Gag Reflex

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Christian circuit produced a teacher who, by some accounts, was the second coming of Christ.

A short, soft-spoken man in his forties, this self-appointed shepherd of God’s flock attracted literally millions of believers to weeklong seminars in which he spoke using only an overhead projector for a prop.

The seminar delved into the basic causes of conflict in life, and he spent an awful lot of time talking about teenagers.

He used words like “temporal values,” and “moral impurity.” For example, he spent several sessions on how rock music alters the brain waves of teenagers, thus inciting them to moral impurity. Along with that moral impurity, a “temporal value system,” that is, placing value on things that don’t last -- like Gucci, money, cars, and Prada -- leads to massive conflict in one’s life.

A favorite metaphor of Mr. “Shepherd” was God’s “Umbrella of Protection.” According to the teaching, when a couple marries, the husband becomes the “umbrella.” The wife and the children are under his “umbrella of protection,” and when the devil throws his fiery darts at them, those darts are deflected by Dad’s umbrella.

So prevalent was this teaching that, almost thirty years later, when my friend had to replace the roof on her house, her mother (also a preacher’s wife) actually said to her, “You DO know why your roof is leaking? It’s because you’re sleeping with your boyfriend.” Never mind the fact that a catastrophic hailstorm had pitted the shingles on every house in her neighborhood. No, that roof was leaking because at age forty-five she had ripped some serious holes in her metaphorical umbrella by sleeping with a man outside of marriage.

I told her the only solution is to find a new boyfriend. If having sex causes leaky roofs, she needs to be sleeping with a roofing contractor.

Incidentally, seminar attendance took a nosedive in the mid-eighties, around the time God Himself revealed a new insight to the teacher. The “quiver full” principle stated that God commanded Christians to give up all methods of birth control in order to rapidly multiply and produce more conservative voters. My dad, to his credit, realized the guy was off his rocker and terminated our attendance at these seminars.

My friend and her boyfriend broke up a few months after the roof was replaced, further cementing in her mother’s mind the connection between the two. Sadly, it also meant that her mother was forced to find another affliction to use in her attempts to control her adult daughter’s behavior.

But isn’t that what we all do? We must attach meaning to maladies. Someone is diagnosed with lung cancer, and we immediately say, “He’s a smoker.” Cirrhosis of the liver – “drank too much.” Because if we can point to a character flaw in another that is causing the problem, then we can insure ourselves against ever having that problem.

Yesterday, it happened. My friend spent a great part of the day enduring tests to figure out why she coughs like a lifelong smoker every time she eats. The doctor thinks it’s acid reflux.

I can hear it now. Her mother will say it’s "the consumption,” the antiquated name for tuberculosis, which, during the early part of the twentieth century, was thought to have been caused by masturbation. Maybe she should find a new boyfriend and take her chances with a leaky roof again.

Personally, I think she’s probably just gagging up all the rules other people keep trying to cram down her throat.