Book Review: Lord I Want to Be Whole

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Lord I Want to Be Whole

Author: Stormie Omartian

Author's web page: https://www.stormieomartian.com/

Date: 2000

Publisher: Nelson

ISBN: 0-7852-6703-4

Length: 237 pages

Quote: “My definition of emotional health is having total peace about who you are, what you’re doing, and where you’re going, both individually and in relationship to those around you.”

Here’s another one of those Christian books that are very good for some Christians, and harmful for others, and likely to do at least as much harm as good because people recommend them indiscriminately.

It’s fair to say that the Bible writers are generally in favor of peace. However, Jesus warned that what He has to offer to some people was going to be “not peace but a sword,” and the Bible prophets had nothing good to say about those who “say Peace, peace, when there is no peace.”

Stormie Omartian knows what she’s talking about, and whom she’s talking to. Her audience for this book are addicts and sufferers from mood disorders. For them, trying to escape from reality into a feeling of “peace” may be part of retraining their brain, which may be a valuable exercise for them to use at a certain stage in medical treatment. For them and them alone, “having total peace” is likely to be a step toward emotional health.

For others, “having total peace” when we reflect on our day may be good. (Or it may not; a restless desire for spiritual growth might draw some of us closer to the Great Spirit.) “Having total peace...in relationship to those around you”? Feeling okay about it if “those around you” decide to test your peace of mind, as in the old song, by molesting your wife or husband? What about maintaining total peace with a family member who chooses to study the process of decay on food items under his bed? We should think it’s just totally copacetic if our mother is dying, or if our son the addict broke our arm while tearing through our purse in search of drug money? Would Omartian really consider that emotionally healthy? Somehow I don’t think she would...

“Stormie Omartian” is a stage name. “Omartian” was adopted from her second husband’s family name; “Stormie” was because, as a young singer, she was a turbulent, tempestuous, troubled young soul. She escaped from an emotionally abusive home into an unsuccessful premature marriage, got divorced, then became a Christian musician, but continued to struggle with addiction and emotional problems even as a Christian wife and mother...and felt like an “alien” among the superficially serene, unruffled church ladies...

Actually, close observation of too many church ladies reveals that they’re not unruffled. They’re afraid of the emotions they’d feel if they were really obeying “God rather than men.” Emotional and verbal bullying is rampant in churches. Pious bullies learned fast, during the Age of Therapy, to score off any noticeable emotion anyone else seemed to be feeling: “Yes, I can see that you are angry—that’s too much anger for a little thing like, ha ha, my throwing my trash in your back yard. Where’s all this anger really coming from? I sense that it’s really about something your Mama...” So these church ladies think they’re supposed to maintain a stony face or a horrible sharklike grin as they report their four-year-old’s near-death reaction to a new vaccine of dubious usefulness. If they were kidnapped and tortured by street terrorists they’d think they were supposed to keep on grinning like plastic daisies.

Omartian confesses in this book that her abusive life led to a point where she not only yelled “Shut up!” at a child whining for attention, but felt tempted to beat the child. Believing that part of her anger was residual rage at her sick, dysfunctional mother—or even just frustration because she’d not learned better ways to communicate with the child, she yearned for “total peace.” I empathize, but somehow I find it hard to believe that that’s all of the problem. What about the reaction she was having to the VAP she heard on the way out of church after prayer meeting? What about the guilt complex that kicked in when she saw someone who was equally qualified for a job or “break” that went to her? What about the effects of a supposedly “healthy diet” that happens to make her sicker than junkfood does?

Trying to sweep those annoyances under the rug in a futile grab for “total peace” does more harm than good. Relatively little harm is done by occasionally yelling “Shut up!” at a child, but some actual good could be done by addressing those other unharmonious notes in our lives. Maybe it’s not the child’s whining, but the overall level of noise in the environment that’s making Ma mad. Maybe, no matter how well that job at the airport pays, living near the airport isn’t worth it, and a different job, a longer commute, or even separation from Pa during the work week, is the key to “total peace.”

Too many simpering sisteren want to believe the Big Lie of the Age of Therapy: “There is no problem outside yourself. You can change, control, fix your own feelings! You can accept all these things that you can’t change!” And they try, and they try, and they lie, and they cry, and when the tears, fears, or rage do break through they build it up into a complete nervous breakdown and try to fix it with drugs...which not only makes pharmaceutical companies rich at working parents’ expense, but also pushes a few of these poor souls into real insanity.

They’d do better to focus on changing the things they can’t accept. Activists don’t always get what we want. Sometimes we make mistakes; and the people who have financial interests in maintaining the condition we can’t accept aren’t going to liiike us. On the other hand, whether “total peace” is what we feel about our spiritual lives or not, at least we don’t have to live with the guilt that comes from being part of the problem. At least, if our children’s whining or other noise gets on our nerves, we had taught them that noise never gets good results, so they don’t feel as if the world crashed down around their heads if on an especially trying day we screamed “Shut up!” Activism is not what comes to mind when we think of “total peace,” yet in some ways activist Christians probably experience more inner peace than the more passive variety.

Omartian reveals the shortcomings of the grab-for-peace approach on page 18. After telling a Christian counsellor about her unhappy childhood, she says, she was advised to “forgive” her mother. Oh, that sloppy phrasing...forgiveness was not possible; her mother had not repented. Nevertheless, Omartian “wanted to forgive my mother...‘God, I forgive my mother,’ I said...I felt [God’s] love at that moment more than I ever had before. The next morning...I awoke with no depression...I soon learned, however, that...I would feel that same anger...more often than I can begin to count.” Evidently the prayer/therapy session in which Omartian fantasized being able to forgive, or even pardon, her mother came at a key point in her recovery process; it attached itself to an emotional “high” and became a mood anchor Omartian was able to reuse many times—but real forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration, were impossible. Omartian only ever had a feel-good fantasy that never affected her actual relationship with her mother.

It could have been worse. People who are trying to forgive the unforgivable are at least unlikely to murder them.

The fantasy of pardon and reconciliation can be particularly helpful for those who feel guilty about the things they said or thought just before someone died. This fantasy is not helpful, and should never be suggested, when people’s emotional reactions have anything to do with ongoing abuses of justice. Church ladies have fantasized too much about handing out pardons to imaginary penitent abusers, thieves, bullies, even child molesters, while those evildoers were still actively doing evil.

“When I was fifteen years old, I was talking to the guidance counsellor about my next year’s class schedule when he suddenly stood up, reached over his desk, and grabbed me. I was so embarrassed I actually gagged; that put him off long enough to give me a chance to back away fast...He’s still employed at the school my younger sister attends today.”

“You should pray for God’s help to forgive everyone...”

Wrong. Together with any sane people who may attend your church, if possible, you should run not walk down to that school and denounce the lousy creep. Failure to do this may lead not only to another teenybopper’s being hurt more than you were, but to its being partly your fault. No Christian should dare waste time on the Forgiveness Fantasy, as far as active evildoers are concerned. When they’re in prison, dead, or at least physically disabled (if only by old age) such that they’re unlikely even to fantasize about doing any more evil, then we can indulge in the Forgiveness Fantasy.

Even Moses was authorized to delegate some of his responsibilities to others. Hypertensive men who are prone to “anger addiction,” or addicts who are likely to backslide if they hold a bad memory in mind for very long, may need to protect their emotional feelings as well as to do what they can to protect others from the kind of evil that’s been done to them. But church friends who rush to stifle their memories and murmur “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace, are still part of that problem. It would be better if the church friends could say truthfully, “It’s all right for you to relax: the rest of us are working on the problem.”

Only when we’re clear about this, I think, are Christians ready to use Lord I Want to Be Whole. It’s not for everybody, and it should never be used to stifle dissent or complaints of real abuses. Introverts shouldn’t touch it until they’ve spent some time becoming consciously aware that they are “whole.” It is for people living with mood disorders and/or drug reactions.

Omartian has so been there. As a minor “celebrity” she’s gone through her recovery process in a more public than usual way, as Johnny Cash did for the older generation. She can tell us what got her through those times of “I’m sober, I’m clean, now how (short of having myself locked up, lobotomized, or just euthanized) do I make sure I won’t start hitting the baby?” She’s worked her program and worked out a way to explain it more completely, more coherently, more grammatically, with more appropriate Scriptures, than some other Christian writers had done.

For its size this is a very big book. Omartian discusses confession, repentance, pardon (and the Forgiveness Fantasy), renouncing sins, taking care of her health, receiving healing and empowering gifts as an active Christian, and more. Each section is written clearly and briefly. Most sections contain a full page of appropriate “demon”-banishing Scriptures.

Omartian avoids, too, several mistakes into which other Christian recovery counsellors, who were primarily talkers more than writers, fell when writing their books. In this book there’s no padding with unnecessary stories (“This is what I said to Tracy, who was held as a hostage in Iran for more than a year, and everyone shares Tracy’s experience of feeling homesick...”—No, actually they don’t), no little poems that sound just like a fourteen-year-old fumbling for words in therapy, no comedy. Omartian has a lot to say and uses no unnecessary words to say it.

If you’re a Christian struggling with addiction, reactions to prescription medication and/or physical diseases, or clinical depression or anxiety disorders, this book is for you. If you teach, counsel, live or work with people in that situation, this book can help you. Just remember that, no, it’s not anything like “equally” applicable to everyone who disagrees with you.