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HEAVEN'S HARLOTS: MY FIFTEEN YEARS AS A SACRED PROSTITUTE IN THE CHILDREN OF GOD CULT |
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13. The Swan Symbol of Paramatman (Supreme Self): The Family The following statistics were taken from a 1987 Children of God publication:
Total membership: 12,162 According to a COG publication from April 1990 (Stats Analysis):
Total membership: 18,000 In May 1996 the Family distributed a publication in which they claimed that there was nothing wrong with "flirty fishing" since the motivation was not money or power; however, the practice was discontinued in 1987 in order to "emphasize other means of ministering the Word of God to others" ("Women in the Family" :10). Those who left the Family after 1987 claim that although its use was greatly reduced, it was not completely eliminated. The Family does not deny that sexual sharing is still allowed among consenting adults. "A married member is free, after receiving the agreement of their spouse, to have sex with another partner" ("Women in the Family" :18). However, certain boundaries have been established:
No
sexual contact between adults and minors Moses David reportedly died in 1994. Maria and a group of elders were given his position of absolute authority. Meanwhile, Maria suffers from an eye illness, which causes her great pain if she opens her eyes in the light. Therefore, she sees only in the dark, but she continues to write letters to the worldwide Family. Due to reorganization of the group, membership rules and regulations were tightened, and in a publication of 1996, the group, now called simply the Family, claimed it had 3,000 full-time adult volunteer members, 6,000 children, and 20,000 associates working in over sixty countries. This implies that there were close to 30,000 people associated with the Children of God in some way at that time. I found an article on the Family's website that stated, "Our present fellowship does not go by the Children of God name because that organization was literally dissolved ... the Children of God movement represented a substantially different organization with a very different leadership" (1/9/98). There are various websites that mention the Family. One of them, at www.religioustolerance.org, writes, "In 1987, incest and sexual abuse of children was specifically banned," and "current membership estimates from non-COG sources vary from 9,000 to 12,000" (1/9/98). This same site also states, "It is our assessment that accusations of criminal activities by the Family are unfounded .... No evidence of sexual abuse of children was ever found ... former members frequently refer to a book, The Story of Davidito, which was written by David, son of David Berg's wife, Maria. Although the book does discuss his witnessing of sexual behavior within the group, and their encouragement of him to explore his own sexuality, there is nothing in the book related to adult molestation or abuse of children" (1/9/98). I have access to the "Davidito" book, and have seen pictures of an adult child-care worker caressing Davidito's private area when he was a child, and of Davidito, as a young boy, sucking on the breast of an adult woman. Perhaps this is not regarded as child molestation by the writers of the above-cited "objective" website on religious cults. As a social science student, I also try to be as objective as possible. The following stories from young people are not an assessment but descriptions. I cannot vouch for anything that happened in the Family after I left in 1988. Nor can I know what happened in homes other than where I lived. However, I have heard hundreds of stories from adults and children who have left in the past ten years. Many talk of serious physical and sexual abuse. The evolutionary process of perversion in the Family is clearly established as people who won't put up with sexual aberrations leave, and therefore only those who do remain. Many left with the first wave of sharing and "flirty fishing"; others, like myself, finally left when sexual abuse of children became an undeniable reality. I believe these reports are true since it would seem that those who remain have either denied the abuse consciously or unconsciously, or believe it is acceptable. As I hear the stories of children and parents separated indefinitely, corporal punishment in public of teenagers and adults, mind manipulation, sleep and food deprivation, and more, I wonder how a person can ever hope to live a sane life again. Then I remember -- this is also my story and my hope! Here, at the end of my story, I want to tell you what happened to the various players in this story, some who woke up to life and some who didn't. After the Family Esther, the unknowingly wicked Queen in this tale, was reportedly excommunicated by Moses David, her father, in the late 1970s. According to her own account, she was ultimately expelled from the Family because she did not want to give in to his incestuous desires toward her. All of her children and the man considered her mate at the time left with her. She wrote a book about her experiences as Mo's daughter, The Children of God: The Inside Story (1984), which was published by a Christian publishing house. I read her book and realized that she too had been victimized, but I am disappointed that Esther did not acknowledge the extent of her own role as victimizer and abuser of the immense power entrusted to her as our "Queen." Perhaps she had not yet found answers to her most tormenting questions at the time she wrote the book. Today she is associated with a strict fundamentalist group in California. Rahab, who had married Esther's brother, the one who "fell" off a mountain in Switzerland, left the Family and became a nurse. However, her oldest daughter, Hannah, who is Mo's granddaughter and Esther's niece, remained in the Family until a few years ago. This young woman, who was left without parents and raised in Mo's house, wrote about her ordeals in an ex-cult newsletter, No Longer Children (November 1992). Her sad testimony reveals that she endured dozens of intrusive sexual encounters with her grandfather, the first before she was twelve years old. She wrote that she was beaten with a rod, spanked in public at fourteen years of age, tied to her bed at night, and accused by Mo of being possessed by Satan himself. Hannah eventually wound up in a mental institution in Macao and was sent to California to live with her grandmother (Mother Eve), who no longer lived in the Family. Today she lives with her aunt Esther, for reasons I cannot fully explain, instead of with her birth mother, Rahab, who finally found her lost daughter. Jacob, Esther's first husband, a top leader of the group, and the one who "helped" me by committing adultery with me, left the group with his second wife, the wealthy former socialite, Pearl. They are now divorced, and Jacob runs a prosperous business in America. Coincidentally, many of his early employees were teenagers who had recently left the Family. When Jacob attended the 1994 reunion for ex-COG members, I heard from others present that he had apologized for his shortcomings as a leader in the Family. I was not in the room when this was said to have happened; however, I talked with him for a short period in private, and he never said he was sorry for what he did to me. I did not mention it to him. Ruth, the young southern belle whom I first met in Ellenville and who worked with me in Paris, had also been separated by Jacob from her first husband, the father of Thor's childhood friend Chiara. Jacob had attempted to include her in his growing harem in Italy, but instead she was sent to Paris to be part of the Show Group, and was one of our first women given in marriage to a "king," in this case to our music producer. She eventually left the Family due to what she calls a moral decision -- the Family no longer needed her husband, but they expected her to leave him and return to become one of the flirty recruiters. She broke contact with the group and stayed with the French producer, who was now the father of two of her children. After what she calls "one of the longest-lasting 'flirty-fishing' experiences in the Family (eighteen years)," she, too, following years of emotional, psychological, and even physical abuse while trying to be a "good Christian wife," decided to leave her husband. With three children she made her way back to her hometown in America, arriving from France about a year after I did. Ruth has recently returned to college, pursuing degrees in foreign languages and psychology, and she is very interested in trying to understand the disparate reactions of ex-members upon leaving the Family. From her own experience, she has become aware that there are many women like herself who leave the Family and fall into similarly controlling and abusive situations, which tend to perpetuate the experiences that they had while in the cult. Ruth, like myself, is seeking a way to use her own cult experience and subsequent journey to self-awareness as a source of help to the many who leave and who find themselves totally lost in a world they have not been prepared to live in, especially those who were born and raised in the group. Jon, my former dance partner who traveled with me to Nice and Rome, left the group and started a new life with his family in California. He returned unabashedly to a gay lifestyle, but he kept up a warm and loving relationship with his wife and children. They eventually divorced amicably. When he read an article I wrote for a reunion newsletter, he called me and said he was hurt that I did not say hello to him in my regards to various former members. James, the most lenient leader I ever met in the Family, and whose home I stayed at while in Paris, left COG and returned to his hometown in Canada. His wife remained in the cult, but he took his two oldest children with him and raised them for many years as a single father. Today he owns his own music video production company, and he sends me original compilations of music tapes for inspiration. James understood that I am soothed and nourished by music, and thanks to his concern, I now listen to more than Bob Dylan. Abraham, the unfortunate former husband of Breeze (who as far as I know is still in the Family), left with a Frenchwoman he recruited into the group. They had two children and lived in Texas until she divorced him and married a wealthy Texan. Abe became a "Dead Head" and followed the Grateful Dead around America while selling tie-dyed T-shirts. He visited my home when the Dead played where I lived in 1992. Gabriel, the multitalented musician who was recruited back into the Family in Puerto Rico, stayed with the cult until 1992. His wife was mated to another brother and lived in a separate home so that Gabriel could be free to use his business and technical talents for the group around the world. Living with top leaders, Gabriel became one of the first victims of the "victor camps," which were set up in the early 1990s to break anyone who still had a strong-willed spirit. After what he described as "incredibly harsh methods of mental, psychological, emotional, and even physical abuse," the leaders in Japan finally gave him a ticket to return to his parents, since they suspected he was about to become a serious mental problem. After months of therapy, Gabriel spent a few years attacking the Family publicly in television interviews in the United States and in countries where he had lived, but his emotional state and mental condition by this time were so strained that he gave up his fight. After he admitted on national television to engaging in pedophilia, in the hopes that his confession would convince the authorities that the Family should be investigated, his plan backfired and he was depicted as a pervert by the cool, calm, and well-trained Family public relations men. Gabriel spent the rest of his life on prescription drugs and committed suicide in June of 1996. Rose and Bishop, the two former members who started the tradition of yearly reunions, left before the height of sexual activity in the Family. Rose, who had joined in 1969, lived in the same commune (or compound) as Mo during her first years in the group, and was married by him to a man she did not want to marry. Eventually, she left with a husband she chose, but she felt a sense of failure, rejection, and isolation upon leaving the group that had defined her identity. "Nine years of an intense lifestyle and indoctrination can be hard to put behind you," she contends. She feels that encouragement and support are important for people when they leave a cult, proposing that "sometimes the best person to talk to is someone who has experienced the same things that you have." She and her husband have now become the connecting source between former members of the Family, borderline members who are contemplating leaving but are not sure what they will do, and those who are still in the Family and whose children are trying to contact them. They would like to see a retreat where families with many children, single parents, and young, inexperienced teens who leave the Family could rest and acquire the resources to tackle the work of living in the real world. The need for such a place became one of their main concerns after hearing the stories of those who left the group in recent years, especially the teens. Jesse's mother brought him into the group when he was six years old. She quickly rose to leadership position, and Jesse lived ten years with what he claims were experiences of sexual and emotional abuse that taught him little about right and wrong. When he left the Family at the age of sixteen, he found it too hard to adjust to society and ended up spending years in prison. Jesse told me that while he was in jail, he was so lonely he wrote to the Family and asked someone to please write him. He received dozens of letters, and after prison, he began visiting their homes again. His mother and sister are still in the cult. A Family publication numbered GN 480 DO, from October 1991, published a letter from a teen in their group named Tony, also called Zack Attack. He complained about having a problem with being under constant supervision and restricted from being able to ride "a skateboard or a horse or go ice-skating or roller-skating or even climb a tree." In response, he received "Dad's Blast after hearing about Zack Attack," which stated, "Give him the ultimatum! Tell him, 'Tonight at our next meeting, you're going to get up and weep and pray and cry for mercy and grovel on the floor and confess that you're all wrong in front of all the teenagers and everybody, and beg for mercy." ("Grumblers Get Out!" 2716). This was the type of environment that many members were subjected to at what became known as the victor camps. Adults found it hard to leave because of their connections to their children and spouses in the Family, but teens, who had been raised in the group, had nowhere else to go. Even so, some left and tried to locate distant relatives or to make it on their own. Teddy, Andrew, and their first sister, Shirley, the three oldest children of Jeremy Spencer, whom I took care of when they were young, left the Family on their own. I read about Andrew, who did not use his father's famous name, in an article from a London paper, and it appeared that he was interested in going to college. However, according to testimony from former COG members, one of Jeremy's daughters who left the Family now works as a stripper. A case in point is that of River Phoenix, the young actor who died of a drug overdose in 1993. His parents joined the Children of God when River was only a young boy -- according to some sources, age two -- and they became Family missionaries in Venezuela. Like many COG children, River sang on the streets to help support his family until they left the group and returned to America in 1977. His childhood experiences in the Family certainly must have contributed to what became a troubled adulthood (one author described him as a "disillusioned innocent") and ended in a drug-induced death at the age of twenty-three. Hopie, Mo's second daughter, wrote in a Family-published article on "reaction to childhood sex" (1988) that "daddy made me feel good all over ... I don't think it perverted me ... but it sure converted me to His call." She came to America for health reasons after her father's death, but it was rumored that she was having conflict with the leadership, especially Maria, who had taken Mo's place. In America, Hopie started living with a former male member of the cult, and they have been together for a while, purportedly out of the Family. I learned through reunion sources that before coming to America, Hopie had been sent to Siberia by the Family, and while there she established a food supply chain across the Russian wilderness to feed the forgotten starving Siberians. This involved negotiations with Russian officials as well as the Russian mafia, according to her own testimony. In 1996 she called me and asked if I would like to help her in Washington, D.C., with her fundraising effort for the Russians in Siberia. I declined, but I wished her luck, and I heard she is doing well. Cal/Jerry, Thor's father and my first husband, had three daughters and one more son with his second wife (exactly as I had, and pretty much around the same years). Thor is therefore the older brother to six girls and two boys. Cal eventually divorced his wife, and the children live with him in Colorado. We call each other occasionally and are on good terms. While writing this book, I asked him if he would like to relate some of his own story. The following is what Cal wrote to me from his own memory, but his perceptions of the Family, why he joined and why he stayed, were the same as mine: For me, the intentions and motives I had weren't wrong, and I believe there were many others who were sincere, who held the beauty and light of their personal vision, and stayed hoping to change what the reality was becoming. Many times I thought, I questioned, and doubted things, but we had been conditioned to resist such thoughts, so our behavior became more radical and consequently more fanatical in some. Maybe we were just plain old afraid to "go back out into the world." Whatever the reason we stayed and obeyed will always be a bit of a mystery. Why people like us join something like this I think is clear -- it's the historical climate of the times. We were idealists: "some of them were dreamers/some of them were fools they were making plans and dreaming of the future/On the brave and crazy wings of youth/we went flying around in the rain/till our feathers once so fine grew torn and tattered" ("Before the Deluge" by Jackson Brown). When the whole FFing era started I was pretty anxious. We had been prepared for the ultimate sacrificing of our mates to the crucifix of the bed of love. For months the letters just became more and more specific. I didn't really have a say the first time. It hurt bad. I felt we had lost something in our union. Our union wasn't so good at that time because for months the anxiety just built on me seeing clearly where all these new letters were leading. As the months passed I behaved more and more erratic -- possessive, fear of losing my most precious loved one. Anyway, I got used to it and persuaded myself that this was the ultimate sacrifice. Then in time we were more manipulative and motives and intentions became less honorable. Within the group the fatherless population grew, bad treatment -- bad karma -- bad press. How did I feel about being a pimp for God? At first I had been sincerely persuaded of the power of love -- and the attraction of a pretty woman to win souls. There was always a tinge of jealousy and hurt. Always I participated vicariously, imagining I was the stranger experiencing for the first time the fruits of my wife's love. It made her more attractive and desirable and therefore I couldn't wait until she came home to me. My own emotions, however, made me blind and insensitive to her needs and lack of desire toward me -- due to fatigue and probably disgust at times because her experience had been distasteful. To my heart and mind at these times, I hurt because I thought it was me. "I let you sleep with strangers and you reject me?" It was a problem and created a communication breakdown dividing us. I believe we were deceived innocents. I hope you don't carry any guilt feelings from the past. I am sure that all of us who have gone through these things and survived are better people for the experience. What made me finally leave? It was seeing what happened to poor Sharon. when I heard about her video, something snapped inside me. Of course I had been thinking of leaving for years by then, but knowing what happened to Sharon, I snapped. While I was writing this book, Mara, the third in our threesome marriage and Cal's second wife, called me. She appears to have gone through her own long journey to self-awareness, and she answered my questions with realistic honesty. I asked Mara to write me more on why she joined the cult and why she stayed during FFing. The following is taken from a letter she wrote me. I joined this group while deeply into a spiritual search, and what I now know to have mainly been a search for myself, my true values. In the world I saw corruption, where power and money seemed the name of the game, and where I thought there was no room for me. Why did I accept FFing, in spite of my original disgust at the practice? Certainly because it was challenging and revolutionary, and that word always struck a chord in me. Going beyond morals, transcending the taboo of sexuality in Christianity seemed very appealing. Now that was the intellectual approach, and I must say that my body could never quite follow. I wasn't free sexually and it made it hard to win people to Jesus that way. Of course, money also being involved made it quite degrading at times. Looking at it now, I can clearly see my immaturity and lack of confidence, and that I covered up with a display of culture and savoir vivre. I was very proud, often felt smarter than others, but at the same time very inadequate. More than the beliefs, it's the human warmth that attracted me in the group, so when I left it wasn't hard for me to cut emotional ties, and go back to my first spiritual interests in Hinduism and Buddhism. Today I feel so different than during that time of my life, that I feel that I am writing about someone else. I can only assume that the serenity and balance I found today are a fruit of all the questions and deep searching that followed that period. It led me to psychotherapy and now meditation. Mara, now forty years old and divorced from Cal, lives near her children in Colorado. My Family My older brother, Steve, has spent most of his life in prison. He currently is finishing a twenty-year sentence for unarmed bank robbery (he reportedly smashed his arm through the teller window and demanded money). No one was hurt but himself, when he cut his arm on the glass; however, since he had already had more than three strikes on his record, he is in the same ward with murderers and rapists. I asked him recently if he ever hurt a person in any of his robberies. After a few minutes of contemplation, he told me that the only person he ever hurt was me. "I punched you in the stomach once when we were kids. I think we were wrestling and you kicked me, and it hurt so badly that I punched you. You started crying and I have felt sorry about doing that all my life," he explained. Although all my sisters believe in the Christian perspective of God, none have become very "religious." Perhaps my sister who died in a car accident at the age of twenty would have been. My other sisters all live in Florida, have steady jobs, own their own homes, and seem to be happily married. They are typical Americans and lead typical American lives; however, I will leave it up to the reader to define "typical." They do not talk to me often about my time in the Family, and they encourage me to stop talking about it also, so I hope they don't read this book. Only my sister Ruby, who was in the Family for a short time in Paris and knows how manipulated I had been, understands why I would not want to stay with the father of my children. Ruby told me years later that when I first joined the Family she was only nine years old, and she had always looked up to me as the big sister. She hated the COG for taking me away and saw that it hurt my mother a lot, so she swore she would get back at the Family for doing this. As she grew up, she watched TV shows about cults and believed that the people in cults were brainwashed; however, when she visited me in Paris, she thought that the Family was just like a group of peace-loving hippies. It was fun in Paris, especially since her sister was in the Show Group and danced onstage. Ruby enjoyed singing on the streets and living with other young people. When she heard about FFing she thought, "I will never do that." She thought the idea of showing one man God's love was nice, but she would never do that with lots of men. "I liked their beliefs in the Bible, and their witnessing methods -- distributing literature on the streets and singing at cafes. I felt more like an observer and was just having a good time in Paris. But nobody was going to convince me to FF. I was real careful not to get brainwashed." My mother continues to live with me as an ever-present grandmother to my children. She visits her other daughters in Florida a few times a year, and talks with her son on the phone every week that he is not in the "hole." She continues to pray every morning, goes to church weekly, and spends many of her waking hours translating German sermons into English. Although she has come to a few ex-COG reunions, and has met many of my friends who were former members, we do not talk much about the time I spent in the cult. I divorced Paolo after three years of separation. He runs a profitable business and lives close to our home. He has a good relationship with the children and me, thanks in part to counseling he receives from a men's group and from his pastor. Paolo feels comfortable in a church environment, and I am happy for him. I am also delighted that he has done so well in his business, something that never happened while he was with me. I often wonder if it was my fault. Although I have written about my bad experiences with Paolo as my husband, now that I am no longer his wife, we both treat each other better. I don't blame Paolo for anything. In fact, I take the blame for using sex and marriage as a witnessing tool -- but in the end, it worked for him. I don't think that Paolo would be capable of living such a rewarding and constructive life as he now leads had he continued his use of tranquilizers, and stopping them was a prerequisite for marrying me. Eventually, I had to deal in my own conscience with the complex issue of annulment, which even the Catholic Church allows in exceptional cases. I believe my marriage was an exception. When I asked Paolo what he thought of our marriage in the Family, he said that he saw it in the context of the "one wife" view that the COG held. For that reason he never gave me a ring, and he called me a "mate" instead of "wife." However, he did not join to share with other women, and he did not particularly like that aspect of our beliefs. He accepted it perhaps because he too was a former hippie who was willing to tryout alternative lifestyles. Once out of the Family's doctrinal hold, we both discovered our true personalities. Paolo is basically a traditional man, with a conservative outlook, and capitalist proclivities, which have helped him to develop a successful business. I am a nontraditional woman, with a radically liberal outlook, nonmaterialistic values, and an eternally questioning mind that attracts me to scholastic pursuits. Even though we are worlds apart philosophically, I do respect his beliefs and his chosen way of life. My dear children are the only reason I could continue to live during my most despondent times and despairing moments. I hope when they read this book (which they are not to do until they are eighteen years old), they will understand that the woman I am writing about is not the mother they know: the mother who they complain is "too protective," "too old-fashioned," and "doesn't know anything." They don't know me as the Jeshanah in this book, although they are aware that they were born and lived in the Family. They have also gone to the reunions and have met the children of other ex-members. They have heard the stories, and they have probably heard my story from other people. I remember Thor's heartbreaking reaction to hearing about me from his father. Since I will probably never be able to sit down with each one and tell them my side of the story (they would never sit still that long), this book will eventually let them know why I was at one time a Heaven's Harlot. But most of all, they should know that it was worth it all in order that I might have had each one of them, and that it has only been through them that I know how to love. Thor, my firstborn, who explains life to me better than anyone, is now half a foot taller than I but still asks for hugs and kisses. I see him as a performer, scholar, philosopher, and mystic, but he would say that he's only living a life. Before Thor left to study in Germany for a year on an exchange program, I spent some time alone with him. Both vegetarians, we talk after a leftover meal of broccoli and pasta. The night falls, and we stay there talking about alienation and meaninglessness, about Jesus and other spiritual masters, about Eastern religions of the heart and Western philosophy of the mind. I tell Thor about the little old lady I see when I meditate who informs me that she is wisdom, and I ask him what it means to climb the spiritual Himalayas. As I listen to his answers, I know that he is going farther than I. On the morning of our last day together, I am worried about his future in Germany. Besides the fact that I will miss him again, it seems like an unnecessary difficulty for my son, now twenty-four and working on his doctorate in math, to be an exchange student in Berlin. He doesn't even speak German, and the scholarship he will receive is considerably less than he got in America. "It's the mountain, Mom," he told me, with a smile that remains in my mind forever. "The mountain was there on my path so I had to climb it." I knew exactly what he meant. I had been coming to a deep abyss, knowing that I must cross it. Although I have not been a perfect mother, I have been a flexible one, and I have imparted the concept of an expansive God to my children. This was so wonderfully illustrated to me when we were answering questions one night around the dinner table. Jordan, at twelve years old, wondered why the American Indians were close to nature, living in tents and eating the food from the earth; whereas the Europeans lived in houses and were advanced in technology. The answers offered by her two sisters were that Indians were closer to God, or that God wanted to see how different cultures would be. The next question came from Michelangelo. "What is the meaning of life?" asked my ten-year-old. I did not answer him -- he was so young -- but as I asked him to answer that himself, I remembered when my own search began.
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