All God, If God There Be
Chapter 1
Baby Tommy
Woe to them who call evil good and good evil. Isaiah 5:20a
One drizzly evening late in my second year at Yale Divinity School, a ringing phone jolted me out of my studies. I was hard at work writing an imaginary dialog between Jonathan Edwards and Paul Tillich on the theological meaning of history. I loved both wrestling with theology and writing papers. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath when I saw the caller ID, but my gut told me to answer it.
“Hi Linda,” droned the familiar sad voice of my youngest brother Tom. I took a deep breath and braced myself. Tom was a beleaguered soul who had struggled with depression and substance abuse most of his life. Still, he was the only member of my childhood family I felt connected to. It had always been that way. My earliest memory is bringing him home from the hospital in the family’s 1946 Ford Woody convertible when I was a week shy of three years old. Daddy was sitting in the driver’s seat, and I was standing on tiptoes behind him, straining to see over the red leather seat back. There he was, wrapped in a blue blanket and cradled tight in my mother’s arms. He had a fluff of pale yellow hair and a dimple right in the middle of his chin. Even then, he was so cute I wondered if he might really be a baby doll. My mother liked to tell the story that I cooed, “Baby Tom, baby Tom” as I looked at him and then hit him over the head with a baseball bat, but like so many of my mother’s stories, I don’t think that one was true. Why would there have been a baseball bat in the car when no one in my family played sports? Anyway, I would have been too little to have hefted a bat over the seat-back. More importantly, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have done that. I definitely resented Geoff and Patty, the twins born only a year after me, but I loved my brother Tom right from the beginning.
Still, Tom had a tough time fitting into the family. (A local seer once saw a picture of us four children sitting in a Flexible Flyer wagon and commented, “The little one doesn’t belong.” As Tom grew up it became clear that he was becoming everything my father wished he weren’t. Daddy had been a sergeant in World War II, and he valued duty and obedience. Tom didn’t value either. He’d shirk his homework and sneak out of Saturday morning chores to hide in his closet with a flashlight reading the Hardy Boys. My father was a shrewd corporate lawyer, while Tom was uncritical and gullible. As a schoolboy, he would bring home reports of Bigfoot sightings and UFO abductions, and my father would challenge, “How do you know that?” “They have pictures!” Tom would explain and stammer under my father’s derisive counter of “Who’s ‘they’?” In a family that prized academic excellence, Tom was never a scholar. He struggled as a legacy student in prep school and at Yale. By the end of his junior year, drinking and smoking dope with his friends had taken precedence over his studies. When his advisor told him his grades weren’t high enough to support an application to med school, he dropped out.
Floundering for a way to pay his rent, Tom jumped at the chance to get rich quick by using the last of his savings to buy into the Bestline soap company, a pyramid scheme that would be ruled illegal within two years. To make money, he needed not only to sell soap himself but also to enlist others to buy in under him and take a commission on their sales. One blustery afternoon in the fall of 1971, a tractor-trailer truck backed down his driveway to deliver 100 cases of biodegradable Zif all-purpose detergent, bright pink Liquid Cleanser, ABC bowl cleaner and shampoos for hair, carpets and cars. My brother was incredulous that none of his friends wanted to get in on a piece of the action and take the soap off his hands. With no plans for the future and nothing but a basement full of soap to his name, Tom was ripe for a new path.
That path led Tom to the fourteen-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji who had come from India to the United States the year before. He was drawn in by the guru’s countercultural message of the love, peace, and bliss that could be found through a secret meditation practice known as “knowledge.” Without a hint of irony Tom informed me that Maharaj Ji was a divine being. By floating down from the sky on a jumbo jet, he had fulfilled Jesus’ biblical prediction that in returning he would “Come with the clouds.” The guru attributed the excesses of American capitalism to the principle that material wealth invariably corrupts. That means that even if his followers wanted to give their possessions to charity, they would defile whoever received them. The only solution was to give wealth to someone who is divine and incorruptible. With this teaching in mind, Tom went to Maryland to convince my father to release the remainder of his college fund for him to give to Maharaj Ji and his Divine Light Mission. That didn’t go over well. As he always did when he got mad enough, my father squealed out of the garage. In his blind rage, he failed to notice Tom’s car parked in the driveway behind him. My brother returned to Connecticut with no college fund and no car to give to the guru, but all was not lost. Tom spent the next month renting a U-Haul truck on weekends and delivering soap to every ashram in New England.
I may have shaken my head at many of Tom’s escapades, but I found his naivité and spirituality endearing. I’d had mystical encounters with God; I’d taught comparative religions; I was active in my home church and studying to become a minister, but I still didn’t know what I actually believed. My whole life seemed to have been mired in an approach/avoidance relationship with God. Despite my misgivings about Maharaj Ji, I envied Tom his guileless ability to believe in a compassionate divine presence and even his trusting devotion to his guru. I enjoyed his rambling stories and obsessions that ranged from designing a portable boat-bike to building a three-story treehouse replica of the Saint Michaels Lighthouse. Over the years Tom would call to talk whenever his life took a new turn. He had married his high school girlfriend Penny while still at Yale, and they’d both become Premies, or devotees in training, with the Divine Light Mission and moved into an ashram. To support the Mission,Tom had taken work as a hospital orderly and discovered he still longed to work in medicine. When he’d asked to finish his last year of college and study to become a physician’s assistant, the mission refused his request. Undeterred, Tom left the ashram, although he continued to follow Maharaj Ji for the rest of his life. After traveling a twisty road that led through work with a drunken doctor in the Smokey Mountains, a Caribbean medical school, a US med school and a post-doc fellowship, Tom became a doctor. He started his own rheumatology practice, and he and Penny raised three beautiful children, Jessica, Jimmy and Laura. From the outside his life looked like a fairy-tale success story, but that wasn’t the case. Tom had never stopped drinking. He’d inherited our father’s back problems and began adding copious pain meds to the mix. He had no head for business. He couldn’t keep up with paperwork and had stopped receiving insurance reimbursements. He called one night to talk about a secretary who had embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from the practice. “I can’t report her or fire her,” he lamented. “She has three children and she needs her job to survive.”
Even though I loved Tom, I sometimes dreaded his calls, with their frequent litany of problems and poor-me’s. This one was no exception.
“I’ve got some bad news,” Tom blurted out as soon as I picked up the phone. “I’ve been arrested, and it looks like I’m going to jail.” I wondered briefly whether one of his patients was suing him or he’d been caught cooking his books. But no, that wasn’t it.
“I’m being charged with sexually abusing Jessica and Laurie,” he continued.
I sat in stunned silence. “Did you?” I finally asked him.
“Not really,” Tom responded and told me a convoluted story of how all he’d done was rub his daughters’ backs when he put them to bed. And maybe sometimes he’d touched their breasts by mistake. And there was a time he’d been upset and fingered his younger daughter’s vagina, but it was only once— or maybe twice. He rambled on sounding more like a victim than a perpetrator. He started talking about our cultural obsession with sexual crimes, claiming that in some parts of the world it’s just accepted that fathers will touch their daughters.
My head began to spin. Some parts of the world? My mind tried to go to the most patriarchal cultures I could think of, but a dawning realization brought it all closer to home. Fathers touching their daughters had been accepted in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, by the family I’d grown up in. Why, by the standards being applied to Tom, my own father whom I’d held on a pedestal for half a century would have been arrested and sent to prison. That was a reality I simply couldn’t absorb. Weren’t the family nudity, the tickling and the touching just fun ways of teaching me to enjoy my body? Weren’t the things he did when I was a teenager just his way of saying he loved me? For the first time in my life I began to question whether my father’s attentions were entirely innocent. Was it really possible that I too had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse?
I could barely absorb this question, but I began to read about survivors of incest. I learned that many of them have problems similar to those that had plagued me most of my life. I too longed for my father’s love and believed in the inerrant goodness of my parents. I too suffered from insomnia, anxiety and depression. I had experienced eating disorders and a distorted body image that convinced me I was dirty and disgusting. Since childhood I had dissociated from events that were too painful to absorb by blocking the emotions surrounding my abuse or even my memories of some of it. I struggled with intimacy and relationships. I had a hard time trusting anyone or anything—especially God. I was fully convinced that whatever my father had done to me was my fault and that the resulting symptoms were proof of my own inherent badness. I asked myself, How could I possibly have lived for 53 years, suffered from so wide an assortment of symptoms, and worked with such a variety of therapists without ever recognizing the sexual abuse lurking in my family? The answer is, as they say, complicated.