People in Glass Houses Read online

  I knew that once my virginity was gone, I was useless in my old community. Used goods. All Christian boys deserve a virgin on their wedding day. It is an essential dowry. I knew I was disqualifying myself from the competition back at Hills. Anything other than virgin is slut. And as for the idea that you chose sex willingly? Even worse. That’s about as attractive as twice-divorced with six kids. We knew there were girls who had been seduced by boys and lived a lifetime of regret. Even if they did eventually find someone understanding, it was never ‘the same’. Most of these girls wondered what they had been thinking.

  I knew exactly what I was thinking.

  I announced there was going to be sex. Roger agreed. And while I had no idea what this process would involve or what all the talk was about, I knew it had to be taken care of. Fence-sitting gets very painful. If I was going to hell, I was going to have a good time. Or at least find out what a good time was. The pleasure of sin lasts for a season, so let’s see how long that season lasts. I have a knack for stretching things out beyond anything reasonable.

  I no longer had any proof of either of the worlds I now knew. Roger never pressured me at all for sex, but he did pressure me to use logic and common sense over emotion. He did not hesitate to explain that the Old Testament was a storybook, and that the New Testament was a method of social control. I found his lack of fear amazing. Having lived a life based on detailed and programmed fears, I couldn’t relate to his disregard for the Almighty. I knew he had never known God, but he also held no interest in meeting him, despite my protests. He wasn’t disturbed by it. He had little time for it. I was fascinated and worried. He made a lot of sense, but the god of this age had blinded his mind. Listening to him was akin to walking in the counsel of the wicked. Come out from every unclean thing!

  The disposal of my hymen coincided with the disposal of my commitment to the cause. It was something I refused to repent for. I told God that I was sorry I couldn’t repent but that I would rather be truthful than break promises. In any case, he would have known I was lying if I had promised to change, so there seemed no way around it.

  During so much of my time at Hills I was a doubter. When I was at church, it was mainly okay. But when I wasn’t there, my mind was at war. I had been sincere. Deeply disturbed, but sincere.

  After the door to sex opened, I was a hypocrite. There was now tangible sin in my life to address. Finally. I had something to make me understand why I was being punished. I had done a lot of time—at least now I had a crime to go with it.

  In church I watched my friend’s ex-boyfriend tilt back and raise his hands to God like he was an Old Testament prophet, straining with his eyes shut to see his Creator. Nobody imagined that he was the reason my friend was so distressed and her body so wrecked from countless morning-after pills. He hadn’t missed a beat. He looked just as holy.

  I couldn’t be like him. I couldn’t purposely go out and do something and then play that role. It would be ridiculous. I’d rather be held up in the main marketplace as the lowest of sinners than pretend to be something I’m not.

  I had enrolled in Biblical Studies at uni. There, I heard lecturers talk of the bible as a book; not the divine word of God, just a text like any other. The blatant inconsistencies were acknowledged. No one was taking it in any way seriously. Telling people Jesus was alive was like reporting your recent Elvis sighting. It was the sort of thing best kept to oneself.

  For me, it was getting all too much again. I never turned my back on God and went running into the warm embrace of Satan. I didn’t renounce. I simply stepped aside. If God was real, he would reclaim me. I had fought long enough to remind him I was there. If he wasn’t real then, essentially, nothing would change. In any case, I hadn’t heard from him in so long, I’d stopped making a place for him at the table. I wished he’d had the guts to fire me, but he refused to take my calls. I never quit being a Christian. I just stopped showing up to work.

  NINA

  The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

  —Pat Robertson, quoted in ‘Equal rights initiative in Iowa

  attacked’, Washington Post, 23 August 1992

  She sat in that massive lecture hall with an orange and blue and white scarf around her dark brown bob. She was eating an apple with the ferocity of Eve and reading Sense and Sensibility the same way. I was stunned. Neither Austen nor winter fruit has that effect on me. The room was crowded, first year Literature. I had had more than enough English by that stage but didn’t know what other subject to take. Neither it appeared did the other 1500 Arts students wandering around Sydney Uni in 1990. Nor did any of us appear to care. Hundreds of barely adult nomads crammed in, latecomers sitting in the aisles, wondering where and who they were.

  She left Sense and Sensibility behind. I was unable to relate to the specifics of her passion, Pride and Prejudice having been compulsory study the year before. To each her own. I picked the book up and carried it around until I next spotted this needle in the haystack of first years.

  Two weeks later, there she was. Picking up things and carrying them around until they become spontaneously useful is a skill I developed playing computer games. This was no exception. Nina was very grateful to have her book back.

  My newly birthed interest in feminism bonded us immediately. After high school, Nina had chosen to do an English language degree merely for the love of it. She was accompanied by her partner in life, Alex, who, while not quite as brilliant as Nina, was equally passionate about English literature.

  But these were tough times for Nina and Alex. He had developed a penchant for a stranger and dramatically left his childhood sweetheart. We would approach those English lectures strategically, so that she could spy on him incognito.

  Nina took me to her shared terrace house in Glebe where she lived happily and independently away from home. Her mother had died when she was a baby, and she had been raised by her wonderful father and stepmother. She was always gracious, modest to the point of secrecy, kind, generous and open. She was a vegetarian, and gave me couscous and tofu. She waitressed to help pay the rent and she studied harder than I’ve ever seen anyone study. And she was breathtakingly brilliant. The kind of mind you can’t ever hope to have, but you can hope to be around.

  She showed me feminism. She was passionate and determined. She said words like rape and period and hymen as though they were words that we were allowed to say, just like any others. Her feminism was extreme, when I look back on it, and for that I am eternally grateful. This little fundamentalist was hardly going to be attracted to a merely middle of the road version of events. I liked the things she said. The feminism that I developed for myself was never about men at all. It was about the quality of life for women. It was about justice, choice, acceptance and merit. The school of thought I had come from was about rivalry, marriage-ability and willingness to work to the male vision. We talked and we talked and we talked. And I grew sharply in my understanding. It was Nina who explained sociology to me; I couldn’t understand what the lecturers were saying.

  I had come from a thinking of black and white. It took years to train my mind to allow for the flexibility that most concepts, when examined with any sophistication, require, and to think three-dimensionally outside of the unerring Word of God, which commanded two-dimensional obedience. I have seen fundamentalist kids go on to real world universities and colleges and learn in precisely the same style that they were taught in church. Good and evil, right and wrong, black and white. It doesn’t allow for much original thought. Maybe it sounds like a great idea to be the best doctor for Jesus, but it means you end up practising only one kind of medicine.

  Nina was spiritual, much more spiritual than I felt, and seemingly much more rewarded. She never really defined herself, but she meditated and performed benign rituals of freezing notes,
or burning candles and writing poetry. She dreamed dreams and saw visions. And she practised the rituals and beliefs of the native Americans. She read animal cards. When a spider came to live in her shower for three days she left it there, careful not to disturb the energy of creativity that spiders are said to bring.

  I was stunned. I had never experienced anything like this before. She wasn’t simply dabbling in the occult as a naïve teenager; she was begging for demons. She was not only refusing her salvation, she was blatantly pursuing pagan rites. And here was the hard part: she was repeatedly successful. Why, I could never understand. Why would God bless her like this, on her way to hell, worshipping idols? I knew the gifts of God were without repentance, and that the pleasure of her sin would last only for a season and that season may even be her whole life but still, I couldn’t work it out. Was I to wait for her fall?

  The worst part was that despite her denial of the Lord Jesus she was so much happier than I was. Even though she faced each day without God’s hand on her life, she was carrying on unconcerned. Her life seemed so normal for her, so real, that I could not imagine her undertaking the confession, repentance and discipleship that were necessary for happiness.

  Nina had hard times, too. She grieved the loss of her boyfriend, argued with her parents, and had to move house when the lease expired. But instead of being led by the Holy Spirit to the house where she felt God wanted her to be in his perfect will, she arranged the whole thing under the guidance of her dead mother. She made a list of her requirements and conjured up Natalie, who wasted little time in directing her straight to the house she had asked for. Including a bath with legs. To my incredulous brain, it seemed awfully similar to a technique I had watched all my life. I found it impossible to argue against her success. If we shall know them by their fruits, what the hell do we make of the heathen with orchards full?

  For the first time in my life, I was forced to accept that someone was happy without Jesus. Even if the devil was appearing to Nina as an angel of light, deceiving her with false spirits, it sure looked like a much easier cross to bear. I knew of course that this was how Satan makes sin appear. He makes it look so appealing, normal even, and that’s the trick behind it. He’s clever, that Satan. He knows your weak points. That’s why he puts certain people in your path, to lead you astray, to steal your truth, rob you of your salvation and destroy your life. But Nina taught me more in a month than five years of night church had, and there was no choice. I could no longer take seriously my private insistence that she was miserable in some subconscious and perversely secret way, and that any day now they’d find nothing but a pile of salt. Worse still, my faith was beginning to bore me senseless, like an invalid relative that I no longer wished to visit. Hers was dynamic, personal, individual and, even more shocking, self-defined. She saved so much time by being indifferent to the amazing grace that wretches like me depended on.

  It was in her authenticity, her struggles, her determination and her passion that I learned inspiration. I had never known any other way to be inspired than by leaders and ideas we’d been told to be inspired by. But this came out of nowhere and, like all those other greedy curiosities, snowballed. Imagine if one day I could be like Nina, think freely without guilt, and be brave enough to risk the wrath of God by doing what seemed right to me regardless of what the bible said. And feel good about it.

  But I knew that was the sound of the devil following me to uni. I knew I had let him in, and that I had to pay for it. After I dropped out in first year to get married, Nina carried on to do an honours and then a PhD thesis and is now a professor at a major university.

  Chapter 8

  IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CIT Y

  If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgement and of raging fi re that will consume the enemies of God.

  Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.

  How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?

  For we know him who said, ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay’ and again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

  —Hebrews 10:26–31

  By the time I had unpacked, the marriage was over. These were the days before prosperity theology. In 1991, a girl had only one meaningful dowry in the Christian Life Centres, and I had left mine somewhere in Sydney’s southwest. Who the fifty shekels were supposed to go to I’m not sure, but I had little choice except to follow him who had purchased me. I was long since tainted goods.

  So I left my family, who felt I had left them anyway the day I boarded the train to Surfers Paradise. I formally quit my Arts degree after a year and a half at Sydney University, which only brought my attendance down by one day a month but was a lot cheaper. I left my part-time job showering old people in nursing homes, which had been the most practical experience I’d ever had in the real world. I left my cat and my room and all my friends and married Roger, my first boyfriend, who had just joined the army and was about to be posted. The registry office at Births, Deaths and Marriages was half empty on a Monday afternoon. My mother wore black. My father chuckled uncomfortably the way one does at vaudeville and checked his watch. In 1991, I was a June bride.

  My career as a military wife was short-lived, and for that I think there may be a god. Adelaide is a beautiful city, but two nineteen-year-olds woke up there one morning and realised they were married to each other, and that one of them was in the army. Five months after the $200 wedding (including petrol, flowers and beers following), I only had one institution to disentangle myself from.

  I tried to be brave for the budgie, Rosalita, as my dad drove the two of us home from the airport that post-marriage Saturday afternoon, telling me it was a good time to move on. He didn’t understand I was history—or was I? At twenty I had done everything a Christian girl was apparently capable of doing. I’d been married. Now what? It was pure excitement stomped on by the knowledge of my own futility. There is a path that seems right to men, but in the end it leads to death.

  The next afternoon, I found Jewels at the house where she was living. She was nannying for a pastor and his family and, while we were kicking around, the doorbell rang. In came Brian and Bobbie, who lived around the corner.

  ‘Hello,’ they greeted me. ‘Where have you been?’

  Having not felt particularly missed since I’d left, I knew then that caring was not their forte. Still, in 1991, they were my family’s clergy. I decided to roll the pastoral dice for them one more time. ‘Well,’ I looked at them both, wishing I didn’t have to explain, ‘I got married to my boyfriend, who I loved very much, because he joined the army and we got posted to Adelaide and then we had a big fight and he told me he didn’t love me, and then we broke up and now I’m back in Sydney with nothing.’

  They looked at me like deer in the headlights, said ‘oh’, and meandered into the other room. Nothing. Not a ‘Sorry for your loss’ or ‘That’s too bad, we’ll set you up with someone from bible college’. Nothing. And thus, no longer the property of my father or my husband or of any use to the church, I was sort of free again.

  Having sold my soul for freedom, and having waited so long for the opportunity, I was determined to get every penny’s worth. My choices had stunned me more than they had the people around me. I knew that I would have bet my life not long before that none of these things would ever, could ever happen. I would not have let them. And yet, here I was on the broad path, trudging with all the others, on the road to Destruction.

  My twenties, or the 1990s as they are more commonly known, were more like Alice’s trip to Wonderland. Having leapt through the looking glass, I found myself drinking tea with some ver
y queer folk.

  The research shows that I was a textbook case for the children who emerge from highly restrictive thought-control groups and cults. All I knew was that even though I could no longer claim born-again freak status, I was still a freak. I didn’t know any of the rules of the new game. And this time, I had no excuse for not fitting in with the heathen. I was now one of them, but they still didn’t know what to make of me. And I was clueless.

  So I emerged into the outside world like a wombat into a nightclub, socially autistic and loving every minute of it. Having secured a full-time job washing old people again, I moved out to a terrace in Paddington and it was downhill from thereon.

  In the early days, I was still heavily time-disoriented. I had grown up knowing that the Rapture could come at any minute.

  Since there were 2000 years from Adam to Moses, and 2000 years from Moses to Jesus, we knew there would be 2000 years until the Rapture when, after a trumpet call from the skies, all Christians get caught up in a cloud in the twinkling of an eye. Two men will be working in the field and one will disappear. Which is why evangelical Christians should not be given driver’s licences.

  My ten-day post-HSC holiday extended on for ten years, but I deeply, deeply believed that God was going to get me one day. The Christians kept telling me and I knew it was true. What he was going to do with me, I had no idea. But I could always hear the clock ticking. I was terrified and I stayed terrified.

  When you are working in the end-times framework, planning is difficult. It feels like you have a terminal illness for Jesus. I had never expected to see the end of school, or to be around long enough to get married and have children. Why were we spending our days studying, working, if Jesus was due any minute? It seemed for most of my life like nothing mattered and everything mattered at the same time.