Cults

 

I just watched a program about cults. How they work. Their methods, their allure and much of it felt eerily familiar to me.

Once, long ago, I belonged to a very respectable, mainstream church that was in transition. The priest had died and the congregation was looking for a replacement. It took a long time and there were several interim priests that came and went.

Slowly but surely I became part of a very intimate group of Sunday school teachers and fervent church members that ended up with us leaving this church and moving to a smaller one across town.

By this time we were all very closely involved. We were at church several days and nights a week. We had potlucks for all celebrations, church or not. We let our children spend hours together and encouraged them to be best friends. In fact, had something happened to us, we decided we wanted the lead couple to become the people who would raise our children instead of family members.

That couple came from the Catholic church, a former priest and nun who were now married with children. Natural leaders, they set the tone for much of what happened.

In the beginning they ran workshops where people paid a large amount of money to bring a dish to share for a communal group. There people split into pairs and one lay on the floor between large speakers blaring music around them. The other was a sitter who watched over the person on the floor. 

The person lying down began to breath in quick short breaths, really hyperventilating until they hallucinated. These experiences were taken as very serious ways of understanding our phobias, or problems. Eventually several people in the group, including me, began private counseling with this couple.

Slowly they also formed a so called Dream Group. At first it was lead by a Jungian psychologist retired from Switzerland. It evolved into a group that did not include her, but was lead by the former priest and nun at their home.

The group experimented with different modes of work. Sleeping together in a circle on the floor of a local church to see if they would share dreams, sweat lodges by a large creek, drumming circles where we descended in our minds deep into the earth, even classes involving painting. All of these supplemented by the counseling.

I thought of them as my real family, the people I trusted implicitly. At the time it did not feel incestuous or strange that counselors would be leaders and a part of this group, even claiming to be re-parenting some of them.

One day they suddenly decided that all the people they counseled would have to break off into a new dream group that did not include them. All the other events ended too.

They were the center of our lives. Surrogate parent type people who also benefited from us paying for their events and counseling. Suddenly they up and moved far away. He got a parish in the wilds of another state and we were bereft.

Not too long after that they severed ties with me on social media and even when they came to town for a funeral they did not seem to want to carry on our old closeness.

Now I wonder if I was part of a cult. It is an uncomfortable feeling.