Book Review: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

Hello Friends:

This book gets three out of five 'wings' from your Adventure Hostess.

Rating this was nearly impossible.  Three or four?  I went back and forth.  I ended up giving it a three.  I can see that someone else would like it quite a bit more, and give it a four or higher.  But ratings are subjective ... I just couldn't give it a four.  As you'll see below, in spite of plenty of good stuff the book had to offer, there were a few things that drove me nuts.

Before I get into the details of the review, I need to tell you why I read this book, and why it is relevant for this blog.  It goes back to the post OCD's and Scrupulosity: Obsessive Religion.  There I discussed some of my confusion and pain over trying to figure out what commands in the bible had to be followed to be saved, and which ones didn't.  That is part of the reason I gave up on the bible entirely.  There is always another person showing you how what you are doing is wrong, and how their version is right.  My OCDs make this situation intolerable for me.  I need an unequivocal answer.

For example, most Christian women in the US do not cover their heads in church.  And yet in 1st Corinthians it says, "But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head."  Even in the fundamentalist church I used to frequent, women did not cover their heads unless it was with a massive Sunday-best sort of hat.  So isn't that picking and choosing what commands to follow and which to ignore?  And yet the bible also says, "You shall not add to the word that I am commanding you, nor take away from it."  (Deuteronomy 4:2)

So I discussed this with my therapist.  And I'm making this sound like it was a nice, happy little conversation.  But this subject gets me really bent.  Very sad and very scared.  My therapist said, "Nobody follows the bible literally.  Nobody.  No matter how fundamentalist or orthodox, everyone chooses what commands they follow, and how they interpret them."  I wasn't sure I believed that, so he suggested I read this book and see if it offered a little perspective.

Right.  Onto the review.

The Year of Living Bibically by A.J. Jacobs was published in September of 2008.  The premise is that the author spends a little over a year of his life trying to follow the bible as literally as he possibly can.  In practice, he realizes immediately that such a task is impossible, but he tries hard to follow each rule at least once, no matter how strange or obscure.  It is largely a book of humor, and that's probably the section you'd find it in if looking in the bookstore.  But it has poignant aspects, as well as some not-too-shabby religious scholarship.

Some of What's in the Book

The book is written like a dairy, with short entries, each dated, and then compiled into chapters.  Every entry is accompanied by a relevant passage from the Bible.  The author does not have an entry for each and every day, but he does try to keep a chronological record of his attempts to live the bible literally.  Each entry highlights one command, experience, or lesson learned.  He spends most of his time attempting to follow the Old Testament (Torah) where most of the bible's commands are found.  And then he adds on a few months to attempt to include the New Testament commands.

What I Liked

The author has OCD issues, and he admits this up front.  They are pronounced enough that his wife has developed a code phrase for when the author is trying too hard to shield their son from the contagious and pointy aspects of life.  She says "helmet" and he knows he needs to back off.  His OCDs play into his own reasons for wanting to investigate the commands of the bible, and bear some resemblance to my own.  So this made the subject and the author immediately sympathetic to me.

The book is simply enjoyable to read, well written, and entertaining.  The author's style is conversational and low stress.  One thing leads into another, and you find yourself not putting the book down.

What I most needed from the book was found early, a passage on page nineteen that helped me see more clearly what we all really mean by 'following the bible literally.'  "In fact, the very first command that God gives to Adam is 'Be fruitful and multiply.'  It's the Alpha Rule of the Bible.  Now, if I were taking the Bible absolutely literally, I could be 'fruitful' by loading up on peaches at Whole Foods Market and 'multiply' by helping my niece with her algebra homework."  "This hammers home a simple but profound lesson:  When it comes to the Bible, there is always - but always - some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules.  In this case, I'm pretty sure that the Bible was talking about fertility, not math, so that's what I'll continue to pursue."  It's where he says "I'm pretty sure ..." that it comes home most strongly.  No one would disagree with him in his interpretation, but it is, in fact, interpretation.  This all might seem silly and obvious to you, but honestly, it was useful for me to read.

What I Didn't Like

The author writes very short chapters/sections.  He gets into an idea and then drops it before he really flushes it out or explores the consequences.  This is my major gripe with the book, that it could have been profound, but instead was often sadly shallow.

The tone of the book is a little cynical; not always, it is sometimes very moving.  But one gets the distinct impression that aside from the author's OCDs, the main reason he took on this project was so that he'd have something to write another book about.  Because of this, he intentionally puts himself in 'interesting' situations, things that might be considered very bizarre or controversial, so that his book will be interesting.  He does this instead of developing some of the aspects of his search that would have naturally been very interesting and not at all contrived.  One small example comes from his attempts to always tell the truth.  He sometimes uses this as an excuse to say something biting or off the wall, rather than finding a way to demure.

As far as genre, the book just does not know what it wants to be.  Is this a book of humor?  A memoir?  A travel essay?  A religious or inspirational work?  It is all of these things at one time or another.  For some this might be a plus, but it didn't work for me.  It was humorous in places, but not funny enough to be a book of humor.  It was moving in places, but not compelling enough to be a memoir.  It was scholarly in places, but not developed enough to be taken seriously from a religious standpoint.  I was glad I read it, but yet when I put the book down I felt vaguely unsatisfied.

Summary and Final Comments

The book does make the point that one cannot follow the bible completely literally.  No one can follow each and every command of the bible in the original sense it was intended, and on a daily basis.  There must be some sort of picking and choosing about what commands are more important than others.  Our current culture (which denounces rape, which tries to protect animals from abuse, etc.) is not welcoming to ritual sacrifices, nor to the idea that 'you raped her, but it's okay as long as you marry her'.  And this is good; some of the bible is barbaric.  I think we have a more compassionate idea of human (and animal) rights, including rights for women, minorities, and more.  This does beg the question of how to determine for one's self which commands to follow, and in what priority.  But that's a different problem.  I recommend the book for anyone who enjoys ironic humor, who does not mind irreverence in their literature, and who has the same curiosity I did about what it might mean to try to live the bible literally.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

PTSD and the Crisis of Faith: Part Two of Two

 Hello Friends:

I promised a post to follow up on PTSD and the Crisis of Faith: Part One of Two, where I talked about why a loss of faith is part of the whole PTSD package of symptoms.  And here it is ... much later ... my attempt to synthesize the basis of the loss of faith and how to reclaim it.  Jumping in where I left off, the general stages of recovery from PTSD (again, as taken from Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman) are:  (1) establishing safety, (2) reconstructing the traumatic story (which includes remembrance and mourning), and (3) restoring the connection between the survivor and her community (reconnecting with ordinary life)

To add a little more information to stage three, our topic of the day, here's what Herman calls the "Role of the Community", which boils down to recognition and restitution:  "Sharing the traumatic experience with others is a precondition for the restitution of a meaningful world.  Once it is publicly recognized that that person has been harmed, the community must take action to assign responsibility for the harm and to repair the injury."

Now this is where it gets a little murky for me.  I do not think that "community" has to mean a panel of people from the grocery store, the PTA, the local church, your condo association, and the guys who salt your driveway in winter.  These people are certainly "community" in the largest definition, but there are a vast number of relationships that could define a person's community.  Your community includes your family, your friends, your therapist, your coworkers, your bowling league, and ... you guessed it ... your on-line blog buddies!  While many of us would love to have the people who caused our trauma be denounced publicly, made to own up in a court of law, fined, imprisoned or what have you, that is only one possible scenario for how the community could acknowledge our trauma, and work towards restitution.  At least in my view.  Assuming my interpretation of community is correct, then this is how recognition and restitution might play out ...

Recognition.  The role of the community is to listen to your story, to believe it, and to validate it.  You might only share the long version of your story with your therapist, your SO, or your sibling.  Then you might write an article, create art, or write poetry, and thereby share some part of the story with people on-line, in a class, or at a workshop.  You can do like me and blab at length in a blog format.  Ideally, people respond with appropriate emotions, either anger or sadness or what have you, and let you know they believe your story.  On some level, these people need to let you know that they realize you were hurt, and they recognize your pain.  Now obviously, everyone is not going to do each part of this.  This is the feedback you get from your community as a group.  Hopefully, after going through this process in our own unique ways, you and I will feel like our story was recognized and validated in some fashion by those we chose to share it with.

Restitution.  The community needs to acknowledge who is responsible for the trauma, and then somehow try to work to repair the damage.  So first, as I see it, the community must make it clear that they understand who is responsible, and that you and I are not to blame.  Just hearing those words from my therapist was a help, but then to get them echoed from my SO, sibling, a close friend, a few people in a chat room, and even more, is what really helped me solidify the idea that I as a child did not deserve to be abused.  I think the "community" then needs to respond with some sense that, having seen our hurt and knowing the cause, they desire some kind of fairness or justice, just like we do.  One possibility is having the community contribute to our healing in some way (by supporting our choice of doctors, our choice to use or not use medicine, allowing time off or leave for recovery, by being there with an ear, lending a hand when needed, or whatever support looks like to you and me).  Restitution might also be something bigger; a relative dedicating their 10K run to a domestic abuse shelter in honor of you, or your friends attending a march to raise awareness for child abuse, etc.  Whatever form it takes, it shows us, the survivors, that our community intends to see the injury repaired, however that might be possible.

Finally, finally, I come back to the actual point of the post.  So what, indeed, is the relationship between that recognition/restitution and our relationship with our higher power of choice?  As I noted in my previous post, part of what deconstructed the survivor's faith to begin with was a sense that the world does not have (for C-PTSD) or no longer has (for PTSD) any true justice, any real order, or any deeper meaning. Whatever "system of meaning" was in place was dismantled. "Why me? The arbitrary, random quality of her fate defies the basic human faith in a just or even predictable world order. She is faced with the double task of rebuilding her own "shattered assumptions" about meaning, order, and justice in the world and also finding a way to resolve her differences with those who beliefs she can no longer share.  Recognition and restitution are necessary to rebuild the survivor's sense of order and justice."
 
And there you go.  And this is essentially where I gotta stop because my brain hurts.  I can now see how connecting to the community will get recognition and restitution to happen, and I can see that these would indeed help rebuild my sense of order and justice.  But will this naturally lead to a redevelopment of a sustaining faith?  Exactly how does that happen?  Oh crap, I think I'm going to have to hit the books and come up with a part three, aren't I?  Part three of two.  Snort.

I would love love love your comments on this post.  What does recognition mean to you?  What would restitution look like?  Do you think any of this would help you reconstruct a more meaningful world view?  Would that positively impact your developing a 'sustaining faith'?  How?  Very curious.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/grantpalmerphotography/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

OCD's and Scrupulosity - Obsessive Religion

Hello Friends:

We now interrupt our previously scheduled post (the second part of my PTSD and Spiritual Crises series) to take a step back and ask, so what?  So why do I care so much that I'm not spiritually well-defined, anyway?  I mean, I know this is a symptom of PTSD, but is it really necessary to work through this religion stuff at all?  Aren't flashbacks, say, much more of an issue?

Well, yes and no.  As I said in the last post, it seems that all PTSD symptoms are related to the same prime causes, and therefore working on one is likely to help with another.  And it may be impossible to ignore one utterly and expect some other issues to heal up just nice.  So constructing a consistent and meaningful world view may assist with mitigating flashbacks, and vice versa.

But it's more than that, at least for me.  I suffer from a form of 'scrupulosity'.  This is a specific aspect of my OCDs that emerge in the realm of religious and spiritual thinking and rituals.  I found a great description of it here, and excerpted the following (gender change is mine):  "For certain individuals, religious beliefs become compulsive, joyless behaviors.  The individual may constantly worry that she might say or do something blasphemous.  She may fear that she has committed sin, forgotten it and then neglected to repent for the sin.  She may spend long hours searching her mind to try to ferret out evidence of unconfessed sins.  She is unable to feel forgiven.  Specific obsessions and compulsions vary occurring to the individuals religion.  An Orthodox Jew might worry that he did not perform a particular ritual correctly.  He might obsess about this for hours.  A Roman Catholic might go to confession several times a day.  Another individual could believe that anything she does might be sinful.  This individual might become so paralyzed with doubt, that he or she becomes afraid to do or say anything at all."

My issues are not that I tend to perform rituals; I don't have too many religiously compulsive behaviors.  It is that I obsess about how I'm going to hell, and am constantly looking for the right set of 'rules' to follow so I don't have to worry about going to hell anymore.  I'm not sure it is possible.

My religious background is pretty varied within different brands of Christianity.  But the most lingering bad effects came from the time I was attending a fundamentalist church.  These are dangerously seductive for those with OCDs since, on the surface, they seem to present a perfectly defined set of rules that anyone can follow and 'know' they are saved.  But then, when church pulls you in deeper, you realize that instead they always leave you guessing.  Wondering.  Always needing to come back and check.  You are constantly admonished to be vigilant against 'backsliding'.  You must confess your sins to God constantly, and are only assured of being 'saved' until you commit the next sin.  For this sect, thoughts can be sins, and we've already discussed the difficulties in telling yourself not to think about something.  It became a nightmare of trying to meet a set of rules that never really did the trick.  You were never quite good enough.  (Been given the gift of tongues yet?  No?  Hmm ...)  In addition to all of this confusion, you had to take responsibility for the souls of people around you.  If you weren't actively trying to convert them, then you were sinning.  If they died unconverted because you didn't talk to them, that was on your head.

In spite of having left this church behind years ago, damage has been done.  I mentioned in my post on Trying to Make Sense of God, that I'd had a final 'break' with God over what I read in a book.  I accepted that there was no way I could do everything necessary to be sure I was going to hell.  And since the lack of knowing is unbearable, it is easier to say, 'screw you' and know you are going to hell.  Strange, I know.  But there you have it.

Knowing now that this confusion is fed by PTSD, I have some new hope.  Maybe there really is a way to look at this situation more compassionately.  More 'realistically' just like the way I look at all the rest of my OCDs.  I've had success there.  Maybe I can have some success creating a new view of the world where things 'make sense'.  Where there is justice.  Where there is a meaningful spirituality.

I don't know if I can, but as you see I have some motivation to try.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bettina_m/ / CC BY 2.0

PTSD and the Crisis of Faith: Part One of Two

Hello Friends:

Well, here's another installment in under my tag of 'spiritual struggles'. I mentioned in Spiritual Crises: Trying to Make Sense of God that at this point, I'm pretty much at ground zero as far as God goes. Ya might want to take a look at that old post since it is the background for what I'm going to talk about here.

Now tell me, how is it that I've been looking for great resources on PTSD for a solid year and missed what is apparently one of the classics? Maybe I'll review the book, formally, in the future. But for now I'm going to use it as the basis for my look at spiritual crises and what to do about it.

The book in question is Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., and was first published in 1992. I have used it here because I wanted to see what the psychologist's model is for a person actually getting 'better' from PTSD, and specifically, what that means for their spirituality. All quotes below are from this book.

The punch line is that there is indeed a model and a path. The caveat to the punch line is that it is an integral part of the whole recovery from Complex PTSD as a process. You can't just say 'hey, I'll get my situation with religion in order first, then come back and deal with the rest of it.' But I plunge ahead doggedly, anyway. Here's my analysis.

The specific symptom we are concerned with is that Complex PTSD causes "alterations in systems of meaning" resulting in "loss of sustaining faith and a sense of hopelessness and despair." Right, okay, I have that symptom. Check.

But why? What exactly is it that the trauma does to undermine a sense of faith? Or worse, to ensure that no sense of faith can really develop or remain unchallenged? The answer to that (as far as this book is concerned, anyway) comes from the nature of the "damaged self."

"Trauma forces the survivor to relive all earlier struggles over autonomy, initative, competence, identity, and intimacy. The developing child's postive sense of self depends upon a caretaker's benign use of power. Traumatic events violate the autonomy of the person at the level of basic bodily integrity. The belief in a meaningful world is formed in relation to others and begins in earliest life. Basic trust, acquired in the primary intimate relationship is the foundation of faith. Trauma creates a crisis of faith. Damage to the survivor's faith and sense of community is particularly severe when the events themselves invoved the betrayal of important relationships."

Yikes. Okay, this also makes sense, but it makes me cringe. Thinking back on the nature of the 'primary intimate relationship' i.e. Mom. (Zo, tell me about your mother.) How cliche. But there you have it - having a neglectful and abusive mother directly impacts the ability to develop a belief in a meaningful world. For us who suffered repeated trauma from the primary caregiver, the world makes no sense, has no meaning, and there is no one who can be trusted.

Here's a passage from the bible I quote a lot, except I'm going to reverse the gender to make the point, "If a daughter asks for bread from any mother among you, will she give her a stone? Or if she asks for an egg, will she offer her a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Mother give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Her!" (Luke 11:10-13 NKJV)

Well ... I got a scorpion.

So of course I don't trust God to give me something ostensibly good. Why would I want my heavenly father (mother) to give me anything at all? I'll pass, thanks. I'll go find my own egg.

So, how to fix this attitude? How to bring yourself to a point where you can create some kind of meaningful world view? "The fundamental stages of recovery are: (1) establishing safety, (2) reconstructing the traumatic story (which includes remembrance and mourning), and (3) restoring the connection between the survivor and her community (reconnecting with ordinary life)." "Recovery is based upon empowerment of the survivor and creation of new connections. It can take place only in the context of a relationship."

Um. Okay. Safety ... right. With my OCDs nothing is safe, really. But this idea of safety includes more than just a sense of physical safety. It means having the worst of the symptoms under control (by meds or CBT or yoga or what have you), having developed at least a vague sense of control of yourself and your life (again, by therapy or whatever), as well as having some established support network. I basically have all this, so I'll give myself a check for stage one.

Then the tough part. Stage two, which has two nasty aspects. The first is recounting and remembering the trauma. Bleh. "The goal of recounting the trauma story is integration, not exorcism." Ah, right. Well, I've remembered a lot of nasty stuff. But I don't think I've actually reprocessed it all. Besides, the second part of stage two is mourning, and I am really, really stuck on that. But the book says "The reward of mourning is realized as the survivor sheds her evil, stigmatized identity and dares to hope for new relationships in which she no longer has anything to hide." Holy crap. Really? Sounds good. Also sounds like pie in the sky. Stage two, no check for me.

Not to end on a down note, but seems like a good place to sit and ponder. I think I'll address both the reprocessing and the mourning later. Next post, I'll finish with step three, even though it's going to be a while actually getting there. So I might as well post about it ...

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegocupolo/ / CC BY 2.0

Spiritual Crises: Trying to Make Sense of God

Hello Friends:

Religion and spirituality have been on my mind a lot lately. In truth, they often are. For whatever reason I'm a spiritual person. My being trained as a research scientist does not conflict with this at all - but that's the subject of another post. (Or an entire book. And you know I think I'll put that one on the list of "books I really gotta write one of these days.") Instead, what I wanted to focus on here is the idea of spiritual crises and their relationship to anxiety and trauma.

I've been doing a lot of reading into PTSD recently, since (as I've mentioned in previous posts) the PTSD appears to be the core motivator or prime mover, so to speak, of my disordered psyche. I was very surprised to see that in the lists of responses to trauma "spiritual crisis or loss of faith" is in almost every one of them. I don't know why this is a surprise to me. After all, going to the therapist is usually another lesson in "No duh." (Did you know there is now research supporting the fact that people with three or more co-morbid anxiety/depression disorders are less able to remain functional at jobs and in work environments than those with fewer or no disorders? Did we really need a peer-reviewed paper to tell us this?) And yet, I still get taken by surprise by the obvious. If life sucks for you, then you generally don't have a great relationship with the Almighty.

For some people, their religious crisis stems from the reality of suffering. After a major traumatic event, people often think "How could God have let this happen to me?" and "How can a good God allow these sorts of horrible things?" Through their trauma these people are confronted with a brutal reality that is so at odds with their previous world view that they cannot find a new working middle ground. Their faith is seriously compromised or abandoned as a result.

I don't happen to wonder about suffering in the world, and this may be part of the difference between PTSD sufferers (from a single event) or Complex PTSD (multiple events or extended duration events). I've been subjected to trauma from birth, so it never occurred to me that the world was a nice place. My ideas of religion grew up in the context of a scary world. My crisis didn't come about from a sudden bad event, but instead from years and years of traumatic pressure slowly changing my point of view.

Although I can point to the triggering moment that I chose to stop praying, and thus sort of ended up with me and God no longer on speaking terms. I read a book where the author was saying that the accident that made her a quadrapelegic was actually God's answer to a prayer. She prayed that He would bring her closer to Him, and the next week she was paralyzed from the neck down. This was (and is) about the most horrible thing I'd ever read. It crystalized my lack of trust in God - apparently if you prayed for things, he would give them to you, but in a nasty 'Monkey's Paw' sort of way. Better not to pray at all, and then at least you know the bad stuff comes from random chance.

"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." - Mahatma Gandhi

I have always loved this quote, even when I was on 'good terms' with God. Surely, I felt, God is compassionate and giving, and knows that starving people don't need sermons, they need FOOD. But then being squished through the eye of the needle that is Fundamental Christianity, my views on God became torqued. I saw God as scary, judgmental, angry, unapproachable, requiring perfect prayer, constant sacrifice, and incessant vigilance lest I fall away and be tossed into the fire. This, by the way, is also an excellent description of how I felt about my parents, who provided many of the traumatic experiences that continue to haunt me. If you cannot get unconditional love from your parents, you certainly don't imagine you can get it from God. God, like my parents, became someone whom I thought it better to avoid.

But this sort of pisses me off. I don't want my innate interests and desires for a more spiritual life to be another casualty of my abusive upbringing. So many things have already been broken by a past that was not my fault - I don't want to ditch the whole idea of spirituality as a reaction to something else. I need to find out if it is right for me, and how, and to do that I need to find ways to separate myself from images of the divine as a parent. I don't have a good model for a parent so I'm not going to want a deity that is one. What I want are influences that allow me to fully grow into myself as a person.

Which brought me back to the quote from Gandhi, and a way to begin to think of God, the Goddess, the Divine, Wisdom, Warm Fuzzy Life Feelies or Whatever as that which nourishes me. God can't come to me as a controlling, child-sacrificing slave-master, but God can come to me as bread. Or, in fact, as the love I get from my husband, the acceptance I get from my sister, the joy I get from watching the cardinals outside return in the spring. You know, good stuff like that.

Bread, of course, is already fraught with religious significance and imagery, not the least of which is the 'body of Christ' from Christian mass/communion. Not wanting to bog myself down too much there, instead of a picture of a communion wafer I chose a pic of challah bread. One of the many benefits of having married a Jew is the introduction to Jewish food (which includes great stuff like matzo ball soup, and some less great stuff like gefilte fish). If you haven't had Challah, it is amazing stuff; soft and stretchy on the inside, rich and dense, but yielding, with a crisp, thin crust. It makes the best French Toast on the planet, too.

Another benefit of a Jewish husband is that his operating system comes pre-loaded with the idea that is it a good thing to treat one's religious beliefs with the same intellectual honesty used anywhere else in life. The tradition of Jewish scholars arguing Torah in the Yeshiva lives on in conscious and unconscious ways. So I, WASP woman that I am, get the encouragement and the room to step back and consider what God really is to me.

Challah seems like a great place to start with that.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image is Challah by A. Ross from Flickr via Creative Commons.