5
Men, Women, and Children
Creative Initiative argued that the paradox of Jesus actually
contained the essential scientific truth of creation: people were free only to obey the
laws of nature and the will of God. Thus, they had to give up their egocentric wills and
become slaves of God and God's order before they could achieve real freedom. Indeed,
integrating apparent opposites was a continuing theme in all of Creative Initiative's
work. They hoped to achieve sociocentric ends through homocentric means; they perceived a
monistic universe and populated it with dualistic human beings; and they built a movement
on science and Socratic inquiry and then linked it to a religion based on mystical
revelation and philosophic dogma. None of these paradoxes was more complex, however, than
the one by which a religion, started and led by women determined to save the earth from
men, was transformed into a sect that promoted the traditional roles of wife and mother
and expected women to eventually relinquish their major leadership role to men.
Masculine and Feminine
Creative Initiative believed that the transition from female to male
leadership could take place because the men would have undergone the transformation
process and in doing so would have acquired the necessary female characteristics. Only
someone who had gone through the transformation process would be able to act as both the
feminine and the masculine because he then would have "brought into perfect balance
the masculine and feminine components which are present in every human being." The
model for this perfect combination of the two genders was Jesus who "demonstrated and
exemplified this perfect balance."[1]
Creative Initiative borrowed the idea that a mature adult combined both
masculine and feminine elements from the work of C. G. Jung. Jung contended that both men
and women were born with a latent image of the opposite sex. He called the feminine aspect
of men the "anima" and the masculine aspect of women the "animus." He
thought people developed these images through their contacts with members of the opposite
sex, reaching genuine maturity only when they had learned to use the qualities of the
anima and animus appropriately.[2]
In Creative Initiative work the masculine and feminine principles, as
they were usually called, were vital concepts in describing appropriate behavior for
members. In theory Creative Initiative believed that each person had to cultivate those
properties usually associated with the opposite sex in order to become whole. Their
material, however, stressed gender distinctions so aggressively that it was easy to forget
that the ultimate goal was gender synthesis. For example, a part of the A seminar in 1973
described male and female personality characteristics as sexual analogs. According to the
course, "Even the genitals bear this out. Woman is innerâthe male is
outer. Because the feminine is subjective and the masculine objective, we can also say
that the feminine is passive, a receiver, and the masculine is active, a doer." The
material went on to say that women's "passive, subjective nature allows her to
receive and to let the creative birth process take place within her," but men,
deprived of this biological opportunity to create life, created in the world. That, said
the course, was why the great music, art, poetry, design, and even cooking had been
produced by men.[3] The categorization of masculine and feminine
characteristics in course material was extensive and often included elaborate charts in
which the various traits were lined up in columns, sometimes with the "given"
trait paired with its "misuse." For example, the "given" feminine
trait of "nurturing" was paired to its "misuse" as
"smothering." This pair in turn was contrasted with the "given"
masculine trait of "aggressiveness" and its negative counterpart,
"domination."[4]
Yet in Creative Initiative the ideal was some kind of synthesis of the
masculine and feminine. They did not mean, however, that the mature person was an equal
balance of the two. When it was properly struck, the balance was always within the
boundaries set by traditional gender roles. On the one hand, "A woman who is too
unbalanced on the feminine side," explained a course curriculum, "could be very
passive, sweet, helpless, dependent [and] would probably have a hard time standing on her
own two feet." On the other hand, "If she denied her femininity and functioned
mainly out of her masculine side, she would probably be one of those bossy, domineering,
aggressive kind of women of which we all know at least one."[5]
Women had to somehow be feminine but not too feminine, and at the same time be masculine
but not too masculine. The same course curriculum ended by saying:
And as for women, there are times when she must use her animus nature.
There are times when it's appropriate to lead out and be aggressive. There are times when
she needs to think logically and rationally. In fact, this is exactly what women must do
todayâbe willing to be actively involved in the objective
worldâto use their minds and their strength. But the catch is, she must do it
in a feminine way, motivated by her deepest feminine instinctâcaring.[6]
This basically Jungian view of human nature had a profound effect
on Emilia and, through her, on the entire movement.[7] She tended
to see individuals within the movement in terms of Jungian types and based much of the
underlying ideology of Creative Initiative on gender role models legitimated by, if not
actually derived from, a Jungian world view. As we noted earlier, Emilia explained to an
advanced seminar in 1978 that Harry was the Jungian archetype of the wise old man. He was
not, however, the dominant maleâthat role, she said, was played in one
generation by another leader, Jim Burch, and in the next generation by her son Richard.
She told the group that "since Harry was not the dominant male, I had to move into
position and function as if I were a dominant male until the transition to Community could
take place."[8] But once that transition had occurred, Emilia
explained, she and the women who had founded and led the New Religion movement during its
first decade had to step aside. Men had been stymied because they had limited their
dominance to war and science, but the time had come for "the Dominant Male archetype
[to] move beyond the physical and mental dimensions to become the Spiritual Warrior, or
we've had it." "The women cannot finish this mission," she explained,
"because we don't carry this archetype of Spiritual Warrior. In the world, a man must
manifest it."[9]
Because they equated the receptive with women and the feminine and the
active with men and the masculine, Creative Initiative philosophy taught that women had
almost always been first to understand new ideas in the history of humankind. Indeed,
Emilia liked to claim that "the very first, most primitive cells were feminine in
function and form," and in a grand leap of logic, she concluded, "that gives us
some reasons as to why girls develop earlier than boys and we are considered older and
wiser."[10] From Eve who tempted Adam, to Emilia and the first
ten women in the New Religion, it was the feminine principle that was open to receive
change, but it was the masculine that actually acted to bring that change about.[11]
Emilia developed a fairly elaborate theory about the female life-cycle,
much of which appears to have been based on her own personal history. This theory
dominated her ideas about the proper role of women through the mid-1970s and was a vital
component in the overall philosophical structure of Creative Initiative. According to
Emilia's theory, the first stage an adult woman entered was that of "lover." In
this stage she surrendered the independence she had enjoyed as an unmarried woman and
devoted herself completely to her husband from whom, in return, she expected reciprocal
dedication. The key element in the first stage was the woman's willingness to give up
herself for her husbandâto "capitulate." The second stage was
motherhood, in which the woman learned to love life through the life she had created. It
was also in her role as mother that a woman cultivated "her certain talents, innate
talents, on how to civilize and humanize the race so that [it] no longer will kill life
but will be for life."[12]
It was, however, the third stage that was the key to the unique role of
women in the transition to the third age and the salvation of the human race. In the third
stage, said Emilia, the woman had to detach herself from the bonds she had forged in the
first two stages: "She must detach herself from any demands of being loved by the
lover. . . . She must surrender that, releasing the man so that he can help heal the
planet. She must release her attachment to her children." In the third stage the
woman had a new function, one that had been "predestined from the beginning of
time," which was "releasing totally and aligning herself with everything that is
for life."[13] The third-stage woman would transfer "her
dependency on man to a dependency on a supra power, intelligence, will." The
relationship she had once had with a man she would then have with "a power higher
than man," who would become "the great love of her life."[14]
So profound was this transition to the third stage that it required new
nomenclature. If one broke down the word woman into its componant parts (a favorite
Creative Initiative explicatory device, sometimes employed, as here, in a way that had
nothing to do with the actual etymology of the word), one got "wo[e]-man." But
the third-stage woman, the Third Age woman, would not bring woe to men but would be a
source of blessings and therefore needed a new name. Creative Initiative called her
Blessman. "To be the Blessman," they explained, "has a different ring to it
from being the WO-man. To be the Blessman would be to embrace and become one with the
living myth."[15] In fact, the word Blessman was used
for a number of years as the complimentary closing in movement correspondence.
Yet once more the ambivalence that marked so much of Emilia's life
expressed itself in her definition of Blessman. She was a charismatic and socially dynamic
woman who had married a somewhat shy and introspective man; believing that woman should
play a traditional role in the family, her entire adult life had been an attempt to
reconcile emotionally and intellectually the clash between her assumptions and her
reality. Carried away by the vision of women as the avant-garde of the New Religion and
the new evolutionary stage, Emilia painted a picture of women who had moved beyond their
husbands and families to devote all their energy to God's will. When it actually came to
defining how this new woman, the Blessman, would act, however, the extreme rhetoric
translated into a much more traditional reality.
According to Creative Initiative, the Blessman would use her special
female gifts of nurturing and caring for life to nourish her relationships with others,
especially her family; she would not blame others for family problems but would look to
"her own state of mind to discover what is going on with her."[16]
She would be aware that she was "the servant, the giver." That is, she would
give without expecting to be appreciated. She would give because she knew there was a
need: "A good servant gives and gives freely to whatever is needed. She is not
preoccupied with the question: Will I be appreciated, recognized, or thanked?" This
position was a variant of the surrender theme that characterized surrendering the
individual will to the will of God. By accepting the needs of her family as legitimate in
and of themselves and by finding satisfaction in fulfilling them, the new woman was
practicing an analog of her relationship with God. She was, however, at the same time
freeing herself from her dependency on her husband. No longer doing things for his
approval, the Blessman was freer to express her feelings of both love and anger toward
him.[17] Although they never quoted the poem, Creative
Initiative certainty embraced the theory of William Ross Wallace who wrote, "The hand
that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world." The poet whom they did quote
frequently was Wallace's Victorian contemporary, Matthew Arnold, who predicted, "If
ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the
benefit and good of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known."[18] The sentiments of Victorian aesthetes were congenial to Creative
Initiative's view of women because the movement had a basically Victorian conception of
sex, sex roles, and the family. Much of Creative Initiative's views of women appears to
have been a projection of Emilia's personal history and ideals, which were in fact of
Victorian origins. She had been born and reared just after the turn of the century in an
aristocratic Mexican environment, although an American father and schooling in the United
States enabled her to escape the most extreme elements of that machismo culture. As a
powerful and magnetic woman and a natural leader she had, nevertheless, to create for
herself, and by herself, an environment in which to exercise her abilities and still be
true to the values of her past.
Emilia found her solution within the New Religion as a spiritual leader.
Like Victorian women who also made virtues out of necessities, the new religion
acknowledged the secondary role of women in the world and their primary role in the home
and then sought to show how they could exploit their positions to bring about the desired
end. "It may be a long time yet before we shall be permitted to share temporal
leadership and policy making at all levels," she wrote, "but spiritual
leadership and power is ours for the taking at all levels, and we must assume it while we
can still hope to turn the tide."[19] Emilia was able to
attract other women to her new vision because they shared many of her life experiences,
had similar problems, and sought similar answers. In the early 1960s, before real economic
opportunities were open to women, and for women who had been raised to value being wives
and mothers, becoming part of Creative Initiative both justified their preexisting beliefs
and gave them a sense that they could move forward to work for the betterment of all
humankind.
The women Emilia rallied to her cause may not have had power, but they
did have a lot of discretionary, time they could devote to the work. "As economically
emancipated housewives, living in a time of frozen foods and gadgetry, we know that
conditions in the world must be changed and that it is our obligation to effect that
change," announced a
flyer for an early seminar.[20] Creative
Initiative always worked on the assumption that the women in the movement would be free to
devote all their nonfamily time to the work. Indeed, theirs was a movement by and for
women who did not work. For the first dozen years or so after Emilia's revelation in 1962,
the group was completely dominated by women. "Men," as one participant
remembers, "were almost incidental." Most of their meetings were held during the
day, which made it extremely difficult for any interested working woman to participate.
Moreover, as the same woman wrote, "a great deal of pressure was placed to reevaluate
why a woman was working and to quit."[21] A workshop series
put on especially for young mothers assured them that "the crisis in the world today
is a result of the breakdown of relationshipsâthe traditional role of
mother" and urged them to resist the temptation to betray their true natures by
looking for a place of prestige and power in the business world.[22]
Although the movement was never comfortable with working women, and
working women (there were some) were never very comfortable in the movement, by the
mid-1970s the women's movement had changed public attitudes sufficiently to make some
concessions necessary. A speech to a women's gathering in 1974 acknowledged that women had
moved out into areas once dominated by men, but "in the process [the woman] has
abandoned or devalued her place of natural functioning." The speaker did go on to
assure her audience, "this is not to say that woman must return to being tied to the
home, stuck in roles in which she feels unfulfilled, but simply that woman must claim her
feminine side, her natural side and make it conscious."[23] As
late as 1977, nevertheless, they were using a guided meditation called "Arriving
Home" which asked the man to "imagine in your mind's eye that you are driving
home from work" but told the woman, "picture yourself in the house. It is late
afternoon . . . You remember that your husband will be home shortly."[24]
The group built their theory of a special female strength using standard
Victorian ideas about the nature of women. First, women bore children. "Every woman's
task is to be a priestess to the flow of life," said an early paper, "to
procreate, nurture, and fan the fires of creation.[25] From that
undeniable biological fact they then deduced that women had a special aptitude for love.
The narrator of a 1966 program told her audience that love "has been given to us as a
gift that accompanies our role of giving birth to the race of man."[26]
Love was defined not as doing but as giving, as a form of self-sacrifice:
"Woman's basic self derives from her basic function: to love, to give of herself, and
through giving, realize herself."[27]
There was a curiously contradictory element to Creative Initiative's
ideas about married love. They were quite sure that the family was a model for the world
and that the love between spouses was analogous to the love of the individual for God, but
they were not sure whether individuals developed a love for God by experiencing love for
people or if a love for others followed from the love of God. "We learn to love God
through the workout of learning to love people," said the syllabus to a 1982 marriage
course, "therefore marriage is the perfect workshop for learning to love with
totality."[28] But Emilia told people that real love between
spouses occurred "only when both partners are committed to loving God first. You
relate as 'sons' of God, 'brothers' committed to the same goal."[29]
The love a woman felt toward her husband was defined as a "passive
love" that taught her how to give; the love she felt toward her children taught her
"pure love."[30] Women were told that just as they all
had given love to their husbands and children they now had to give love to the whole
world, to "give totally to a self-transcending cause." The group taught that
giving love was the process of "civilizing."[31]
"The only two things women can do better than men," wrote one leader in her
personal notes, "is to bear children and civilize."[32]
"Civilization" was used as a contrast to materialism and war, considered male in
origin. A speaker at a 1969 women's meeting illustrated this point with an anecdote about
her own children. Her sons had built a fort in the backyard, and one day her daughter went
out and put curtains in the fort's windows, much to the disgust of the boys. "She
was," said her mother, "trying to civilize at that early age."[33]
Putting curtains on the windows of the fort was a particularly apt
example for women in Creative Initiative because one of the qualities that women were
supposed to have to a greater degree than men was an appreciation of beauty. Beauty could
have a functional role in helping people appreciate the mystical, or it could be seen as
an important part in creating the right atmosphere for recruiting, but beauty could also
be an expression of the woman's sense of self. In making the move toward taking
responsibility for herself and for the work, one woman explained that the first thing she
did was to "look at how I appeared." "It was quite a blow," she
admitted, "20 pounds too heavy, no lipstick, very comfortable with 'Plain-Jane-Me.'
"[34] Such an aesthetic self-assessment was not incidental but
part and parcel of the process by which women discovered their special abilities. Women
were told to evaluate all the visual aspects of themselves and their environment,
"home decorâcolor, objects, dress, make-up, attitude, walk,
stance," and others in the group were urged to share with a new woman their views on
her appearance.[35] It is hardly surprising then that a newspaper
reporter described one spokeswoman as "wearing a chic lime green frock and looking
more like a fashion model than a crusader."[36]
The beauty that women could create contrasted with the ugliness that was
so often the product of male activities. In Emilia's mind there was no doubt that men were
in fact the source of most of the world's problems. "This is the century of
women," she wrote in a personal reflection. Man, she continued, had been
"emancipated from the child bearing function and been allowed to develop his psychic
spiritual function," but he had not done a very good job of it. "On the whole,
except for rare individuals," she wrote, "men have rejected the prototypes of
excellence in the domain of human nature. For the most part they are arrogant, violent
destructive beasts." The time had come for women to "move into enlightenment and
to declare to men what God wills, or they, men, will destroy the earth." She wrote
that men had been poor stewards of the earth and should no longer be the "rulers,
priests and guides of life."[37] Although such powerfully
antimale sentiments never made their way into any of the movement's course material, they
do reflect a profound ambivalence in Emilia's feelings toward men. On the surface, she and
the other women in the movement were always loving and supportive of their spouses, but
underlying that was the explicit belief that women were morally superior. There were two
kinds of ethics, a movement spokeswoman told a reporter in 1975, and Creative Initiative
had developed a "new feminism based on the need to stop acting on male ethics based
on greed, power and war, and form new female ethics."[38]
Dramatic readings at an early presentation designed to recruit new women
into the movement captured the richly female-centered nature of the work. The audience was
told that women contained "those watching, waiting, loving characteristics of
awareness that know intuitively the needs, the conditions, the relationships for beauty,
harmony, joy, movement, well-beingâthe climb toward God," and that each
woman had those qualities because she had "built into her body . . . the chalice, the
response to sunlight, the living well of water filled to overflowing."[39] Creative Initiative truly believed that anatomy was destiny, not
merely for the individual woman but for the whole world. Through their use of Victorian
gender stereotypes, however, the women of Creative Initiative were not locking themselves
into the limited domestic sphere. They were saying instead that the whole world was their
domestic sphere and that just as they could bring peace and love to their own families,
they could do the same for all humankind.
Marriage
In 1952, almost a full decade before her vision, Emilia articulated a
model of male-female relationships that remained constant throughout the history of the
movement. Speaking to a continuation seminar (in that period, a seminar that followed
Jesus as Teacher), she said that boys should be reared to have a "code of
responsibility" toward women, and that girls should not be taught to think of
themselves as sex objects. Girls' self-image, she said, "should be that of the saint,
as in bygone days, so that man will do anything, slay all dragons, to get the worthy
woman!" The most important thing, she added, was for girls "to be educated into
the art of being good homemakers and how to handle men rightly; they ought to be educated
to be feminine."[40] They were to be, in other words,
traditional wives and mothers.
Creative Initiative believed that the family was the paradigm for the
world: it was primarily the woman's job to make the family work, just as it was primarily
women who would launch the third age for all people. "If we as women want a better
world we had better start with ourselves," they were told. "We can change the
atmosphere affecting first our family situation and then moving out into the world. What
is going on at home, is going on in the world." Their language seemed to leave little
hope that the unmarried would be able to achieve wholeness as human beings because, as
they explained, "to learn to love reality and our fellow man is the created purpose
of a human, and the marriage is key in promoting this discovery."[41]
For obvious reasons, then, single people frequently did not feel welcome or comfortable
within the group. The movement considered single people, especially single women,
incomplete, and at various points in their history Creative Initiative either excluded
unmarried people altogether or relegated them to special singles groups.[42]
This practice was particularly hard on those who wanted to participate in the various
ceremonies usually carried on in families, or by groups of families. One such woman
remembers "having to invite myself to dinner" so that she could celebrate the
Sunday ritual.[43]
Like so much else in Creative Initiative's program, the stress on the
importance of uninterrupted marriage appears to have been a projection of Emilia's
personal experience that struck a responsive chord in other women. She had always taken a
personal interest in helping couples avoid divorce and, as the movement grew and became
increasingly institutionalized, more formalized methods were developed to help preserve
and strengthen marriages. Making a "lifetime commitment" to marriage became one
of the milestones in the Creative Initiative involvement process. The stress on lifetime
monogamy must have been especially appealing to Creative Initiative women, not only
because it reinforced traditional social values but because many of them had given up the
opportunity for outside employment and were therefore economically dependent on their
husbands. By making marriage a core value, Creative Initiative was, in effect, rewarding
its women members for the economic opportunities they had foregone.
In order to help couples build the kind of "responsible"
marriage that would allow the wives, and eventually the husbands, to participate actively
in the work of the movement, Creative Initiative conducted numerous marriage courses. Like
the various self-assessment courses, these experiences were designed to get people to look
at themselves and their relationships honestly, build communication, and strengthen
commitmentâto the marriage, to the community, and to the will of God. Some of
the courses were offered at a beginning level and were actually recruiting devices. Others
were longer, more complex, and designed to complement the married couples' education in
other Creative Initiative beliefs. In all cases they emphasized the importance of giving
over getting.
Like all other Creative Initiative programs, the marriage courses were
constantly undergoing revision, but for the most part they followed a series of steps that
sought to help the participants move through a process of insight and renewed commitment.
The courses usually began with an introspective session in which both partners sought to
identify "areas of resentment, dependency, hurt, conflict, guilt, non-giving,
patterned behavior, and all other manifestations of hate." This was followed by a
lesson in conflict resolution in which the individuals were taught to see that their anger
at their partner was their own problem, to look for the sources of that anger in their own
psyches, and then to resolve both the feelings and the issue that had caused them. Next,
the courses tried to help people to recognize the frame of reference, based on personal
history or "conditioning," that each person had in the marriage. Finally, they
were guided to find what was "unique and precious" about their marriage and
hopefully to realize that the marriage was "a training ground for living the Life of
the Spirit."[44]
The material from the marriage courses stressed the importance of
communication, sharing, and conflict resolution. From all appearances such techniques were
gender-neutral and placed no special obligation on either spouse to fulfill a particular
role or make any concession to the other based on sex. Participants were always instructed
to come to their own conclusions on such potentially gender-related issues as housework
and child rearing. The even-handed approach of the marriage courses is somewhat surprising
in light of the group's outspoken support of gender-linked character traits that were
supposed to express themselves in specific behavior patterns. There was nothing in the
marriage courses that would have prevented a very traditional division of labor between
husband and wife, but there was also very little that seemed to advocate it. Other
evidence, however, indicates that this neutral appearance did not in fact reflect reality.
As might be expected from the group's beliefs about masculine and feminine
characteristics, women were frequently advised to take a passive but controlling position
within the marriage.
In various courses that involved only women, participants were told that
women were the ones who actually set the conditions that determined whether or not a
marriage would succeed and therefore they had to take on the responsibility to make it a
"creative marriage." There were no "Prince Charmings" to rescue them
from their problems, just as there were no great leaders or messiahs to rescue the world.
Women had to shoulder the burden.[45] Their control of the marriage
was not, however, straightforward. Handwritten notes, evidently taken by one of the
participants in a marriage course, indicate that loving a husband was the same thing as
"training" him to be good, "encouraging" him to seek enlightenment,
and "pushing" him into the Kingdom.[46] The same tone can
be found in another set of participant notes that seem to say that a woman could (should?)
use sex as a reward or punishment for her husband's behavior. This second set of notes
observed that consent is necessary for sex, therefore, the woman "can get the man to
do practically anything you want, so want the highest for him."[47]
The use of affection as a device to control men, even for their own
good, does not appear to have been either widely advocated or used (although the fact that
it turned up in two sets of notes is suggestive).
Much more common was the advice that a woman capitulate to her
husband's demands if she were otherwise unable to reach an agreement with him. The
admonition "resist not evil," was interpreted within marriage to mean
"resist not, period!" "We violate the laws of relationship when we
resist," members were told. "For example, if you've a very egocentric husband,
something has to give, and it will have to be you."[48]
Although men may have been advised to capitulate to their wives, we
found no evidence of such in the historical record. All the examples we found consisted of
women surrendering their resistance to their husbands. When they did so, they were often
quite pleased with the act and the consequences. In a talk to a low-level course, one
Creative Initiative leader told her audience of women how she dealt with a situation in
which she wanted to go out to the movies but her husband wanted to stay home. "I
would," she said, "respond by staying home with himâfixing
something special for dinner and just relaxing with him." If she really had a need to
go to the movie, she said, she would make arrangements to go see it with a friend during a
matinee in the middle of the week.[49]
Not all women responded to the Creative Initiative philosophy by
capitulating. Some seemed to find that the teachings gave them a sense of independent
legitimacy that allowed them to claim their own feelings, although those feelings were
often expressed in doing traditional woman's work around the home for its own sake, not
because they expected some kind of reward from others. It may be that this also involved
capitulation, if not to one's husband, then at least to the role of wife.[50]
Just as the family was a paradigm for the world, the role of wife within the family was a
paradigm for individual behavior in the world. The woman's special feminine qualities were
given their primary arena for expression in the family. By bringing love, beauty, and
morality to her family the wife could take the first step toward bringing them to the
world. By learning to capitulate, both to others and to her role, she could rehearse and
prepare herself for the necessity of capitulating to the will of God.
Sexuality
The paradoxical concept of victory through capitulation extended even
into the bedroom. For a number of years Creative Initia-tive used a book by Dr. Marie N.
Robinson called The Power of Sexual Surrender . Like the group, Robinson placed
great stress on women fulfilling their natural feminine roleâthe crux of her
book on how women could overcome problems of frigidity. Robinson, for example, talked
about a "masculine woman" who held an important position in business, earned
three times as much as her husband, and was incapable of a "normal" vaginal
orgasm.[51] Robinson said that the secret to achieving a mature
orgasm was learning how to surrender. She believed that sexual relations were a reflection
of the greater world, reminding her reader that "in sexual intercourse, as in life,
man is the actor, woman the passive one, the receiver, the acted upon." By accepting
that reality and surrendering to it body and soul, Robinson said that a woman could
achieve the psychological freedom necessary to respond physically to the act of love.[52]
The movement used Robinson's book because it reflected their own view of
women. Women could achieve what they wanted not by fighting for it but by surrendering. In
an important sense, however, it is misleading to judge Creative Initiative's attitudes by
their use of Robinson's book because Robinson stressed sexual satisfaction as a positive
goal much more than did the movement. Creative Initiative's neo-Victorian model of
feminine behavior included an inherently ambivalent attitude toward sexuality. Most course
references to sex were fairly straightforward, advising that the couples look at their
expectations and assumptions about sex and try to consider the other person's feelings
instead of merely their own. Yet underlying this reasonable advice, there was a subtext
that defined appropriate sexual practices very narrowly and implied that sex itself, it
not actually bad, was a temporary desire that would be left behind as people moved higher
up the evolutionary ladder.
Creative Initiative strongly rejected the unbridled behavior that grew
out of the sexual revolution, and leaders of marriage courses were told to "present
the community stand on marriage and sex clearly and firmly," and informed
participants, that "our stand is not today's norm for the rest of the world."[53] Creative Initiative believed that sex achieved a special role only
within the context of a monogamous marriage. When each person in a monogamous relationship
was limited to one other sexual partner, something special was constructed from something
universal. They claimed that fornication and adultery were wrong because they detracted
from this uniqueness and substituted breadth of experience for depth of experience:
"How many instruments can one learn to play in a lifetime?"[54]The
clearest evidence of their position on female sexuality was their use of Dr. Melvin
Anchell's book, Understanding Your Sexual Needs .[55]
Creative Initiative admitted that the book was controversial and cautioned that they did
not subscribe to everything in it. They did, however, particularly recommend chapter 2.[56] They suggested the book in many of their classes and received
permission from the publisher to reproduce and distribute the favored chapter in their
courses. Couched in the folksy, anecdotal style so popular in mass-market self-improvement
books, chapter 2 related the story of Patty and Bob, an "average young couple."
The couple was having problems because after seven years of marriage and four children,
Patty had lost interest in sex. Anchell explained that the couple's problems lay in the
fact that they had accepted the popular notion that women were as sexually responsive as
men, when in fact they were not. There is a "natural female indifference to the sex
act," Anchell explained. On the average, he continued, men are capable of three
orgasms per week after age thirteen. Women, however, cannot even have a "genuine
orgasm" until their mid-twenties. Between their mid-twenties and menopause, Anchell
wrote, most women are capable of a maximum of two orgasms per month, whereas after
menopause a woman "gradually returns to a neutral or passive attitude."[57]
In other chapters in his book, Anchell railed against "sexpert
professors" who claimed that women had libidos as active as men's, he attacked
premarital sex, denounced the sexual revolution in general and "free-love
hippies" in particular, and referred to oral sex as a "perversion." He
implied quite strongly that a woman with a job could not have either a satisfactory family
life or a normal sex life. Anchell blamed most of society's sexual problems on the media,
which glorified female sexuality and thus misled both men and women into false
expectations.[58] It would be difficult to imagine a book on
sexuality more at odds with the trends of the time in which it was writtenâor
more in tune with the basic beliefs of Creative Initiative.
As the use of Anchell's book implies, Creative Initiative did not equate
sexuality with marital happiness. They considered sex between spouses a legitimate
expression of marital love so long as it did not venture into excess, but sexual pleasure
was not a goal to be sought of and for itself. Seeking sexual pleasure per se was
considered "lust," one of the most frequently condemned human passions.
"Lust is an experience of aberrated sexual energy," they believed. "It is a
dead end and connected to a powerful pleasure complex," which, if left unchecked,
"would become obsessive and destroy the individual."[59]
Their writings often referred to sexuality as "the procreative drive," implying
that the primary purpose of sex was reproduction. In a discussion of the Old Testament
myths, the group explained that Sodom was destroyed because "its name became
synonymous with aberrated sex," and that "homosexuality is a violation of
correct functioning because it produces no offspring."[60]
In a general sense, it is probably accurate to say that Creative
Initiative understood reproduction to be the primary purpose of sex, although it also had
its place as an expression of love. Yet the movement never took the Roman Catholic view
that each act of sexual intercourse had to carry with it the possibility of conception.
Quite the contrary. Not only was nonprocreative sex never condemned but, in fact, the
movement placed great stress on the efficacy of birth control and abortion as a means of
controlling world population. As an ecologically oriented group, they appear to have been
heavily influenced by the zero population growth movement of the early 1970s, and a draft
document from that period recommended universal voluntary birth control, to be achieved by
"massive education, tax penalties for more than two children, free sterilization,
intensified research on safe and convenient contraceptives, and unconditional
abortion."[61]
The most direct formal confrontation with the group's ideas about sex
came in the C seminar when participants used the "four absolutes" of the Oxford
Group to confess their transgressions. The second of these four was "absolute
purity," which was "to be looked at with reference to sex." They taught
that cultural taboos existed in order to impose some control on sex; otherwise it might
get out of hand because "man does not seem to be naturally monogamous." This
comment implies that in the area of sex Creative Initiative inverted its basic
philosophical assumption that nature was good and that people had only to discover the
reality of human nature to know how to act. It would seem that Emilia believed (since the
four absolutes came into the movement through her) that people were "naturally"
inclined to unacceptable sexual behavior on which the group had to impose a strict code of
conduct. To help people discover and confess sexual behavior that might have produced
guilt or shame, the group listed seven problem areas: (1) masturbation; (2) incest; (3)
childhood sex play; (4) premarital sex; (5) "sexual abnormalities," including,
but not limited to, oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, and lesbianism; (6) pornography;
(7) adultery and fornication.[62] Thus, Creative
Initiative tried to confine sexual expression to the narrowest possible area and held out
the possibility that members might eventually transcend it altogether. After marriage
"normal" sexual relations between spouses were acceptable, but any action that
seemed to expand the boundaries of sexual expression and thereby treat sex as an area of
human creativity was discouraged. Sex was not to be banned, as for Catholic religious; nor
was it to be used in a way open to the possibility of procreation, as for the Catholic
laity; rather it was to be accepted as a necessary part of the natural order, good only so
long as it was kept under control. The excessive pursuit of sex, like the excessive
pursuit of beauty or material goods, could lead a person away from doing God's will by
becoming a god itself.
The deemphasis on sex seems to have been linked to the movement's
version of the Freudian notion that sublimated sexual energy could express itself through
creativity. In one course on the teachings of Jesus there was a long section addressing
the issue of lust. Among the questions posed for discussion was: "For the person who
had decided to lead the religious life, what is the highest use of the procreative
energy?" The desired answer was to "direct these energies toward creative action
that benefits all life. This can only be done by loving other people and all life more
than desiring our own immediate pleasures and self-interested pursuits."[63] The trick, however, was not to try to suppress the sexual
driveâthat, said Emilia, would only "reinforce the unconscious and focus
attention there." She told the people in the movement that if they redirected their
energy, the sex drive would eventually atrophy.[64]
The idea that libido would decrease by itself was borrowed from Gerald
Heard who viewed sex and pain as manifestations of redirected psychic energy that would
diminish as people moved up the evolutionary ladder and became more spiritual.[65] The sexual drive decreased as the level of psychic awareness
increased. One did not achieve a higher spiritual level by repressing sex; rather one
worked to fulfill the will of God and the diminution of the sexual drive was seen as a
result, not a cause, of leading a successful religious life. Some people in the movement
whispered about high leaders in the "hub" group sleeping in separate beds and,
although it was not a topic of formal discussion, assumed that they had little if any sex.[66] A young woman who had grown up as a teenager in Creative Initiative
wrote, "everybody knew . . . if you were truly a member of CIF (3rd seminar level
plus commitment) then you would not engage in oral sex with your spouse."[67] Because there was the widespread belief that the leaders were
"better," in the sense that they had achieved greater "totality" in
dedicating their entire lives to the will of God, what they did was presumed to be the
appropriate model for others. These leaders not only believed that sex was inversely
proportional to spirituality, they lived it ("the message and the messenger are
one"). The result was, according to one member, that many of the people in the
movement suffered from "severe sexual hangups."
The downplaying of sex, even within marriage, and the apparent lack of
sexual contact among members not married to each other, had the very functional effect of
focusing more of the participants' energy on the movement. Raymond Trevor Bradley has
argued that in communes with charismatic leaders particularized relationships are usually
suppressed while generalized love is promoted. This could be promoted either through
celibacy or nonexclusive sexual relationships.[68] Given Creative
Initiative's strong family orientation and moral rigorism, sexual promiscuity was
obviously out of the question. Pure celibacy was equally untenable for a group that
stressed marriage and children. Thus, they promoted celibacy for the unmarried and looked
forward to refocusing their sexual energies as they became increasingly involved in the
spirituality of the third age.
Men
Not surprisingly, given the distinctly feminine focus of the Creative
Initiative movement, there was comparatively little attention paid to men. There were many
fewer courses, many fewer special meetings, and generally less philosophical attention
paid to the husbands until quite late in the 1970s when the second generation took over
and eventually led the group into secularization.[69] As noted
earlier, the women who formed the religious center of the movement appear to have had a
profoundly ambivalent attitude toward men. On the one hand, they acknowledged men as the
people with the greatest intellectual, economic, and political power, but on the other
hand, they blamed most of the world's troubles on that power. They did not believe that
they as women could lead the movement into the third age, but at the same time they
believed they had to get it started on the right path and educate enough men so that the
males could eventually complete the journey. Thus men were both the root cause of the
world's problems and its ultimate saviors. It was the women who had to change them from
one to the other.
Men in the third dispensation were something like Eve; they came second
and were produced out of the body of the women's religion. Their pledges and ceremonies
were masculinized versions of the women's, and their courses and ceremonies were often
afterthoughts. In addition to the philosophical reasons for the secondary male role in the
movement, there was also the practical consideration of time. Creative Initiative women
were not employed outside the home; their husbands were. Men had less time, less energy,
and generally less inclination to become involved in unconventional spiritual enterprises,
a fact that was recognized by the movement, which almost always aimed its recruiting
material at wives.
Men never adopted a new name similar to Blessman, but they expected that
through prayer, dropping resistance and hatred, mutual criticism, and following the
example of Jesus of Nazareth, they would develop the character necessary to take up the
burden of leadership. This army would emerge "made up of men who claim their destiny
as men, exercising their masculine qualities of aggressive, courageous initiative at the
highest level while coming to terms with their feminine components in such a way as to be
integrated, resourceful, creative, effective human beings."[70]
The incessant use of the military metaphor to describe the activity of
the men was necessary to integrate the Jungian concept of masculine traits with the
movement's monistic world view. Because they believed that men were naturally aggressive,
they frequently used martial language and symbols (the flaming sword) to express their
desire to bring about a peaceful, unified world. Reading the men's material, one gets the
distinct feeling that somehow Creative Initiative males were afraid that they would be
considered unmasculine if they simply declared their support for peace, love, and unity, a
feeling that may have been strengthened by their belief that men had to be shown the way
by women and had to develop their own feminine characteristics (their anima) if they were
to be successful. By adopting a martial posture, the men were able to dress these
"feminine" values in traditional masculine garb and thus integrate the various
roles they were supposed to play.
Children: The Second Generation
Creative Initiative taught that "the purpose of the family from
the beginning has been to educate the young on how to survive" and that "what is
needed now, more than ever before, is for parents to take back the power and
responsibility for training their young in what it means to be in right relationship to
themselves, other people and the environment."[71] Just as a
person needed a spouse to experience one of the steps toward total love, so children gave
parents an opportunity to expand their love. For a family to be a true model for the
world, it needed two generations so that the older could train the younger to be part of
the new age. Having children, however, as virtually all of the members did, not only
generated the usual parent-child conflicts but two special problems that stemmed directly
from the sect and its teachings.
The first problem might be called the issue of loyalty. Creative
Initiative stressed that the family was the paramount social institution and structured
most of its rituals around the nuclear family. So one's primary loyalty would seem to
belong to the family. Yet the group also believed that the family was only a second step
(the individual was the first) toward the ultimate goal of changing the world, and the
instrument for that final purpose was the community. For many years, subgroups of
cooperating people in the movement were called "family groups" and people in
these larger "families" were expected to treat one another like family members,
which they in fact seem to have done. So individuals were expected to be loyal to their
blood families, to their movement families and, of course, to the movement itself. Loyalty
to the movement or commitment to the cause was a measure of "totality," of
having surrendered the individual ego for obedience to the will of God. Practically,
however, given the limited resources of time, money, and energy, totality as an attitude
could not be translated into giving totally in all places. Somehow a way to explain the
lack of totality in some areas had to be found.
Second, there was a conflict between the desire of members to make their
children active participants in the movement and their realistic recognition that they
could not force their children to believe anything. Unlike their parents, the children did
not have to go through a process of transformation, nor did they make a conscious decision
to commit themselves to the movement. Because they had joined the movement of their own
free will and had paid the personal costs of being members of an unconventional religion,
the parents were highly motivated. The children, however, were born into the New Religion
and for many, establishing independence meant rejecting their parents' religious beliefs,
at least for a while. If adults could not force their children to believe, at least they
might try to have their children behave according to the Creative Initiative code of
values. But their children were growing up in an era of political radicalism, sexual
liberation, and drug use. It proved to be even more difficult to get their children to act
the way they wanted than to get them to think the way they wanted, although in the end
Creative Initiative members appear to have had at least as much success as other
parentsâperhaps more.
In theory, Creative Initiative took a relaxed view toward parenting; the
term they used was "detachment." Their entire childrearing philosophy was based
on the presumption that children were not, and could not be, their parent's possessions:
"Our children are not our children but the sons and daughters of life. . . . And
although they are with us they don't belong to us." All parents could do, all parents
should do, was to remember that the message and the messenger were one and lead their
lives accordingly. If parents were sure about their own journey, the group said, then the
children would be able to see what was the right path for themselves.[72]
Drawing on the work of Erikson, Piaget, Maslow, and other psychologists,
the group saw childhood as a series of distinct stages, each with its own characteristics
and needs. Creative Initiative explained that children, by the time they entered school,
were beginning to look to people outside the family for friendship and models, and they
emphasized the necessity of allowing children to develop independence. Although they did
not say it in so many words, the group appears to have been trying to minimize the kind of
authoritarian parental control that had created "authority problems" for many in
the movement. The message seemed to be that if they could raise their children to be as
free as possible of destructive parental control, then the children would find it that
much easier to discover the will of God on their own.[73] If
children were to find authority and support outside the family, however, then it was
crucial that those outside authorities be supportive of the ultimate goal of following
God's will. Thus, it was obviously best if Creative Initiative children found their
closest friends within the movement, and most of them did. It was also important that they
saw the movement itself as an extended family to whom they could look for support.
In addition to this religious justification for seeking a detached
styleof childrearing, there was also the practical matter of parents dividing their time
between children and the work. Although there was a continuous series of child-centered
activities through the history of the movement, and detachment did not mean laissez-faire,
there was also a sense that if parents could realize that their children were independent
persons who had to find their own way with the help of people outside the family, then
parents would feel less guilty about putting time into the movement and not into their
nuclear family. "Do you have a private life of fun and work and relationship
with your kids?" Emilia asked a group of seminar participants.[74]
"Yes" was the wrong response.
People were supposed to give their first loyalty to the group. The sense
of community had to be built among adults and between the adults and all the
children, not just their own. The essential tasks of parents included "caring,
concern, honesty, direct encounters, establishing trust, [and] demonstrating and
communicating right attitudes and right conduct" to all the children in the
community.[75] One of the most frequent comments to appear on our
questionnaires from movement children was how much they appreciated the genuine closeness,
love, and support they received from adults other than their parents. "Every father
was your father," wrote one young man.[76] One of their most
frequent complaints, however, was how much time their parents had spent on movement work
to the neglect of the family. This view was also shared by some parents, one of whom told
us, "I feel the time commitment was out of proportion and caused many parents to
neglect their children. People (myself included) were made to feel guilty if they didn't
attend meetings, seminars, etc., and were told they were too 'attached' to their
children."[77]
Since the movement had always defined its end as transforming the
individual and its means as education, the education of children became a central concern.
The fullest development of their educational philosophy came in 1972 when they took the
logical but short-lived step of creating their own elementary school, called Escuela de
Luz, which taught only kindergarten through grade three and enrolled approximately fifty
children. When they discovered halfway through the first year that the open classroom
format they had begun with was not working, they switched to a more structured and
disciplined style. They concluded from this experience: "We saw once again the
freeing effect on the children of knowing exactly where the limits are, rather than
operating from a personal base."[78] Thus, they interpreted
the educa-
tional. experience of their children as another example of the great
paradoxâobedience is freedom. The Escuela de Luz experiment lasted only two
years. It was shut down because it demanded too much time and effort that the group
thought should be going into projects to educate adults, which was, after all, their main
purpose.[79]
Most of the Creative Initiative childrens' programs were of a less
formal nature. Afterschool, weekend, and summer programs led by teenagers and parents were
the most prevalent form for communicating the group's ideas to their children. The
education program for children had originally begun as a direct response to the needs of
young parents who, by the late 1950s, made up the overwhelming majority of participants.
If these people were to take the necessary seminars to deepen their commitment, something
had to be done to accommodate their special needs. For these young adults a stay of two
weeks (or even one week) at Ben Lomond was a near impossibility since there was no
practical way either to take their children to the camp or to leave them for that length
of time with somebody else. So, in 1960, Sequoia Seminar ran an experimental "family
camp" that included a day camp for the children of adult participants. It was
sufficiently successful for Harry to announce that there would be additional family camps
in the future. At first, the children's camps were mainly day care with no attempt to
achieve an educational function of their own. "It is the experience of the adults
which is the really important factor," Harry declared. "If the parents achieve
the change which the seminar envisages, the children will be direct beneficiaries for the
rest of their lives."[80] By 1969 the summer camp program had
expanded to accommodate the children of many of the adults attending
"continuation" seminars. Although the prime purpose was still to keep the
children occupied while the adults participated in the seminars, Creative Initiative did
promise that they would "give the children a good growing experience."[81]
Finally, during the mid-1970s, the camp program reached a highly
developed form. Most of the children of members attended camp as campers or counselors or
both, and many remember their experiences with great fondness. The camps now had names,
Aurora for the girls, Arriba for the boys. In 1973, more than forty adults and fifty
teenage counselors cared for over two hundred children, with a budget of more than
fourteen thousand dollars. More important than size, however, was the new purpose of the
summer camps. No longer content to provide merely a safe place for children, or a
"growing experience," the camps were now invested with a full educational and
religious purpose.
The camp prospectus for 1973 stated that they wanted campers to learn
about the outdoors, "new ways to behave, relate to others, a sense of wonder, and a
feeling of belonging to this Community."[82]
An overview of youth activities in 1980 gives some idea of the extensive
variety of services that Creative Initiative organized for children. It is also indicative
of the kind of services that the group provided for members in its functioning as a sect.
Twenty-five of the fifty youngest children, all under age eight, were taken to a camp out
of the county to avoid the helicopter spraying of pesticides for the Mediterranean fruit
fly that infested Santa Clara and surrounding counties that summer. The fifty children of
elementary-school age were involved with various family-centered youth programs, had
special seasonal celebrations led by teenage counselors, and could attend either the boys
or girls summer camp. Thirty-one junior high schoolers had young-teen groups, Aguilas for
the boys, Jovencitas for the girls. They could attend boys' or girls' summer programs, and
there were several ceremonies for those young people who had already gone through their
Eagle or Spring Maiden rite. High school students (and there were ninety of them in 1980,
more than any other age group) were offered a communication course, an organized youth
center with lectures and social events, an opportunity to begin studying the Records, and
the chance to become counselors in the summer camps. That year they could also participate
in the Youth Conservation Corps, a community action program. Finally, the seventy
college-age students could participate in two experimental live-in cooperatives, attend
special discussion groups with high-level leaders, or supervise the Youth Conservation
Corps.[83]
As indicated by the creation of separate boys' and girls' summer camps
and other sex-segregated activities, the strong sense of gender distinction that marked
the movement's adult philosophy was played out fully at the children's level as well. In
fact, the group made a point of promoting parent-child activities that were almost always
structured along traditional gender role lines. A particularly telling example of this
traditional division of roles can be found in an outline for a series of meetings for
teens and their parents. The first day was to begin with "informal discussion while
breakfast is being prepared by women." On the second day "girls help get
breakfast"; this meal was to be more formal, so participants were instructed,
"Men seat wives." After breakfast, leaders were told to "ask girls to clean
off the table and the boys to do some task (You might ask them to go out and find a
rock.)." The third day's breakfast had no specification as to who should prepare it
because it was a cookout, but girls were once more asked to help the women with the fourth
day's breakfast while the boys and men met together to "discuss how they could show
the girls appreciation of breakfast."[84] There were numerous
projects in which boys and girls, especially in their teens, worked together, but there
were even more programs that divided children by sex in order to imbue them with what were
considered gender-appropriate values.
For boys, the group proposed a complete cycle of activities beginning
when they were seven and ending when they were fifteen. Although this plan was not always
followed to the letter, the general structure was instituted and for many years was an
excellent example of the kind of practical benefits that Creative Initiative provided
members of the sect. Each of the activities was designed to help the boys become more
independent and self-confident and to give them a sense of their maleness. Boys could not
participate in the program unless their fathers did too. Not only did the group believe
that the fathers had to be present to be models for the boys, but the activities were
thought to benefit the father as well as the son, specifically his "masculinity and
identity will be strengthened when he consciously puts himself in the position of leading
boys."[85]
The most elaborately developed of the childhood activities for boys was
the "Eagle" ceremony. "Eagle" was later changed to the Spanish aguila
in line with the widespread use of Spanish in community activities, especially those for
the children. The ceremony, which took place after the boy had turned thirteen, was
consciously designed to be a rite of passage from boyhood to young manhood and, unlike
most of the other activities, was overtly and almost exclusively religious in nature. It
was intended to be the "high point in [the] entire Boy's Program."[86] Candidates for the ceremony were told that "throughout
history, men have recognized the passage of their sons into young manhood with special
rites and ceremony." By participating in the ceremony of Las Aguilas, the boys were
demonstrating their "acceptance of responsibility of manhood and a willingness to
cherish and preserve our religious tradition."[87]
Participation in the ceremony was not automatic. Like all other steps in
the Creative Initiative program it was voluntary and, like most others, it also needed the
approval of the community. Candidates for the Eagle ceremony and their parents had to
demonstrate a high degree of commitment. The parents were required to have reached a point
where they were participating in advanced-level seminars, which meant that they had to
have been in the program for at least three years. All those concerned, sons and fathers,
met for counseling and instruction with peers who had previously gone through the
ceremony.[88] The actual plans for the ceremony were approved by
"elders in Region to insure quality and appropriateness of Blessing: content, tone,
size."[89] And finally, the candidate went through a two-month
period of intense religious training in preparation for the ritual, in which he received
instruction in the beliefs, ceremonies, and obligations of Creative Initiative.
The Eagle ceremony was intended to be more than a symbolic rite of
passage. Within the belief system of the movement, those who went through the Eagle
ceremony were seen as separating from their parents, freeing themselves in preparation for
commitment to God. The boy's father was told to take "initiative out of internal
motivation to pass on what is of value to his son." Although the exact meaning of
that rather opaque phrase is not obvious, the implication appears to be that the father
would pass on to his son the right and the ability to make decisions for himself. More
explicitly, the ceremony was said to "mark the 'first cut' from the family, a move
from the family into the brotherhood of peers." In the process the son was
transferring his concept of authority "from the family and father to the clan,
represented by men other than the father."[90]
This last aspect was formalized by the boy choosing a new
"spiritual father" from among the other adult males in the movement. Girls also
chose a spiritual mother for their equivalent ceremony. The use of spiritual parents
actually worked two ways. For the spiritual children there was a sense of independence
from the nuclear family, and for the spiritual parents there was formalization of the
communal ideal that the adults were parents to all the children and youngsters children to
all the adults. This ceremony confirmed both the young person's progress on the path
toward enlightenment, moving away from parents as authority figures, and also reinforced
the sense of mutual support and caring so crucial to the operation of the community as a
sect. Several Creative Initiative children whom we interviewed or who answered our
questionnaire expressed special fondness for their spiritual parents.
There appear to have been many fewer structured opportunities for women
to engage in activities with their daughters, but those for which we have records were,
like the boys' programs, designed to reinforce the sense of the child as a member of a
gender with very specific sex-linked skills. A program to recruit girls to take care of
the babies of people attending seminars required that both mothers and daughters agree to
be a team, with the mother acting as advisor and emergency backup for her daughter. The
girls were told that the experience was worthwhile not only because they would be paid but
also because it would give them "the opportunity to prepare for your own motherhood
by having a baby to 'practice' on."[91] But for the girls, as
for the boys, the highlight of the formal youth programs was the rite of passage into
young adulthoodâthe "Spring Maiden" ceremony.
The Spring Maiden ceremony was an analog of the Eagle ceremony. Like the
Eagle ceremony, it was an act of commitment not only by the child but also by the same-sex
parent. "Because our work is mystical in nature, this program evolved as a way for
mothers to pass on this spiritual heritage to their daughters," said the ceremony
announcement. It went on to explain that before her daughter could participate in the
program, "each mother must first decide that this work is the focus for her
life."[92] The ceremony itself was designed to affirm the
"maiden's" "femininity and her uniqueness." The decorations were
quintessentially feminine: pink and yellow roses with butterflies symbolizing the
metamorphosis of the girl into womanhood. The girls also went through a preparation for
the ceremony which at times included learning female crafts like crocheting,
candle-making, and flower arranging. They were given lessons on the meaning of the
ceremony and on problems faced by teenagers such as drugs and sex. There was also a
session on choosing a college (which seems a bit premature for thirteen year olds) and,
interestingly, a session on careers. Creative Initiative mothers apparently assumed that
their daughters would not only go to college, but would also have careers, even though
they themselves did not work or had left their jobs to work in the movement.[93]
Teenagers: Living (And Not Living) The Life
The preparations for the Eagle and Spring Maiden initiation ceremonies
were the most formally structured religious instruction given to Creative Initiative
children. It was assumed that by the time the children reached their teen years, they
would have absorbed the basic principles of the movement, and therefore most of the
teen-focused activity was directed at showing the young people how to apply their beliefs,
how to "live the life."
The movement mounted two particularly ambitious programs to allow
teenagers to put their values into action, one for young men and the other for young
women. The men's project began first, in 1979. Nineteen young men, ranging in age from
sixteen to twenty-two, were given a six-month training course and sent to work for three
months in Nepal. Richard Rathbun, Harry and Emilia's son, had spent three years in the
Peace Corps in Nepal and acted as the project supervisor. After their work in the Nepalese
villages the participants returned home and, except for high schoolers, decided not to go
back to school immediately. Instead, they created an organization called YES (Youth
Evolving Solutions). Until they all returned to college in the fall of 1980, the young men
in YES lived together and participated in a series of ecology projects designed to get
people to use less fuel by riding public transportation, bicycles, and carpooling.
Participants lived in a house in Palo Alto that they ran as a cooperative. It was during
this project that YES first used a slogan that would be resurrected in 1987 by Beyond War,
"Think Globally, Act Locally."[94]
Admittedly jealous that the boys had had an opportunity to do something
denied to them, a group of movement girls asked if they could set up a similar project. So
for a year, from July 1981 to June 1982, about a dozen young women also lived
cooperatively in a house in Palo Alto, creating and running their own community service
projects. They called the one-year program "Salvatierra" (save the earth) and,
unlike the boys' project, Salvatierra had a very strong religious element. Initially the
girls were employed at a variety of jobs, including work on the line in a San Francisco
factory and field work on farms in Fresno. Most of their time, however, was spent in
religious training, self-improvement, and preparing to teach three one-hour units to
elementary school children.[95] A particularly difficult aspect of
Salvatierra was the problem that the young women had dealing with adult expectations. One
participant had two nervous breakdowns trying to cope with the demands placed on her in
that intense living environment.[96]
Although Creative Initiative did promote a process of freeing children
from their parents' authority, in no sense did it give the young people carte blanche to
explore freely in the world to find their own truths. In place of the parents' authority
the movement substituted the authority of the community, usually described as an
expression of the will of God. So long as they were living at home, children could rebel
against their parents, but when they were living away, among their peers, a more
oppressive kind of authority exerted itself because rebelling against one's peers meant
risking alienation from friends and community.
Emilia had crystallized her opposition to drinking, smoking, and even
dancing as early as 1952 when she spoke out against them at a Sequoia Seminar continuation
seminar.[97] Although the opposition to dancing did not survive,
smoking and drinking continued to be anathema to Creative Initiative. There was tremendous
pressure on the children not to engage in these forbidden practices, to the extent that
teenagers were requested to sign contracts agreeing not to smoke or drink alcohol.[98] Although nobody was "forced" to sign such a contract, the
teenagers realized that refusing to do so was tantamount to rejecting the movement's core
demand for "totality."
The single most common complaint from Creative Initiative children who
answered our questionnaire was the criticism and guilt they suffered for not being able to
live up to the ideal of totality. In this sense they were no different from their parents
who also found the demands for perfection and the confrontations that resulted from their
presumed failures the most difficult aspect of their participation. Unlike the adults,
however, the children did not have the option of dropping out of the movement. All their
parents' friends and, in many cases, most of their own close friends were in the movement,
and the costs of rebelling were extremely high. As one respondent told us, "I saw my
[non-Creative Initiative] school friends as having lower standards, so I kept many of them
at a distance."[99]
The responses to our questionnaire give the impression that Creative
Initiative teenagers were more rebellious than other young people of their age and status,
but that impression may well be misleading. Because of the strict standards to which they
were held, behavior that would have been seen as normal or experimental among their peers
was labeled "rebellion" by both the Creative Initiative children and their
parents. And, within the context of the movement's demands, it was more rebellious
than the same action would have been in the "outside" world.
Young men and women who violated the movement's values were made the
objects of the same kind of peer criticism that adults experienced. Groups of teens were
brought together, one young man reported, "and forced to accuse one another."[100] Although most of the mutual criticism seems to have been directed
at personal behavior involving sex, alcohol, and drugs, other aspects of the community's
values were also considered fair game. Another young man who remembered being critiziced
for being insufficiently masculine (an apparently chronic fear among Creative Initiative
men) said, "It was hard to feel good about yourself, but the criticism kept coming in
the hope you would become a better person because of it."[101]
This process could begin when the children were as young as twelve. The effect was to
seriously weaken the self-confidence of some who experienced this group criticism, thus
undermining the very sense of self-worth and ego strength that the movement was trying to
impart.
As a result of the demand for "totality," many Creative
Initiative children reported that they developed a curious combination of hypocrisy and
snobbery. Sometimes individually and sometimes as groups, they broke the rules, but they
lied about it both to the adults and to some of their peers within the movement. They
pretended that they were upholding the standards while leading a secret life.[102] Yet, despite the reports of widespread violations of community
standards by teenagers, our respondents also wrote that there was a strong sense of moral
elitism among the children. In one sense this is not surprising since it reflects a
similar feeling among the adults, but, from all evidence, the adults lived up to their own
values and were perhaps justified in feeling superior to ordinary folks; many of the
children did not.[103]
Despite their willingness to break the rules of the movement, most of
the children who answered our questionnaire ultimately valued their childhoods in Creative
Initiative. Many mentioned the benefits of having parents who adhered to a strict moral
code and who had worked out the problems in their marriages. Even more important, most
were thankful for the values they had learnedâeven if they had, on occasion,
wandered from the strait and narrow. The second-generation respondents tended to be
positively disposed toward the movement, and many were active in Beyond War. Yet even
those children who did not stay involved with the movement as they grew older usually
expressed appreciation for the strong sense of right and wrong and the concept of unity
with the world that they had learned from it. In addition, of course, there were those
teens who never did rebel and who were able to operate in a world of drugs and casual
sexuality without ever being touched by either because of their Creative Initiative
training.
Creative Initiative never actually addressed the second-generation
problem per se, although they discussed the unique problem presented by children who,
unlike their parents, had never made a decision to join the movement. There seem to have
been two reasons for this. First, the sect was very new. Every member was a convert and
imbued with the fervor of people who had deliberately rejected one value system for
another. Although the group had some structure, including an informal hierarchy,
ceremonies, and a body of written dogma, it did not have a standard churchlike
organization. This meant that children did not have to be formally inducted into
membership. Second, as a millenarian movement, Creative Initiative hoped it would be able
to change the direction in which the world was moving. No dates or predictions were ever
made, but one gets the sense from the group's materials that they thought the balance
could be tipped during their lifetimesâsome early works made vague references
to the year 2000 as a kind of deadline. Given that assumption, the principal effort was
always directed at educating other adults. Children's training was not ignored, but growth
of the movement was linked to rational decision making by mature adults, and the
assumption seemed to be that the children would make their own choice to join or not in
the course of their own lives.
Gender and Paradox
The unifying theme in Creative Initiative's approach to men, women,
and children in the family was an attempt to integrate opposites. Their dualistic view of
human nature made them see human behavior as similarly bifurcated. Some things were either
good or bad and thus could be dealt with in a straightforward fashion. Other dualities
were more complex. Men and women were seen as opposites but not as good or bad. Likewise,
sexuality and celibacy were two ends of a continuum on which they sought a middle ground.
Finally, Creative Initiative tried to find a way to reconcile the conflicting demands of
family and children on one side and of religious community on the other. In the area of
family and gender relationships, Creative Initiative took the same course it did in other
areas of awkward dualism. Rather than choosing between what seemed to be opposites,
Creative Initiative wove the opposites together in a way that allowed them to explain the
apparent contradictions in their beliefs.
For the women, the movement provided a sense of purpose within the
traditional woman's role. Raised in an era when it was assumed that women would become
wives and mothers and nothing more, these educated women found in Creative Initiative
something better, but something that did not compete with their preexisting beliefs about
what women should do. The movement assured them that being a good wife and mother was not
only their most important task but, when done right, would make their families models for
a new world. Working for Creative Initiative was voluntary and, therefore, considered
appropriate for housewives. Yet, Creative Initiative demanded more time than would have
been acceptable to most traditional-minded women, so it developed both child-care
institutions and a philosophy that allowed the women to spend less time with their
families and more working for the movement.
Unable to take over leadership until they had changed sufficiently to be
trusted with the fate of the earth, men played a less central role in the early history of
the sect. Unlike women who were assumed to have a natural understanding of what needed to
be done to prevent the apocalypse, men were assumed to have a natural inclination to bring
it on. Women had to develop their leadership skills to spread the word to other women and
eventually to men. Men had to sensitize themselves to the message being brought by women.
For the most part, male activity was an imitation of female activity adjusted for what the
group considered appropriate male characteristics. The martial style and language of much
of the male activity appears to reflect both the assumption of male aggressiveness and a
deep suspicion that somehow either the group or its message was unmasculine, a doubt that
had to be countered at every turn.
Whether they were men, women, or children, the people who lived their
lives in Creative Initiative participated in a totally integrated religious experience.
For them, religion was not a Sunday thing, not an afterthought, not even a separate
philosophical entity. Religion was the warp and woof of their existence. It informed all
their thoughts and all their actions. It defined their gender identity, their marital
relations, and the interaction between parents and children. The family was the first
level of collective expression of their religious ideals. The community was the second. |
