Sybil (37 page)

"Is loving your fellow man part of worshiping God?" the doctor asked.

"It's part of it," Sybil replied authoritatively. "Not all of it. God said: "Love thy neighbor as thyself.""

"And if a neighbor should have a birthday on the Sabbath," the doctor argued, "should he be deprived of the celebration of that day?"

"Yes," Sybil insisted, "God said He should come first."

"Aren't we worshiping God when we celebrate our birthday?"

"We are not," said Sybil.

"All right," the doctor persisted, "you celebrate Christmas--Christ's birthday?"

"Not in our Church. It's all right to realize and remember that He was born, but you must keep in mind it wasn't that particular day--December 25."

"Isn't it proper to honor the days on which we were born if we are children of God?"

Sybil replied sternly: "But you don't have to have birthday parties and go around tooting and yelling and that sort of thing on the Sabbath. There are many things you have to forgo if you are going to follow God. It doesn't have to be easy. St. John the Baptist said, "I have fought the good fight.""

There was momentary silence. Then, with a directness calculated to quicken Sybil's own repressed doubts--as expressed by some of the other selves-- Dr. Wilbur said: "Well, there is one thing I really don't comprehend about your religion: one thing for which man has struggled through the centuries is his freedom."

"That may be. But no one wants freedom from God." An unwavering Sybil had had the last word.

A few days later Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann displayed combined anger and terror when Dr. Wilbur began to talk about religion. "It's all mixed up," said Peggy Lou, speaking for both Peggy Ann and herself. "It's futile to talk about it. It goes round and round." Pacing the consulting room, Peggy Lou came to a sudden halt. "It's supposed to do more than not upset you. It's supposed to help you. But it never helped me. It never helped Peggy Ann or any of the rest of us." The fire of rebellion had been unleashed, yet the Church still stood. With a swift sharp movement, however, as Peggy Lou continued to pace the floor, she reached metaphorically for the edifice without exit, serving notice, "I'd like to tear the Church down!"

Vanessa breezed into the consulting room a few days after Peggy Lou's diatribe. Although Vanessa was not quite ready to tear the Church down, she expressed contempt for both the Church's prohibitions and its congregation. "I'm not devout," Vanessa said with an attractive toss of the head, "but even if I were, the people in the Willow Corners Church would have turned me off. They were bigoted, unjust, irrational, and hypocritical. I can't see how they dared to call themselves Christians." Vanessa's lips formed a satiric smile. "All the things you had to do to be right," she jeered. "The irony was that the things you wanted to do weren't wrong. On Sabbath they wanted you just to sit. That, of course, my dear Watson, was a waste of time."

She stopped talking and met the doctor's gaze. "And, Doctor, I must confess that I didn't understand the meaning of God's love. Mother was always trying to tell me that God was love, and I couldn't understand what love was. But I did know I didn't want God to be like my mother."

"I see," the doctor replied.

"Mother said she loved me, but if that was love ..."

"Then you didn't want love ..."

"And I'm supposed to want God ..."

"You were afraid ..."

"Because," Vanessa explained, "I didn't know what God and His love were going to do to me."

"Yes," agreed the doctor. "So you were afraid."

Even before Vanessa left the room, Marcia entered the scene to add a few variations on the theme. Religious yet resentful of the religion's prohibitions, which had created in her a sense of alienation and deprived her of the opportunity to grow up freely, she looked at the doctor pensively.

"Things that were right for everybody else were wrong for me. The worst of it was I knew I couldn't do these things--dancing, going to the movies, wearing jewelry--even when I grew up.

"Would you believe it, Dr. Wilbur, I didn't see my first movie until I came to live in New York?" she confided with a derisive but almost comic shrug.

Marcia smiled wanly. "Looking back," she said, "I realize how trapped I was by all the talk of the end of the world. It was something to look forward to, and there would be a better life after that. I had to believe that. But underneath I wished it weren't that way because there were so many things I wanted to do, and it was as if the end would come before I had a chance. But it seemed wrong to think that way, and I had a mixed up feeling--the same sort of feeling I have now when I realize things can't be different."

Mike and Sid, who also made their way into the era of analytic religious debate, voiced a belief in God but a contempt for religious rituals and histrionics. They were not religious, but they were concerned with religion. What they especially resented was grandfather's prattle about Armageddon and evolution. They--especially Mike--were more interested in doing battle with their grandfather and in defending Sybil as well as themselves against him than in the truth or falsity of his utterances.

Ruthie, who was only a baby and whom Dr. Wilbur had met only in connection with the primal scene, talked of rebellion in the church's sandbox. "Our hands were in the sandbox," Ruthie said. "The sand felt all smooth. We let it run through our fingers. We liked the sand, stood things in the sand. Then we were big enough to hear about that angel we didn't trust at all. We'd get up Sabbath morning and play. We thought they'd forgotten, but then they'd remember. We'd say, "Don't wanna go!

Don't wanna go!" Daddy would look. Mama said we hadda grow up. If Daddy had a white shirt and Mama was fixing pancakes, then we knew there'd be the sandbox. So when we saw the white shirt and the pancakes we got sick, had to go to bed, and Daddy and Mama went to church without us."

Of all the selves of Sybil it was Mary, the homebody, to whom religion meant most. Mary, who had rejected the doctrines, the rituals, the florid symbolism of the faith, had incorporated within herself the unpretentious religion of grandmother Dorsett. "I pray to God," Mary told the doctor, "but I don't go to church. I try to be honest, truthful, and patient and to lead a good Christian life. I believe in "live and let live." This brings me solace."

Yet as the discussions of religion progressed, Dr. Wilbur could see that Mary was losing her serenity. While Sybil was concerned that analysis would deprive her of her religion, Mary was troubled that analysis would make her religion sound inconsistent. And in time the feelings of entrapment that the religion wrought in all the selves, but most especially in the Peggys, reached and overwhelmed Mary. Becoming subdued and depressed, Mary told Dr. Wilbur, "I'm caught in here, inside of these walls. Peggy Lou brought me a picture of the church, and there was no exit. I'm caught in this building with no doors. It seems to be dome-shaped and to be built of blocks of packed snow."

As the analysis proceeded, the religious conflicts surfaced more and more. It would be easy but untrue to say that while Sybil, the waking self, representing the conscious mind, conformed, the others, whose domain was the unconscious, rebelled. The truth was that even though most markedly conformity was apparent in Sybil and rebellion in the Peggys, both conformity and rebellion were expressed in a variety of ways in all the selves, many of whom were further divided within the autonomy of their individual identities.

All of the selves had independent religious convinces and attitudes. All, with the exception of the Peggys, believed in God; all felt trapped by the Church. Under the pressure of confrontation with religion in analysis, Mary wanted to die, and the Peggys wanted to run away. Marcia and Vanessa broke away from some of the old restraints and began, in keeping with Dr. Wilbur's urging, to separate God from the Church, the congregation, and the Church's prohibitions. Feeling freer, Vanessa bought a pair of red earrings to match her hair and Marcia went to the movies on Sabbath. Marcia also dared, experimentally at any rate, to light a cigarette and take a sip of sherry.

Vicky, who had played the role of observer without declaring her own convictions--since after all she had only been a visitor in the Dorsett church--became troubled about Marcia and Vanessa.

"No harm in what they've done so far," Vicky told Dr. Wilbur, "but they're showing off their new freedom. By pulling away from the others they are going to make integration more difficult."

"Yes, I know, Vicky," Dr. Wilbur agreed. "But maybe integration will involve bringing the others to where Marcia and Vanessa are."

Vicky shrugged. Then she looked fixedly at the doctor and expressed perturbation at the change in Sybil herself. "Sybil," Vicky informed the doctor, "hasn't known what her relationship to God is ever since she found out about the rest of us. You see, Dr. Wilbur, she always felt that this condition of hers was evil. As a little girl she thought it was a form of punishment, the handiwork of Satan. When you told her about us, that old feeling about evil came back, even though she was no longer so sure about Satan.

"Sybil often wonders," Vicky continued, "whether she has displeased God. She is also unsure of whether her motives are always right. She gets scared about words--all this talk here-- making things better and then having the whole world to face." Vicky leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully. "Sybil's afraid that if she gets better, something terrible will happen. It's as if the serpent is about to get her once again even though the serpent is losing his name."

Toward Christmas Sybil became perturbed by the courses in zoology and evolution that she was taking at Columbia. Together Dr. Wilbur and Sybil read passages from Darwin's Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.

It was difficult for Sybil to accept that the bodily structure of man shows traces of descent from some lower form. "We are children of God," Sybil insisted defensively. "Evolution, after all, is only a hypothesis."

The subject of evolution stirred Mike to say, "You see--grandpa was wrong," and Mary to remark, "It doesn't matter where we come from but what we do with our lives." Peggy Lou fumed, "Animals have the freedom we never had in our church," and a newly skeptical Vanessa quipped, "What a relief not to have to be a creature of God!"

The analysis veered from religion in Willow Corners to religion in Omaha, where the serpent of childhood became less menacing. The Omaha congregation was better educated, less rigid, more humanistic than that in Willow Corners. Pastor Weber, a preacher who was also an evangelist, considered Sybil an artist and was aware of the subduing impact that a too-literal interpretation of the faith had had on her as an isolated only child in a family that had not experienced the mediating influences of young people. Pastor Weber swept Sybil out of isolation and into the limelight.

"And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another ..."

Pastor Weber's voice, resonant and full, rang through the Omaha church during the special Sunday night service.

"... the first was like a lion and had eagle's wings."

The audience of five hundred looked from the evangelist to the scaffold nine feet above him, at an easel covered with drawing paper and spanning the entire width of the church. Following the beam of the heavy spotlights that illuminated the scaffold, the audience focused on the slight figure of a woman in a light blue chiffon dress with a small white apron: Sybil.

Sybil, delicate, ethereal in the enveloping light--"angelic," as one observer described her-- brought to life, with rapid strokes, the lion with eagle's wings on the drawing paper. The audience was spellbound, transfixed.

As the evangelist then spoke of a second beast, "like to a bear" with three ribs between its teeth, and of a third beast after that, like a leopard but with four heads, and on whose back were four wings of a fowl, these beasts, too, appeared in swift succession upon the paper.

Portraying the message of the Scripture, translating the evangelist's words into pictures, Sybil drew the fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and exceedingly strong, with iron teeth and ten horns. "I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots," the evangelist's voice boomed, "and behold in this horn were eyes like the eyes of men, and a mouth speaking great things." From the paper, compellingly real, glared the eyes that stared into the captivated audience and the mouth that, though mute, spoke.

"Daniel takes the position," the evangelist told the audience, "that we started out all right, man being created perfect, and then came the degeneracy. Instead of coming from the zoo, we are heading for the zoo. We are becoming like animals." The figures, no longer representational, had become abstract, an instant translation of the evangelist's message.

"Man became so sinful," the evangelist's voice warned, "that God had to create a special animal to describe the sinful generation."

On the paper, nine feet above the evangelist and created by lightning strokes of black chalk, was an abstraction of the divine fury that had been evoked.

For three successive Sundays Sybil stood, a slight figure with a mighty stroke, on the scaffold. The audience was spellbound. Sybil's parents were unreservedly proud of their daughter. Pastor Weber was jubilant that Sybil Dorsett had put his philosophy into pictures.