Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
This Friday, September 13th, we are pleased to welcome Wisdom Council member, clinical trauma specialist and expressive arts therapist Dr. Jamie Marich to lead us in a mini-retreat on Writing Your Spiritual Memoir. In this mini-retreat experience, Jamie will use several expressive arts facilitation strategies to help us start or continue the process of writing our own spiritual memoir.
Fresh off the experience of writing her own memoir You Lied to Me About God about her experience of growing up in a mixed Catholic-Protestant home and experiencing spiritual abuse in other settings, Jamie has a great deal to share with you about the power of expressive arts process in embracing your spiritual story.
Read an excerpt from Jamie Marich’s memoir You Lied to Me About God:
My Story Is a Cautionary Tale
Whenever a writer decides to unearth another layer of truth about her own life, the experience can be cathartic and therapeutic. Catharsis is part of my intention in bringing this full narrative to life. I also feel that by telling the truth of my experiences unapologetically, I may also help shed some light on the impact of conservative, dogmatic religions on the human experience and in society. While my perspective is lim- ited because it is, admittedly, Christian, I believe that there are some common threads in all spiritual abuse stories. I hope that people from other global faith traditions or spiritual paths can resonate with the themes in my own story and teaching. Because the battles I experienced were within Christianity, I see tremendous value in what I have to share for modern America. At times in my childhood I even shrugged my shoulders in desperation, saying to myself, “We all believe that Jesus is the Son of God, can’t we keep it that simple and get along?”
At some point in my late teens, I remember my mother and father fighting over something to do with my spiritual formation. Both of them would regularly say things like, “I’m going to lose you yet,” making me feel like the pawn in their holy war once again. Although I can’t pinpoint the exact fight, because there were many, after one of them I plopped down on my bed and the mauve-patterned wallpaper in my room seemed to keep spinning around me. I was exhausted. And I said to myself, “I don’t know if spiritual abuse is a real thing but if it isn’t, I’m going to write it up some day. Because that has to be what this is.”
During my graduate training in clinical counseling I sensed back to that moment. In having an open invitation to write a paper on anything in my class on human development, I went to the library at Franciscan University of Steubenville and looked up spiritual abuse on the library search engine. Sure enough, it was a real thing, and others had written about it. The very first book I picked up on the topic was Jeff VanVon- deren and David Johnson’s The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, originally written in 1991 by these two former pastors. To know that spiritual abuse was an already established construct validated me. There was not a great deal of material written about that exact phrase at the time, except for a burgeoning scholarship on cult studies, which also resonated with me. In those early moments of discovering that this kind of abuse I experienced was real, it became a mission for me to acknowledge people like me who were living in what could subjectively be defined as more mainstream experiences. And experiencing it all on earth in the name of religion, God, or anything spiritual.
I write this book not as a theologian. My training is clinical and psychological in nature, and I’m sure that when this book reaches the world, theologians from a variety of perspectives will pick apart my arguments. I don’t see them as arguments; they are simply the notes of our experiences that we’ve been yearning to sing out. As writer and preacher Emily Joy Allison taught me in one of our online collaborations around her work in founding the #ChurchToo movement, everyone is a theologian. If we are a person or people of faith with lived human experience, then we have something to share. We are all reverently and wonderfully made, and the voice or voices we add to the chorus matters.
And I invite you all into my solo recital. It’s been a long time coming.
In every chapter of this book, I include an invitation for reflection that you may find useful in helping you engage in your own work related to spirituality. For me, memoir is working at its best when it inspires readers to tap into their own stories and unearth something in themselves that may need to be more fully explored. Your story never has to be shared publicly—crafting it can be something that you do for yourself and your healing only.
(You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir by Jamie Marich, PhD, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of publisher.)
Join Jamie on Friday for a mini-retreat on writing your spiritual memoir. Read their poem The Great Lie in Jamie’s Monk in the World guest post.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
P.S. We are pleased to offer a reflection guide for my forthcoming book A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness which will be released this Friday! Download the guide here.
