From Miriam Williams's Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult, pp. 144-145:
It is not possible for me to list all the men that I went to bed with during this time. Much later, when I was out of the Family and trying to get rid of what I thought were ghosts, a Christian pastor told me to name each man I had been with, or visualize him, and then cast him out of me. I found that it was not only impossible, but tiring and depressing, and I abandoned the practice of casting out demons as soon as I arrived at the Monte Carlo days in my mind. I have never regretted the decision to abandon that techinique for ridding oneself of recollections, for I found it guilt producing and totally in conflict with what I really felt for these men at the time. They were not demons, or even bad spirits that possessed me; in fact, if I believed in possession at all (which I'm not sure I do), I possessed these men with a good spirit. What I did was *in* love and *for* love, and I think that faith is what protected me from the horrors and degradation that I witnessed in all the high-class call girls whom I met during that period of time...
The men I was with were not aware of my mission, however , and they each reacted differently. Nevertheless, I could group these men into the following categories:
(1) those who simply made use of the free sex (these were the men I have generally forgotten).
(2) those who genuinely liked me or who felt a romantic inclination toward me (these are the ones I remember best).
(3) those who found my spiritual message sexually stimulating (these were the ones I recall with pity or disappointment).
(4) those few who fell sadly in love with me but not the Family.
More to come, later. I also ordered for the main library on campus the memoirs of the eldest daughter of the founder of the Children of God, who left the movement, and the memoirs of the first anti-cult bounty hunter in the U.S., a tough evangelical nicknamed "Black Thunder" (though the latter they decided not to order since it's easily available from area libraries).
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2 comments:
Actually, I think this is pretty profound.
I grew to like the book, and Miriam Williams. She is honest about what she thought then and what she thinks now, and both come through in the book. That's a hard balance to have happen. She strikes me as a person who's very just.
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