I was going somewhere with that story, but I got sleepy, and I’ve been unusually tired lately. I attibute it to not drinking Coke as much, though I seem to be replacing it with cigarettes.
Not good. I need to work on that.
So camp warped me somewhat. The next few years would be spent in this strange limbo. Clearly, there was something inherently wrong with Christianity as I knew it. I didn’t know anybody who claimed to be anything other than Christian, yet their beliefs were disparate.
Is it just convenient to put yourself under that umbrella? Is everyone just saying they’re part or something relatively vague, so as not to be ostracized? Is that me?
This would all be compounded further as I went through school. We had kids who would meet before school for their own Bible studies, and would extoll virtue when given the opportunity (though only once directed at me, when one of the “thumpers” took feigned offense to my Low Pop Suicide shirt). In spite of this, I knew that one of the girls in the group had slept with at least two of my friends, and that one of the boys was involved in a relatively torrid relationship with a man I knew in Ann Arbor.
Obviously, they weren’t right. Or they were right, and just didn’t believe what they were saying.
Near the end of my high school career, I took 20th Century Culture, which was considered one of the harder English classes as I recall, and seemed far more interesting to me than Brit Lit. The teacher was a former hippie, and I’m reasonably sure that in her estimation, everything that happened in the 20th Century either led to or was the result of the Vietnam Conflict.
Incidentally, I loved saying “Vietnam Conflict” in her presence. (Hint: Despite being a “war” in almost every respect imaginable, the United States never declared war against North Vietnam)
We read books. Lots of books. Lots of horrible hippie books. I hate that I know what Jonathan Livingston Seagull is about, much less the other tripe we had to read.
But one book interested me, and I’d be lying if I said I started reading it immediately. We were assigned Cat’s Cradle by none other than the late Mr. Kurt Vonnegut. Being one of the last books we read, I wrote it off as hippie tripe immediately. However, I quickly found three things very interesting:
1) I did not pass the first quiz, which I had been able to do with other books, despite never having read them.
2) People around me had a difficult time understanding the book.
3) One of the thumpers in my class despised the book.
Clearly, this is something I must read.
And read, I did.
I very quickly came to the realization that questioning religion wasn’t the taboo I thought it to be. Here’s a famous writer guy whose book is in my school, and he’s drawing these parallels that are so obvious. Sure, it may be oversimplified, but he’s just explained every major religion ever created. It really is meaningless if you’re a nonbeliever, and being a nonbeliever is okay.
It made sense that people didn’t “get” the book the same way I did. The teacher was using Cat’s Cradle to illustrate a facet of the Cold War and the humor in the military-industrial complex, but for me, that was all subtext. I mean, look at this:
I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.
And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, “I’m sorry, but I never could read one of those things.”
“Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God,” I said, “and, when God finds a minute, I’m sure he’ll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand.”
She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone thinks he sees what God is doing.
Exactly! How can it be that I’ve never thought of this on my own? This would light a fire in me to take Comparative Religion classes in high school and college, so that if nothing else, I could understand why everyone was wrong in their own special way.
And in saying that, don’t misinterpret that as me believing that I’m right. I don’t. Not even kind of.
