Misguided: The Soundtrack To My Life

Chapter 16 – The Exorcism of MerryTrigger Warning – this chapter describes in detail extremely disturbing religious child abuse, including a violent exorcism.Music featured in this chapter:Tainted Love – Soft CellThis chapter of my memoir concerns Merry Berg, the granddaughter of cult leader David Berg. Her horrific treatment by her grandfather and the other adults in his inner circle was published in great detail as a warning and spiritual threat, especially to teens. Merry’s abuse was used as the model for dealing with other so-called delinquent, disobedient teens. I have left out of this excerpt some of the most disturbing details of Merry’s abuse, which a British judge would later come to describe as torture.Soon after my divorce from Rachelle was finalized in May 1989, James and Sweetie relayed an order for me to move to a secret World Services unit in Hong Kong....No one spoke to me about the work they were doing. I wasn’t trusted enough to be involved directly, ...Everything I did could easily have been done by one of the others, which made me wonder why I was really there. Manipulative secrecy, information provided only on a need to know basis, and the ask no questions mindset made it impossible for me to know the real reason. In hindsight, I suspect it may have been to maintain complete control over me, at least temporarily, after Berg’s team had recruited Rachelle. I had less freedom there than when I lived in communist China. As Berg bluntly put it, WS members were virtual prisoners under house arrest...... After nearly a year in Hong Kong, I moved to Macau in 1990. It had been five years since I lived in the translation home there. Ho’s compound on the outer island of Coloane now had around 70 people. About half were children and teens, many without their parents. ...... I soon realized that some of the teens were segregated from the others. They were under a separate, restricted regime and didn’t participate in activities with others in the commune. …… Seeing up-close how closely controlled they were under Michael’s harsh command, I realized they were being punished with hard labour. Eventually, after chatting with my teen helpers, and overhearing conversations, I learned disturbing details of other ways those teens were being mistreated. Their physical and psychological punishments included being confined in closets or attics, forced fasting, speech restriction, spiritual threats, and brutal beatings with a wooden paddle.Although I knew that Family children and teens were subjected to harsh spankings, usually with an instrument of some sort, I had never witnessed such beatings, and wasn’t aware of those other forms of cruel corporal and emotional punishments. I didn’t doubt they were happening though, especially after I saw two teen girls subjected to forced silence and public shaming by wearing signs around their necks instructing people not speak to them because they were forbidden to talk.One of those girls was Amber, an exuberant red-head I knew from a couple years earlier when I lived with her and her parents, Ezra and Ginny, in the Tokyo office. The other teen was Berg’s granddaughter, Merry Jolene Berg,i known in the Family as Mene. She was the daughter of Berg’s oldest son, Paul, who everyone knew as Aaron.ii… In 1973, when Merry was one year old, her father Aaron committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in the French Alps. At the time of his death Family members were told it was ruled an accident, but many years later Merry’s mother, Aaron’s second wife, revealed on an internet forum for exmembers that after Aaron died she read his suicide note and sent it to Berg.iii In her early years, Merry was shuffled between her mother and her grandmother, Jane Berg,iv before becoming a child performer with the Music With Meaning radio troupe. She moved to her grandfather’s home when she was 11.A few years after that, in a fit of rage directed at 14-year-old Merry, Berg told her: “Your father Aaron was insane! If it hadn’t been for the Lord, he would have jumped off the cliff a long time before that...”. His acknowledgement of his son’s suicide appeared in a Mo Letter entitled “The Last State – The Dangers of Demonism”,v which describes a violent exorcism Merry endured at the hands of her grandfather. The title refers to a passage in Luke chapter 11 where Jesus is depicted casting out devils from people, and warns them not to allow the evil spirit to return, or they will end up in a worse state than before.The letter’s cover illustration shows a young girl using a broom to chase off a flying demon, and several shadowy demons surrounding her as she sleeps. The introduction explains that Merry’s minders had previously subjected her to five exorcisms in the span of two months, attempting to expel the evil spirits they said she had sinfully succumbed to. When that didn’t have the desired effect on her behaviour, Berg stepped in to conduct another exorcism himself. His co-leaders Zerby and Kelly participated, as did Sara and Alfred,vi longtime members of Berg’s staff who supervised Merry and the other children.Most of the letter is a transcript of the exorcism. It started the moment Merry came into the room where the adults were gathered. Berg hugged and kissed her, asked her how she was, then suddenly started speaking in tongues, grabbed her head with both hands and violently shook her. As Berg described it, he “yanked it around and back and forth and side ways to side ways by my hands until I was afraid I was going to yank her head off or break her neck! God was so angry.... And then I hauled off and slapped her I don’t know how many times tonight, hard, right?”viiAfter violently shaking her for a full minute, he told her to look at him, slapped her face and began rebuking the Devil. Merry repeated each line of his prayer commanding Satan to leave her. He then slapped her again, pushed her into a chair and began a fierce rant interspersed with repeated prayers and threats. Berg berated and spiritually condemned Merry for a couple hours, and threatened to physically beat the demons out of her. He showed her a wooden rod, told her to feel how heavy it was, then made her bend over and whacked her with it, warning that next time it would be much harder, but on her bare buttocks.The vicious verbal violence and spiritual threats Berg spat at Merry was fairly typical of his rants when he was speaking about his perceived enemies, but it was shocking to read such vitriolic language directed at his 14-year-old granddaughter, on top of the physical violence he inflicted on her. That’s why Berg published the letter with those details. He intended it as a dreadful warning, especially to teens, not to doubt, disobey, disrespect, question, or criticize their parents or leaders, which apparently were Merry’s sins. …… Throughout his tyrannical tirade, Berg demonized Merry by claiming she was involved with witchcraft and satanism, and possessed by devils that she deviously let back in after each exorcism. He repeatedly equated demon possession to mental illness, warning her that she would go insane and end up in a mental hospital if she didn’t repent and change. Berg not only told Merry that her father was insane, but that other close relatives were too, including her mother, her grandmother Jane, and her aunt Deborah, Berg’s first child.viiiIt’s not surprising that Berg claimed those people were mentally ill. Each of them had intimate knowledge of his immoral personal life, and had criticized or disobeyed him. Labelling them and othersix as insane and possessed was a tactic to discredit them, which was why Merry was facing the same accusations. She had honestly disclosed her true feelings and thoughts, including criticisms of her grandfather, in daily reportsx the children were required to write. The adults who read her diary probably considered her honest criticisms of Berg’s behaviour her worst sin of all. ...… In August 1987, several months after the events in that letter, Berg banished his granddaughter to her uncle Ho’s commune in Macau. A year or so after Merry’s arrival, Berg instructed his son and the top leaders of the region to set up a separate juvenile detention program in his compound. Known as the Teen Detention Home,xi it was the model for what became Victor Programsxii in other parts of the world. Teens deemed delinquent or rebellious, often over trivial matters, were subjected to punishments, confinement, hard labour and re-indoctrination through constant study of scriptures and Mo Letters, all intended to break their will and force them to submit. …...After reading that account of Merry’s horrific exorcism, the fact that Berg had subjected his granddaughter to such cruel physical and psychological torture was so disturbing that I repressed it. Merry had been at the Macau compound for almost three years when I moved there. I hadn’t thought of her in that time, but when I saw her on the workgang the first time and realized who she was, my memory of that atrocity she suffered swiftly surfaced. The helpless girl I saw that morning, and later with the humiliating silence sign around her neck, was a disheartened, depressed, abused teen, not the devilishly dangerous one Berg maliciously claimed she was.A few months later, I got an even closer look at how Merry was still being abused, which shook me to the core. …… A few days after that shocking evening, I heard they had finally taken Merry to the local hospital. Knowing she was getting medically competent care helped to relieve some of my inner turmoil. I later learned that when Merry was released from the hospital her uncle Ho took her to the United States to live with her grandmother, Jane Berg, who was no longer in the Family, but still friendly. That was the last I heard of Merry until 15 years later when I was under psychiatric care myself and spoke about that horrific experience for the first time.After those events in Macau, I was ordered back to the Heavenly City School in Japan in early 1990. While there all my doubts about Berg and the cult reached a turning point (see the chapter Losing My Religion in this series), and I began plotting my escape. Less than a year after witnessing Merry Berg’s torture in Macau I left the cult and returned to Canada in September 1991.Tainted Love – Soft CellSometimes I feel I've got to Run away I've got to Get away From the pain you drive into the heart of me The love we share Seems to go nowhere And I've lost my light For I toss and turn, I can't sleep at night Once I ran to you (I ran) Now, I'll run from you This tainted love you've given I give you all a boy could give you Take my tears and that's not nearly all Oh, tainted love Tainted love Now, I know I've got to Run away, I've got to Get away You don't really want any more from me To make things right You need someone to hold you tight And you think love is to pray But I'm sorry, I don't pray that way Don't touch me please I cannot stand the way you tease I love you, though you hurt me so Now, I'm gonna pack my things and go Tainted love, oh, tainted loveWhile watching that video as the song played for this podcast episode I noticed for the first time the scene where the male subject of the song is looking at his horoscope, with Virgo highlighted, which coincidentally is also my sun sign. Another example of a pop song mirroring my cult experiences.i Merry Jolene Berg ii Paul Brandt Berg iii Judy Helmstetler (aka Shulamite), Merry Berg’s mother iv Jane Miller Berg v David Berg, “The Last State – The Dangers of Demonism”, March 1987 par. 55vi Alfred Strickland Kelley vii Supra, note 16 “The Last State”, par. 114viii Supra, note 16 “The Last State”, pars. 46,47,54,55ix David Berg, “A Father Applies The Rod! -- Dad’s Phone Call with Ho”, December 1980, pars. 17,18,20 x Open Heart Report xi Teen Detention Home xii Victor Programs This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit perrybulwer344598.substack.com