Revealing a cult lifestyle
She joined one of the most insidious and dangerous cults in America
CULT SISTER Lesley Smailes Loot.co.za (R199) Tafelberg
REVIEWER: JULIAN RICHFIELD
TODAY Lesley Smailes is 52 and lives in Port Elizabeth. She is a qualified and registered reflexologist and meridian therapist.
When she finished matric, she took a gap year in the US.
Before she left, her mother said: “Don’t get married and don’t join a cult.” Her gap year lasted 10 years and Smailes did both.
She joined what at the time was believed to be one of the most insidious and dangerous cults in America and her book Cult Sister details the decade she spent as a “Sister” in The Church.
In its opening paragraph, Smailes says of herself: “I am a people person. I love the sense of belonging that comes from being part of a group, a greater whole. Community.
“As a teenager, my friends and I were rebels, wild and free, smoking joints, gate-crashing parties and getting sozzled at popular drinking spots.”
However, the cult life she lived was a long way away from this.
It was a regimented, disciplined life in The Church, living out of a backpack, eating scavenged food that had been thrown away, enduring the difficulties of having home births, living the freeman lifestyle, entering into an arranged marriage with a Brother, getting harsh threats of losing her children and ultimately surviving in strange and glorious ways.
She tells the story largely through the letters she wrote home to her mother, letters which painted a rosier picture of her cult life.
One of her early letters home sets the tone for much of what was to follow: “My phone call yesterday must have been a bit strange to you.
“This decision has had a lot of thought, tears, prayers and searching of the scriptures and I now feel certain that it is what Adonai wants. I have learned what a woman’s place is and find great peace, joy, comfort and satisfaction just being what He wants me to be.”
And it ends: “I love you, love you. May peace be in you. Greet everyone for me and, if they question, please give them this letter to read. May you be able to receive this with grace.
“With love, which comes from Him. Lesley.”
There will be readers who may find it difficult to identify with many of the decisions she made and the situations in which she found herself.
It may also be challenging to find an empathetic or sympathetic connection with the book’s narrative.
They may find too that the repressive, nomadic, repetitive, nature of the cult lifestyle makes for less than gripping reading.
One feels that Smailes has a lot more to say and that maybe she has found many memories too painful to share. This is understandable.
At the end of Cult Sister, her thoughts on the eve of her return to South Africa: “It was not easy, going home. I was painfully aware of how peculiar we were. Of how peculiar I had become.” Indeed.
It took Smailes many hard, painful years before she was able to move forward with a better life and even writing her book was not an easy process.
The last couple of chapters seem rushed.
Maybe had she included more about her healing process when back in South Africa and some weighty introspection, Cult Sister would have had better balance.
Smailes writes her story well enough and her account, if not of the “I couldn’t put it down” variety, is not without interest. It is refreshing that she tells her story with honesty and lack of rancour.
One hopes that the Lesley Smailes of today has more self-belief, and in her current lifestyle has found peace within herself and a good space in which to live.