated down into your warm, soft existence. Gloved hands, harsh against your sensitive skin. Oh, for the darkness of that safe, warm womb, but then you’re whisked away, weighed and measured, prodded and poked. Wiped clean of the vernix caseosa that protected you. Swaddled. That bit feels okay.

They gave my mum pills to speed up her labour. They were expecting too many babies that day. She took the first lot but hid the rest. I was born on the day I was due, just very late at night, and I was born blue. Was it the December chill, or was I not fully oxygenated? My Apgar score was low. By all accounts, I was a difficult baby, unlike my sweet and passive older brother.

Twenty years later. I wanted to be baptised in the North Sea. To sink into its chilly waters, waves lapping over my head. To emerge reborn, revived, a new creation. I wanted that cold, saline water to wash away my sin. And I had plenty of sin. I had been steadily ploughing down a hedonistic path of debauchery and wantonness for years. I wanted to be baptised, but not today. Last week, I had been an atheist, and my newfound belief was confusing, to say the least. Only a couple of nights ago, I had nearly been knocked off my bicycle by an idiot driver. I shuddered at the thought of how he would have sent me straight to hell. I wasn’t baptised, so I wasn’t saved. But I wanted to be.

‘So, are you going to get baptised today?’

Hans. German. 24 years old. He was a lot friendlier than when I had first met him. He had been decidedly surly then. He obviously hadn’t thought that I would amount to anything, just another scrounger who’d walked in off the street for the free food.

‘No, I haven’t read the whole Bible yet,’ I replied.

He grinned and sat down on the sofa beside me.

‘You don’t have to read the whole Bible. I haven’t read the whole Bible, and I’ve been saved for four years. But you’ve read the bits that matter. You know what you have to do.’

I wasn’t convinced.

‘If you leave here today, you’ll be down the pub with your friends next week, and Satan will use them to take away what you’ve seen. God’s revealed himself to you. They’re gonna laugh about that. And then you’ll not come back here, and you’ll stop praying and reading…’

His voice trailed off.

I was terrified. I saw myself propping up the bar at Café Koos in the Boekhorststraat, ever-present drink in my hand, listening to my best friend Maartje whilst she talked incessantly about her mother’s suicide, the mother she had constantly ridiculed in life and never actually given a shit about. She wouldn’t want to listen to me talk about God. She wouldn’t want to listen to me at all. She was riding on a wave of glory, the centre of attention everywhere she went. You poor girl, losing your mother like that. I thought of Maartje’s mother, and how she had ended her life so drastically, how we had gone to see her body at the funeral home and even though it was a horribly claustrophobic room and we had to lock ourselves in it, my morbid curiosity got the better of me. What does someone who hung themself look like? I had expected worse. There was merely a faint blue hue to her lips. Maartje’s brother and father had joined us. ‘She’s so beautiful,’ they kept murmuring. Their hypocrisy astounded me. Only weeks before, they had been belittling her like they always had. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I’d said, thankful to step out of that room. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t even there. It was just a corpse, a shell that had contained her in life, and now she was burning in hell, according to my newfound faith.

Or I would drink Hoegaarden with my ex-boyfriend Rob for old times’ sake, squeezing slices of lemon into the frothy white foam bubbling in hexagonal tumblers, and we would argue about everything and anything as we always did. He wasn’t very forgiving of the fact I’d dumped him, but at least he didn’t use his mother’s suicide to get attention. She had killed herself only days after Maartje’s mother. I never met her. It was his punishment for her first suicide attempt. You can’t meet my girlfriend until you stop acting like this. I wanted to visit her in the hospital, but he said no. I wanted to visit her when she had recovered and gone home, but he said no. And then she tried again, and that time, she took enough pills and made sure to do it at a time of day when she would not be discovered. And now she, too, was burning in hell.

The two suicides had greatly affected me. My best friend’s mother and my boyfriend’s mother both gone within a matter of days. Bad things come in threes, I often thought. Who would be next?

And I, too, would burn in hell if something happened to me. I wasn’t baptised. I wasn’t saved.

‘So what’s stopping you?’

Hans’ voice brought me back to the room. An airy living room in a high-rise in the predominantly immigrant-inhabited Bijlmer neighbourhood in Southeast Amsterdam. The women of the group rushed to and fro, comforting crying children, serving drinks, and clearing the table while the men lounged on sofas. I wondered if that was a German thing since most of the group was German, or if it was ordained by God.

But in answer to Hans’ question, nothing was stopping me. I honestly had thought it would be a good idea to read the entire Bible before committing myself to a religion that I had despised and ridiculed for years. My sudden conversion had probably shocked me more than anyone else.

In hindsight, I was probably right, but I had no answer, and I knew I had to be baptised that day.

He went over and spoke with some of the other men. They huddled together, whispering intently. Occasionally, they glanced at me. Then he returned with one of them.

‘So, you want to get baptised?’

He was suspicious.

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’

He looked apprehensive.

‘Well, we’re going to drive back to The Hague. We’ll baptise you there.’

‘In the sea?’ I asked hopefully.

He looked amused.

‘Maybe. It’s a bit cold.’

They returned to the huddle of men, and the whispering continued. Then it was settled. We would drive to The Hague. I lived in The Hague, as did Karl, who was going to baptise me together with Cor, the man who had been suspicious. Karl was German, the leader of this particular ‘cell group’ as they were called. His Dutch was terrible, practically non-existent, and he generally reverted to German. Anna, ever eager to please, whispered her interpretation in my ear.

We set off in the car, and I was terrified of what might happen if we were to have an accident. Would I go straight to hell? Or would God let me off, knowing that I had been on my way to get baptised?

Karl wasn’t keen on the idea of a sea baptism.

‘It’s just a romantic notion,’ he said. ‘Far too cold. We have a bathtub.’

It wasn’t cold. It was May, and the weather was unusually warm for the time of year. But I obviously had nothing to say in the matter. My visions of my reborn self, emerging from the water, a newborn creature free of sin, were crushed.

By chance, I was wearing a swimming costume. I was poor. I worked odd jobs in bars and restaurants. I survived. But I couldn’t afford to buy anything. I’d run out of clean underwear that day, so I had pulled on a swimsuit instead. Not being aware of my dire financial situation, the group saw it as a stroke of serendipity. Even though I had a swimsuit, I couldn’t swim. Now that I can, I still have an irrational fear of drowning. Before I learned to swim, I wouldn’t even submerge my face in water.

The bathtub was filled with lukewarm water, and Silvia, a jittery woman with downcast eyes, was sent in to help me get ready. Her Dutch was also poor, and so we communicated with difficulty. I stripped down to my swimsuit, and she gave me a huge towel to wrap myself in after the baptism. I lay down in the bathtub, and Cor and Karl pushed me under, submerging me. I fought and struggled. I had always been afraid of men, of their violence, their confidence, their sense of entitlement. But they held me down forcefully. Thoughts went through my mind - what if they’re going to kill me? Who are these people anyway? Through the water, I heard the muffled sounds of them reciting, ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,’ and then I was up out of the water, gasping for air.

Karl’s normally severe features had been replaced by a broad smile from ear to ear.

‘And now we’ll pray that you receive the Holy Spirit. Get dressed and come downstairs.’

They left, and Silvia came back in.

‘How was it?’ she asked falteringly.

I didn’t really know what to say, so I said ‘good’ as I towelled myself dry and put my clothes back on. I had been born again. Washed free of sin, my depravity swirling down the drain with the baptismal water. I was free.

‘You have shining eyes,’ Silvia said. I looked in the mirror, but I couldn’t see any difference. Maybe my eyes had always shone outwardly.

But I did believe I had been saved, saved not only from sin and death but also from my life of toxic men, drug taking, and poverty. The things I had dreamed of as a child, being a mother, having my own baby to hold and love in the way that I had never been loved, now seemed within reach. No more drugs, no more drinking, no more suicidal ideations, no more men who cared nothing for me but only for their self-gratification. I would be loved now. I was reborn.

Little did I know that I had just joined a cult.

Faith

I had been an atheist most of my life. Born to an atheist father and an agnostic mother, I never really experienced God or Christianity until I went to school. We had to sit on the floor, cross-legged, for half an hour each morning during assembly. The headmaster spoke a lot about someone called God, and then we would sing about God and pray to God, who was apparently invisible but all around us. I remember asking my parents who this god was, and my dad firmly replying that he didn’t exist, while my mother sheepishly admitted that she didn’t really know whether he existed. The Bible, however, they both thought, was just something people had written down to give some kind of structure to society, to give people rules so that enforcing laws would be easier. Jesus had probably existed, but that didn’t mean the stories about him in the Bible were all true. I decided that this god bloke probably didn’t exist. I didn’t see any evidence of it, and dad had been pretty clear.

When I was about six, my mum went through one of her religious phases. That meant I had to go to Sunday school while she went to church. But all my friends went to Sunday school, and I realised now I had been missing out. We listened to stories about Jesus, drew pictures and then danced around the room singing. When we got to the door, we had to throw a coin into a collection box. I actually really enjoyed it, but after a while, I was told I was too old for Sunday school and had to join mum in church. It was incredibly dull. There were no stories, no drawing or happy songs. We just sat in silence on hard wooden pews listening to someone talk. We sang a hymn or two, but they weren’t like the jolly ditties we had sung in Sunday school. Then all the adults went up for communion, and I stayed behind alone on the bench. At some point, my mum was approached about my being on the fence. I should be going up for communion, too. She didn’t want that. I can only think now that it was because she didn’t know what I believed, or if I even believed. I had been christened as a six-year-old, as this was obviously a requisite to keep attending the Sunday School, but I think she knew my heart. I had quite a disdain for this whole idea of a higher being who wanted to keep us in check. It would have been hypocritical for me to partake of the body and blood of Christ if I did not actually believe in him or his sacrifice. In any case, it led to some kind of ongoing dispute. There was a lot of whispering and stern faces, and then one day we stopped going to church. She reverted to her agnosticism, and I became more and more convinced of atheism. When I went to middle school, even though it was CofE like my primary school, it was a lot more religious. The assumption was that we all believed the Bible was the Word of God, and we were all Christians. I found this quite annoying and began making up my own words to the hymns we had to sing every day in assembly. No one noticed, as there were over three hundred of us, but I changed the word God to Bod – Bod was a cartoon character at the time – and blasphemed my way through every verse.