Monday, October 27, 2025
Web Log for 10.26.25
Book Review: Borrowed Time
Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Megaera
Sunday, October 26, 2025
Link Log for 10.24-25.25
New Book Review: Blessed Disruption
Title: Blessed Disruption
Author: Suzie Hall
Date: 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9986493-1-8
Quote: "I noticed similarities in the descriptors that people used to describe me. Strong. Competitive. Intimidating. Beautiful. Independent. Intelligent. Complicated. Self-centered. Religious. Sweet. Sexy. Strong-willed. Impatient. Spirited. Why did I pay so much attention to these labels and emotionally agonize over them, which subsequently caused me to judge myself and play small in life? It’s because I didn’t truly know how disconnected I was from who I was created to be."
Preach it, Sister. Yes, this is another book about how someone grew up Christian and felt traumatized by the church. They're becoming a genre. I read this type of books because one day I may write one, though I'm also concerned about whether the popularity of these books is discouraging Christians who feel called to stay in their churches. What Suzie Hall brought out of her church, however, sounds an awful lot like what I shook off my feet when I left.
It's
gone from an obscure theory, when Hall and I were growing up, to
settled medical science: People not only have the ability to choose
what look like introvert or extrovert behavior, but are
literally, physically born introverts or extroverts. There has been a lot of misunderstanding about this. Wanting to be with others sometimes does not mean that a person is an extrovert; it means that the person has friends. Feeling shy, or tired, or alienated from others in a certain social setting does not make a person an introvert. We're born with one kind of brain or the other, though some people who were born introverts "become extroverts" after a long high fever.
Introverts have more complete brains. The development of individual neurological "wiring" varies, but there are a few recognizable patterns that link introverts of "artistic temperament," introverts with talents for math, introverts who think things through with their long brain stems, and others, as having one crucial thing in common: We're born with a moral sense--a sense of right and wrong, honor and shame.
Extroverts are defined by their failure to develop complete enough brains to have this sense. Some extroverts' academic intelligence is comparable with introverts', but in a very important way, the extrovert brain is handicapped. Disabled, even.
I think evangelical Christianity has been particularly vulnerable to a sort of minor heresy that casts Jesus as "the greatest salesman in the world." Say what? Read the Gospels. He was not a salesman. He was a religious teacher who intentionally restricted his audience and turned away followers. Great salesmen aren't hanged! The idea of Christians applying lessons from the Bible to their business seems good, but in some churches it has created a cult of people who think they are saved by some combination of Christ plus extroversion.
A real religious life is an introvert thing. Extroverts can enjoy the feeling of being in a crowd, singing and clapping and even praying, but they're not built for serious spiritual discipline. We're told enough about St. Peter's life to indicate that he was, although an extrovert and a bit of a burden to Jesus and the other disciples, loved and saved...but as work, because he was a burden, because his whole brain had to be rewired in order for him to represent Christ to anybody. Which is why the rest of the Christian world will probably always have very mixed feelings about the evangelicals.
Extroverts are also prone to make hasty, superficial judgments, which can lead to bigotry, so in some evangelical churches--not the ones I attended--there is a well documented history of embracing bigotry, both against women and against various demographic minority types of men, perhaps also against the young, certainly against those with less money and those with physical disabilities. (Except for extroversion.) Evidently Suzie Hall's family's evangelical church was one of those. She felt traumatized by her church's attitudes toward women, which were harsh enough that as a teenager Hall reports letting herself be raped outright without even calling for help from family members sleeping only a few yards away.
Seriously. It wasn't even a "date rape" where the girl wants to touch but wants to stop at a certain point. It was an outright rape in which a larger, older boy barged into a hotel room and shoved little Suzie down on one of the beds. Her brother (!!!) was in the other bed, their parents in an adjacent room, and they apparently slept like logs through the whole episode. Years after my mother told me, tersely, how to make a boy stop groping and whining for "more," and my father didn't even go there but just ordered me to carry a pistol--loaded with gas pellets rather than lead, so no whining!--there were still teenaged girls who hadn't even been taught to yell for help. Who might, after years of "depression" and therapy, finally tell their parents what had happened, and, when their fathers blurted out "I thought we were family," think their fathers were blaming them rather than the boys the fathers had been teaching or coaching. (Suzie Hall's father was college football coach Skip Hall.)
God in Heaven, turn Your face from our intolerable race...
Right. This goes out to all Christian young ladies of the world: Boys mature slowly. Sometimes they still act like toddlers when they are fifty or sixty years old. Sometimes they are so confused they even try to deny how pitifully sensitive some parts of their bodies are. They may even try to pretend their sensitive parts are weapons. With one good gouge of one fingernail it is possible to clear up their understanding, even at some risk to their lives. Most of the other effects your dainty little hands can have on a 300-pound footballer's sensitive parts are more fun, and put you in the position of "sympathetic friend" rather than "plaintiff," but if you ever meet the type who would attempt outright rape, you should be the last girl he ever thinks about in that way. Don't leave him capable of thinking those thoughts about your younger sister. Possibly the reason why this was omitted from Suzie Hall's education was something to do with her not having a younger sister.
Few survivors of physical violation want to spend the next year or so of their life telling everyone they meet all about their experience of shame and pain. Many, like the teenaged Suzie Hall, try to put it behind them and behave so well, achieve so much, that nobody would ever guess what happened that night. Suzie played sports well, did well in school, did well on jobs, went to all her father's students' games and cheered, married a man her parents liked shortly after graduation, and had two perfectly beautiful children. And then for no obvious reason she flopped into bed with another man. Well, she admitted when her husband guessed what she was doing, she didn't like his assumption that he was in charge of the family's money. But she couldn't consciously say, even to herself, that the easiest way to walk out on her husband without suffering financial loss was to catch another man who could afford to pay her to be a "full-time homemaker." And she didn't want to be a "full-time homemaker" anyway.
Yes, when Christian young people stay single, this is the kind of thing older Christians should give thanks that they are avoiding. It's far better that people in their twenties spend enough years alone to know that they don't need to be coupled, to wonder if they'll ever even really want to be coupled, until they prove someone to be a good enough friend that they know for sure.
So why didn't Suzie Hall forge on into the world and do the job she wanted? Her book doesn't show a single reason why she chose to be a full-time wife when she wanted to be a TV news reader. Those of us who remember the 1980s can remember that there would have been more even than the two reasons she lists--a Christian youth group preaching that girls should try to be full-time wives (in the name of "submission" to their husbands, following a "tradition" concocted by the French Socialists and contrary to what the Bible actually says a good wife does), and her own post-traumatic stress disorder warning her that "being seen" might lead to being attacked again. There was also the well publicized bigotry against women in an industry where Christine Craft was so famously fired for being "too old, too ugly, and not deferential enough to men." There was also the fundamental moral ickiness of the industry, which went beyond the analyses of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Hall probably wouldn't have liked being a news reader. What is certain is that she resented being told to be a full-time wife, instead. We may read between the lines that this resentment leaked out in a passive-aggressive way that ended two marriages and cut off half a dozen "relationships" after her second divorce.
And so, after lots and lots of the kind of "therapy" extroverts love, with lots of ego inflation and a suggestion that financial benefits are tied to perfecting their personalities (I won't say it it's too easy), Hall took the very very courageous step of identifying herself as a "believer" rather than a Christian. That she'd been sent an actual letter from a church she had attended, warning her to repent and advising the rest of the congregation to guide her toward repentance, she's still denying as a factor in this. That some people, or spirits, or cosmic principles, just love it when people's righteous indignation with other people separates them even in name from the love of Christ...
People recovering from emotional abuse by fellow Christians do seem to find some strange words gushing out of our mouths. No Seventh-Day Adventist church I attended literally had a Cradle Row for believers' babies, but all of them had "Cradle Roll Classes" at their "Sabbath Schools." They had songs, which the infants couldn't sing (except for my natural sister the musical prodigy), for the benefit of brainfogged mothers. One of those songs went "I'll share my goodies'cos I love you, and that's what Jesus wants me to do." I knew a rather awful woman who used to chant "And that's what Jesus wants me to do" when she was bullying some younger person into doing what "Mrs. Awful" wanted person to do. In my early twenties I told her I had felt led to adopt the belief that, when she was doing that, I was meant to "take 'what Jesus wants me to do'," I chanted, then changing the tune, "'and throw it out the window'!" Jesus, I'm sure, understood. It was not necessary to reject what Jesus taught, either by His reported words or by His example, in order to reject Mrs. Awful's insinuation that what Jesus wanted me to do was what she wanted me to do...
It's true that Christians who accept the idea that they have something to repent of, that other people in the church are meant to guide them to repentance, are often making the kind of submissive display that invites emotional abuse. There is no simple, objective behavioral rule about what they did that was so bad or when the blaming and shaming has to stop. It cam become an ongoing unwritten contract that if X wants to belong to the group, X needs to enjoy having everyone else find fault with everything person does, because anything X does might be said to show that that spirit of whatever-X-did is still present.
That tended to happen to introverts. The mere fact that many of us liked the traditional rules of modesty and frugality probably started it. I remember that at one church about a dozen people had asked me whether I was a Seventh-Day Adventist. I thought it was a simple question of fact, no more tiresome than "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?", so at some point I asked someone else that question. Poor Baby was so hurt she couldn't even say anything like "I feel hurt by that question," but could only cry on the shoulders of about a dozen other people until they agreed to tell me what a horrible person I was--asking someone the same question that many other people had asked me.
At a certain stage in the spiritual formation of a serious introvert Christian, many of us will continue to talk to people who play that sort of game. Some part of us must notice that we're behaving like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football, but we want to be humble and teachable. Correcting this harmful social pattern usually involves cutting off communication with the person who needs encouragement to leave cravings for dominance in the bedroom.
Hall has heard, of course, about the damage it supposedly does to lesbian couples that some churches don't invite them to become members. I am afraid there is a biblical basis for this. I am afraid, also, that churches have a right to require members to give up other things that the Bible doesn't even describe as "unseemly" for Christians. People who believe in Christ but don't believe in the rules of these churches have a right to join churches that have more liberal rules. Nobody is really harmed. I don't have a lot of sympathy for homosexual lobbyists who come to churches where they know they don't belong, just to try to make people feel bad about taking the Bible's rules about homosexual behavior seriously.
I don't know that most of these people understand the Bible's teachings about homosexual behavior correctly. I suspect that most of them are quietly thinking that, because they're not tempted by homosexuality, homosexuality must be worse than the sins that appeal to them; the Bible never says anything remotely like that. Any serious spiritual practice does involve subordinating the body's appetites to the spiritual discipline. "Gay" promiscuity is absolutely not acceptable for Christians. Homosexual attractions are just one more of the carnal appetites spiritual people can choose to overcome. Whether that means that a committed couple, of different sexes or the same sex, have been called to separate, to repudiate commitments they've made to each other, is more than I would presume to say. Vocations to break off relationships and reject people are individual matters. Sometimes the clear biblical teaching churches could benefit from rediscovering is the one about, before Christians judge someone else's behavior, reexamining their own behavior in case something they are doing is even worse.
But I think Hall and so many of the other ex-churchgoers need to be called out for blathering about the positions some churches take on homosexuality, and never recognizing that another whole set of churches positively persecute introverts. Homosexuality is not an hereditary, permanent, physical trait. It is a behavior. Introversion is an hereditary, permanent, physical trait--and a valuable one, at that. Hall seems never to have noticed how any "friendly" feelings nice, quiet, respectful people used to have can be systematically beaten out of us by social bullies for whom we never are or could be "friendly" enough. In fact, among introverts some social problems don't even develop. People whose instinctive tendency is not to sniff at other people's crotches, to respect other people's personal choices enough not to ask whether people we are not personally pursuing are in any kind of sexual relationship, aren't likely to bother our heads about whether other people are committed to relationships that are not the marriage-for-the-sake-of-children the Catholic Church so slowly and grudgingly accepted.
Would I go to hear Hall speak? I would not. I can tell by the way she writes that at any meeting where Hall would be likely to speak, the audience would be packed in like sardines, there'd probably be sing-along songs played back on somebody's computer with the lyrics flashed on a screen, requests for money would be made repeatedly before, during, and after the performance, nothing at all would speak to my soul at any point where it had been on any stage of my life's journey, and there would probably be a group hug. If I had been wanting a spiritual, or social, or emotional experience when I went in, I'd still be wanting it when I went out of such a meeting. And at some point, very often in the first meeting, any effort I made to share some kind of fellowship with the extroverts would be slapped back into my face--I didn't seem "friendly" enough to them, so what was wrong with me? That, if anything was wrong, it was wrong with their selfish and bigoted way of presenting Christianity, would not be something extroverts would let themselves consider...
I wish extrovert Christians whatever joy they are capable of feeling in their fellowship with each other, but until they are ready to accept that spiritual people have completely different kinds of worship, faith, and fellowship, and learn our ways, I'm afraid these extrovert Christians don't have fellowship with me. But that's my reaction to Hall and her current life and work. It may not be yours. It may not be God's.
Friday, October 24, 2025
Web Log for 10.23.25
Bad Poetry: Ten-Line Obituary
Book Review: Magpie Goblin Word Boy
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Book Review: Wedding Day Brews
Meet the Blogroll: Barb Taub
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Book Review: The Accidental Witch the Half Witch
Things That Scare Me
In between infancy, when we don't know enough to be scared of anything but loud noises or sudden drops, and middle age, when it's to be hoped we know enough to cope with most situations in a practical rather than emotional way, it's human to fear The Unknown. And when we're young, that category of "The Unknown" includes a lot.
When I was little, the fashionable idea was to rear children in a sweet, happy, safe fantasy of a "nursery world" where we wouldn't develop any phobias because we could feel secure that Mother and Daddy would keep us safe.
It didn't always work as planned. Parents also wanted to believe that that nursery world fantasy would keep us feeling secure when we were dragged from place to place, when we were threatened by things beyond Mother's and Daddy's control, when relatives died. And they also wanted to believe that they weren't supposed to take any real notice of how children felt about things that had moved from "The Unknown" to "The Loathed"--medications and even operations (sometimes unnecessary), nasty situations at school, Mother's difficult pregnancy, Daddy's disabling injury, Grandpa's dying...
For me and for the children I used to baby-sit, that was when the really ridiculous phobias started. Around the time my grandfather died, I developed a fear of public toilets. After a long-distance move, a child I knew thought a chip in the paint on the kitchen stove looked like a wolf's head, and avoided the kitchen. After her grandparents' house burned down, a child I baby-sat developed a fear of the sound of water gurgling in a culvert below a road she'd been walking all her life. While her mother was ill, another child I baby-sat described "bad dreams" about "horrible slippers, with eyes and a mouth that talks and whispers horrible things."
Yes, bunny slippers can look pretty horrible when your life in a whole world of The Unknown gets especially stressful. So did that silly blue Knickerbocker Toy (before the Beanie Babies there were Knickerbocker Toys, very similar) that was meant to be some sort of cartoon image of a paddling duck, that seemed to zoom around the room in a fever dream I had just before vomiting. I wasn't afraid of the duck when I was awake, before or after that dream, but I never have liked badly drawn, cartoonish toy animals.
During Grandmother's last illness I remember silently praying that I wouldn't dream about an image that nobody had thought would upset me--a drawing in a comic book of humans walking away from a dead horse on the trail. It didn't take Freud to guess that, although nobody talked to me about Grandmother's condition and I didn't say or do anything that showed fear, some part of my mind saw the image of a blob of brown ink representing a dead horse as also representing all the real unhappiness I and everyone else was feeling about losing Grandmother. When she died there was actually some sense of relief...the drawing of the dead horse didn't scare me any more.
Adults usually look back on these things and either laugh, or empathize with the ridiculous phobias of the children we now know. I think of them as evidence that adults don't need to bother trying to keep children away from stories and images adults think might be too frightening. If a child really is happy in the nursery-world fantasy, Disney's wicked fairy turning into a dragon won't cause nightmares; if not, bunny slippers and chips in paint will figure in nightmares anyway. Don't blame the books, parents. Blame yourselves. Specifically blame the decisions you make to change the children's routine, uncovering that hole in the nursery world through which children fall down to The Unknown. If you don't want to deal with childhood phobias and nightmares, don't even think about changes of address, let alone divorce, and keep all the children's elders healthy until the children are at least thirteen.
By that age most of our fears are reasonable. Well...sort of.
Most spiders can bite, some inject enough venom to make the bitten place hurt, and most humans don't like the sensation of spiders walking across our skin in any case. Since spiders do not particularly want to be picked up and snuggled by humans either, it's reasonable that most of us don't want to touch a spider. I don't scream or faint if a spider runs across my hand (and I live in a place where a lot of spiders hunt down smaller insects by running madly about, trying to surprise them). I don't reach into a box where spider nests are, either.
Yet everyone seems to know a sensible, reasonable person who really can't stand spiders, who may look greenish if people even talk about spiders. I think Spider-Man cartoons may have helped some people cope with the fact that spiders share our planet. Still, many spider-phobics aren't triggered by Spider-Man, because he obviously has nothing to do with real spiders, and are triggered by harmless little animals who actually protect them from insect bites. Why do spiders invade people's beds? Because they like to eat gnats, flies, and mosquitoes, of course. Spiders will then bite us if we happen to crush them, and can they be blamed....but they're there to eat mosquitoes that intend to bite us.
Again, everyone who speaks or sings or performs for audiences in any other way feels some performance anxiety. Most of us don't talk about that adrenalin high having an addictive quality, but it does. But while most of us learn to deal with the feeling that we've not practiced enough (it's not possible to have practiced enough), even learn to improvise something the audience may think was part of the act if we forget the words, some people build up real performance phobias.
Usually people call attention to their phobias and try to elicit sympathy in their teens and twenties. In our thirties we usually realize that there are better ways to get attention, and work through our phobias. College students used to be shown an educational film in which a man who'd formed a phobia of rabbits modified his behavior to the point where he could enjoy the company of Playboy Bunnies. We all broke through our fears that people who were different from us wouldn't liiiike us, that we'd break the new office machine if we used it, that we'd literally die if anything happened to our beloved elders, and many more, too.
So at sixty I don't feel the emotion of fear very often any more. Fire? Deep water? Violent attacks? I've faced the danger, assessed it, and acted on a rational assessment of the situation. A fire is to fight. When throwing buckets of water on it is likely to help, I know I'll run toward the fire with buckets. When it's time to step aside and see whether a fire hose can do what buckets are failing to do, I know I'll do that. I know from experience. For a younger person these situations may still be part of The Unknown.
I've built up a history of bravery. This is a good thing. If some reader is thinking "I have a history of cowardice," ask yourself whether that thought is useful to you. Does someone special hold your hand in a nice way when you scream at the sight of a beetle? If not, it may be time to lose the beetle phobia. Meanwhile, I'd suggest, instead of identifying with a history of cowardice, thinking that you've not built up much of a history of bravery because you are young. The times to (take a swimming course and then) dive into deep water, (hire a local guide and then) walk into the rough neighborhood, (practice climbing and then) climb as high as the tree will hold your weight, are still ahead of you. All of The Nephews come from long lines of brave people and will probably do very well.
However, even if wailing to your friends and relatives about your phobia of birds is working nicely to get sympathy, reduce the phobia people feel because you are bigger than they are, etc., I don't recommend wailing about present-time phobias on the Internet. Well, especially not if you feel, as I do, that you don't want any evildoers attacking your loved ones as a way to hurt you.
Everybody has to have watched at least one movie scene...
"Tell us your secret (or agree to stop whistleblowing, or cooperate with our regime) or we'll shoot you."
"I certainly won't be in a position to do that if you do shoot me. Fire away!"
"We have your daughter. If you do as we tell you, we'll let her go. If not, we'll kill her. Bwahahaha."
"Eeek! Daddy! Daddy!"
In movies this is usually where Superman or Robin Hood or some character played by John Wayne comes in, kills the evildoer, and reunites the threatened family. Though, depending on the age and shape of the actress the producers could afford, the audience may have to watch her squirm and squeal for--several minutes, if she's about twenty years old and has a bosom that heaves well. If she really is one of the grown-up actors' daughter or niece, age six, one quick shot of her squealing "Daddy!" will do.
In real life I don't have any superheroes to count on. I do have anonymity. Because the web sites I use don't know where to find the writer known as Priscilla King, evildoers who track me through cyberspace don't know where to find The Nephews, either. Hello, did anyone really think I'm this much of a privacy fanatic merely because I don't like being interrupted by phone calls? Well, I don't like being interrupted by phone calls. It's not exactly a lie. And all anyone in cyberspace needs to know about The Nephews is that the group includes both sexes and several colors. If you feel that everyone on Earth deserves to see how adorable your grandchildren are, you might want to reconsider this...not that they're not adorable, of course, but that everyone deserves to know it.
But there are milder levels of fear that are perfectly appropriate for book reviewers to tell the world about. "I fear it's not a good day for a picnic." "I'm afraid those things are more fun to look at than they are to own." Most relevant of all, there's the set of things that might make us say "I fear this book's not going to be much fun to read."
1. Very bad "mechanical" writing skills--spelling, grammar, punctuation. An occasional "they done" for "they'd done" or "Criminals Trump and Obama" for "Criminals, Trump, and Obama" can happen to anyone, but sometimes self-published books are hard to read.
2. A "correct" but vague and nondescript tone of writing "voice," suggesting that the book was written by plagiarism-ware. Those things are not "intelligence." Nor are they friends to writers. By all means run a manuscript through a spelling and grammar checking program--after you have written it--but don't let your computer try to do more than that.
3. Things that feed into hateful old stereotypes, especially about women. Women who venture out of "The Home" alone may be harassed in some way but the tone of your writing should leave no room for the suggestion that that's normal or acceptable. Women who may be twenty-five, but whose behavior would be noticed as unusually immature at fifteen, may deserve a romance but should get several chapters, or better yet volumes, to grow up before they marry anybody. We really did elect a President who imagined there could be peace while the Hamas goons who participated in the terrorist attack two years ago were alive, but we've lived and learned and will probably remember not to elect another one: No man should ever trust a man who abuses women, any more than women would do.
4. Painful p.c.-ism. In a story set in the 1980s it's authenticity, not hate, to mention the employers who are more concerned with a character's stockings or hairstyle than with whether the person can type. In a story set in the 1850s your characters don't need to be slaves or slavemasters--in fact the lives of free Black Americans at this period is one of the fresh, little explored chapters in US history, and my personal feeling is that most members of "Peace Churches" North or South, at this period, were more interesting than most slaves or slavemasters--but they will most definitely be aware that slavery still exists. In a story set in the 1650s your characters may not believe that God really cares which set of church-related words people use, but they have surely been notified, probably by physical abuse, that other English-speaking people care very much about this. (One can hope Addison was exaggerating when he described how the little boy found St Anne's Lane, but would he have claimed the story was true if it hadn't happened to someone?) If you let a character in the past spout ideas that belong to the present, you need historical evidence that the person or someone like the person really said whatever you want your foresighted character to say.
5. Self-contradiction happens in fiction. The storytelling mind says or writes that something happened in the springtime and then notices that it would work better in the story if it happened in the winter. The character's name changes in mid-conversation. I once wrote about a scene that actually happened in a Camaro, which has a vestigial back seat, and, while routinely blurring all details, changed the car and had a character in the back seat of a Corvette, which has no back seat. But writers are supposed to read their work and fix these things before they allow other people to see their stories.
6. Product placement. Until you've actually signed a contract that specifies that a character drives a Corvette, it's probably better to keep your options open, anyway. He drives a sports car.
7. Annoying word usage quirks. You want things to affect or impress people, not "impact" them. A computer is running or it's not, but it's not capable of "responding" and never will be. Characters sharing the stage might be speaking with each other, but characters talking privately are talking to, or with, each other. Though of course a character might misuse these words to show that the character is the sort of person who misuses them in real life.