From the “Straight Talk” section of The Cape Cod Voice, May 2008.
By Seth Rolbein
Of the two, Shawn is the big brother, 36 years old now, a successful businessman, proud owner of his own house, still willing to party now and then but solid, pragmatic, clear about where he is and where he’s headed.
Shawn DeLude has come a long way since he ran from the Community of Jesus in 1986, a scared, confused teenager. Then again, unlike many who have left the Community, he chose to stick around, and make a stand in Orleans.
One reason is Tim, his little brother, 27 years old now, who Shawn never got to know until it was Tim’s turn to escape 13 years later, in 1999. Tim’s both the better athlete and more lyrical of the two, masking his curiosity and intelligence behind the off-hand persona of being “just a garbage man,” working with Shawn at his company, Nauset Disposal.
The pain and confusion that accompanied Tim DeLude’s decision to leave the Community still feel fresh on him, a sorting out that hasn’t settled. But there’s no regret; “the hardest decision of my life — and the best decision,” he says. The toughest part is their family is split; their parents remain at the Community, while all five of the kids are gone, another brother still in Orleans, two sisters farther away.
While Shawn has talked in years past about why he left at age 16, about what he saw as tactics meant to “break you down, humiliate you, so you’re no longer a person,” all in the name of religion but in his opinion really about control, Tim has never talked much in public about what he went through. “I’d hate sounding whiney about it,” he says.
But more important (and on this Shawn wholeheartedly agrees) is Tim’s strong feeling that if public conversation about the Community turns into a “bash and trash” session, it does no good; those “within” simply dismiss any criticism, take nothing to heart, make no changes. This is especially important for the sake of the next generation, kids raised in the Community who, the DeLudes feel, deserve more freedom and contact with the outside world, who should live with less fear, isolation, and control.
“Why do they have to keep labeling us as ‘bitter ex-members’?” Tim wonders. “They refuse to apologize. It’s that arrogance and ignorance that will keep them from moving on, if they don’t reconcile their past. They refuse to admit any wrongdoing. All they say is, ‘That was then, this is now.’ Well, that’s bullshit. It doesn’t fly.”
When Shawn left in 1986, the founding Mothers, Cay and Judy, were still in power. By the time Tim left, in 1999, the new administration led by Mother Betty Pugsley was well established. His experience crosses generations, so to speak, and argues against those who say the Community’s ways changed completely once the founding Mothers were gone.
“I was three or four years old when we moved there,” Tim remembers. “From then, I never lived anywhere for more than two years in a row, was never allowed to get comfortable ... The place was like a giant chess board. There were 25, 30 houses, whatever, and every four months, six months, eight months, there would be a great move. They’d juggle people around. Even if you owned a house, you wouldn’t live in it. It was all about control, to keep you on your toes.
“As kids, you dreaded dinnertime. You just didn’t know if you were going to get the crap kicked out of you verbally.” People would single out one person, Tim remembers, and launch a group attack, criticize things big and small. Parents who showed affection to their children were accused of favoritism, practicing “idolatry.” People were attacked for being “self centered,” while some, says Tim, would “get power by claiming that God had spoken through them.”
The negative focus would shift from person to person, day to day. Everyone would gang up as a form of survival in these “light groups,” Tim continues, because so long as someone else was the subject, the focus was off you.
As difficult as these experiences were, as much as they broke people down, Tim says they stopped short of physical “disciplines” that people claimed took place earlier in the Community’s existence. The new leadership, personified by Betty Pugsley, “realized they needed to change their image,” he says. But “fear,” both of the group’s intense disapproval and of the outside world, remained deeply ingrained.
“We were never really allowed to hang out” with kids from outside the Community, he recalls. He still remembers the one time he was allowed to have a friend over, the one birthday party in the first or second grade he was allowed to attend. “I remember in the fourth grade, we were singing ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ around Christmas-time at school, and I plugged my ears, because a Community mom was going by, and it was rock! I didn’t want her to think I was listening to rock!”
But what was different for Tim, growing up, was his big brother Shawn was gone by the time he was six years old.
“When I left, husbands and wives weren’t allowed to have sex,” says Shawn. “We couldn’t watch the news ... I could only see my parents one day a week, and on Sundays. I absolutely hated it.” He saw the inner society divided, almost feudal: “There were the peasants, the middle class, and the decision makers.”
“If you have money,” Tim agrees, “you’re untouchable.”
When Shawn left, he remembers his father screaming, “The world will gobble you up!” And the first years were indeed tough. He was a teenager on his own, “a hyperactive kid with new-found freedom, trying to figure it out.” He made “some bad decisions,” as he puts it. But “I didn’t cut and run. I stayed, I had a commitment.” Over time, one by one, Shawn’s siblings began to leave, too.
Tim remembers he idolized his oldest brother, even though they never really had a chance to spend time together. “I talked to Shawn maybe four times from the time he left until I was in the 10th grade,” says Tim. “My parents actually made us turn our heads when we passed where he worked.”
But Tim was curious, pushing his parents not only to see Shawn but get some life experiences. He attended the Grenville school in Canada, now closed and subject of much controversy, a place Tim liked in good part because he was away from the day-to-day of the Community on the Cape. By 1999, he was allowed to spend time on a kibbutz in Israel, another kind of communal experience that he found much different, to his mind much more open and healthy.
It was the combination of Shawn’s example, and some travel, that convinced Tim he could leave, that it was possible to get out without destroying himself.
“I waited until the band [the Community’s stellar group, “Spirit of America”] was leaving for a tour. Then I told them I’d be leaving in a few days,” he recalls. He chose the moment because there would be fewer people around and perhaps less pressure, but “for the next four or five nights, a group would come by the house, yelling at me, saying I was going to hell, I was gonna be a drug addict.”
Tim held to his decision, borrowed his brother Kevin’s truck, loaded it up with the few possessions he had, and on an August night in 1999 he drove away. “I turned on the radio, and AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell,’ was playing, I shit you not,” he laughs. “I called Shawn, and I said, ‘I’m out!’”
“I never pushed him,” says Shawn, “but I wanted to be here for the family ... I wanted them to see that the world didn’t gobble me up. I’m not going to hell. I’ve met great people and I have great faith.”
When you leave, “you’re going against everything you were taught, your whole life,” says Tim. At times he felt depressed, even almost suicidal. “In therapy, what I’ve realized is that I think we’re suffering from a form of post traumatic stress syndrome ... I still get a pang of fear sometimes, when I see people from there.”
The brothers are very close now, spending a lot of time together at work and around town, hanging out at the handsome new home Shawn built three years ago, one more symbol to him more symbol to him of “life after the Community.” Tim, more than Shawn, also got involved in an intense Internet conversation that engaged dozens of former Community members and Grenville students in an exploration of the past, and feelings in the present. “It really helped me a lot,” says Tim. “It made me realize I’m not alone.”
Tim nicknamed himself “curbside,” no doubt a little joke about his “garbage man persona. But his writing revealed eloquence, and what he says is his focus now, his reason for trying to reach people still in the Community, and offer an alternative.
“For so many years we stayed silent,” Tim wrote on a message board, “scared of the punishment that surely lurked around every corner. Waiting for when we least expected to have god’s vengeful punishment strike down upon us. As we all now know (not to say that it doesn’t pop into our heads from time to time), that’s all a bunch of crap.
“For those still involved, we can all put ourselves in your shoes. We have all been there and know the drill. I can only imagine how I would have reacted to a site like this while I was still involved.
“If I were you right now, I would feel persecuted and threatened. I ask that you instead be liberated by these truths.
“If I were you right now, I would have disdain for those who would dare to question your undying commitment. I ask that you listen with your hearts to those who are reaching out with love to you ...
“I know how deep down you can’t trust anyone. You stand alone while trying to fit into this conglomerated idealistic façade of a community. And you feel good for fitting in, it doesn’t matter the price, ignorance is bliss. I know, I was there.
“After all this, I want you to realize one thing, you are not in it alone. We have all been there and all know how you feel in one way or another. Don’t live in fear anymore, you only get to live once. There’s a lot of love out here to go around.”
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