Re
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My odyssey of life, so far.
(Part 2, or the rest of it.) My parents did try to give me bits of the Christian way in my earliest upbringing. One of my earliest memories is my mother having written out the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer on two large sheets of paper, and of getting me to be able to recite them both from memory when I was about 3 1/2 years old.
My parents had me in nursery school (one run by a local Baptist church) when I was 3 and 4 years old, although none of us attended their church services. Later I attended a kindergarten run by a Presbyterian church, and again we didn't attend services. (We never went anywhere else, either.) Neither my parents nor I were ever talked to about why we didn't attend; I never gave it a moment's thought, nor had the thought ever dawned to me to ask them to take me to church on a Sunday morning.
I spent the first 2/3 of first grade attending a school run by a Lutheran church. It was recommended to my parents by the people they rented their house at the time from. The lady who was our teacher was young and a bit OTT at times with discipline.
One very nervous lad who tried to dissipate some of his nervousness by walking around a bit was actually once tied into his chair with rope, and his mouth taped shut with masking tape because he'd talked too much for her liking. I nearly got the masking tape treatment myself at one point, with a bit of the tape stuck on the edge of my desk as a 'warning'.
There, however, our lack of church attendance was noted on the report card. At the time we lived in New Orleans. We lived in an eastern suburb, and this church/school was in the far west end of the city. The school bus ride took nearly 45 minutes each way, every day. Too long for anything for a six year old boy. (Later we concluded the woman who recommended that school to us--and sent her own children there--did so to keep them out of her hair for as much of the day as possible. I'd be getting on the bus around 7.35 ayem and back home about 4.20 peeyem.)
Shortly after the masking tape episode, and with my parents seeing how the long bus rides were getting to me, they decided to pull me out of that school, and started me in the local public school just before Valentine's Day. I did as well, or better, in the new school.
That summer we moved to a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, where we spent the next 4 years. I attended public school, and most all was well there. The new neighbours across the street....another story. The family were my introduction to the whole 'born-again' mind set (or should that be 'head trip'?). When the man introduced himself to my mother one day, he told her his family were 'the only real Christians on the block'. The arrogance of that statement as much startled her as it failed to impress her.
Their story was they had once been heavily into partying but as a result of surviving a bad car wreck whilst drunk, became 'saved' and went whole-hog in that direction. They had two children, a son two years younger than I, and a daughter two or three years younger than him, who tended to tag along with us as she had no-one else to play with. She often got her brother into trouble by 'telling on him'. As a result that boy got the hell beaten out of him with a belt periodically (something that never happened to me, and which I found quite blood-curdling).
As I say, they were extremely religious, in a Southern Baptist kind of way. This meant that they were at church whenever the doors were open (as the old cliche goes). Their idea of Sunday as a day of rest meant they went to church for both morning and evening services, and apart from the ordinary three meals a day, spent the rest of the day in bed, asleep. The kids were not allowed to play or do anything else either.
It was around this time that I also had my first taste of the 'salvation spiel'. One evening, when their son and I were out riding our bikes, he asked me out of the blue if I'd 'been saved'. 'From what?' I wondered. 'From sin!' He thus began the whole tired spiel, like he'd been programmed (perhaps at one of those 'revivals' they attended) by someone to do. I really didn't know what he was on about, but I managed to withstand all that kooky hell talk unscathed and un-freaked out.
Another dimension of the out-and-out rudeness of this sort of thing was shown me in hearing about what happened to my grandfather at about the same time. A very religious cousin of my grandmother's, and her husband, just appeared unannounced at my grandparents' house one day. That was rude in itself, not calling on the phone first to see if they were busy, or whatever....at any rate, when they turned up, they were invited in, and seemed loosely conversational for a couple of minutes.
Then the woman started in on Grandpa. Asked him that question about 'If you died tonight, would you go to Heaven?'. Grandpa was then well in his eighties and had been suffering with heart pains for several years. The last thing he needed was someone stressing him out about anything, much less banging on about death and dying, or going to, or burning in, hell. As you no doubt have concluded, she did the same breathless spiel as my friend had done....on and on. Dad was furious when he found out what this woman had done, and called her and tore her off a strip for it.
One thing I sensed I would have liked to have had at ready was some kind of a set of responses that could quickly stop someone who gets into that spiel before it goes on and on, and pacifies them. But I didn't know where to look, or knew if such a set of responses existed.
A few years later we moved to Dad's hometown, as his parents were still alive then but quite old and he wanted to be able to look after them if one of them fell ill or became an invalid. Grandpa died ten days after we moved into the house we'd bought. The minister who did the funeral was the then-pastor of the church Dad and my grandparents had attended years earlier. He had prayer with all of us, and said he'd soon meet with us about joining his church, etc. He never did, and we never did go. He still did the funerals in later years for Dad and Grandma though.
About five years after we moved there, we got a version of the famous surprise, rude visit I described earlier. This time, the perpetrator was a man my parents knew of a little in the years shortly after they were married. This man was well known in the town as what Dad called a 'religious nut', his terminology for hyper-religious people.
He was notorious for standing outside his place of business day after day, frequently accosting passers-by, and pushing tracts off on them. Dad told me how many local people who got wise to this man would frequently cross the streets taking long-way-around walks to get to certain businesses, just to avoid dealing with him.
On this frosty evening, the man brought a buddy with him, a local lawyer. We did think this sudden appearance very strange and all the rest of it; we didn't suspect it was going to be the 'salvation inquisition' thing. Dad invited them in, and soon secretly wished he hadn't.
After about three minutes of nervous, fluffy chat, the man got down to it. 'Pete,' he said to Dad, 'I want to ask you a question.'. 'Uh, okay....'. 'If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?'. 'Well, I hadn't really thought about it, actually,' was Dad's response. Things like trying to find good-paying office jobs at his age with companies not prone to 'lay-offs' in that locality were much more pressing priorities; Dad was too private an individual to make this point known to these men. The man and his lawyer friend got on with all their 'if you don't get 'saved' you're going to hell' business, peppered with heavy doses of 'it says in (book/chapter/verse) this and such' know-it-all authority.
Dad was trying his best to be the calm, polite, well-composed sort of man through all this interrogation and exposition. My mother was in the middle of washing-up dishes when they arrived, and it was some time before she was finished. When she was finished, she joined my father and the two men in the living room.
Then they tried to push their scare tactics and know-it-all BS on my mother. She didn't suffer fools or arrogant twits, and that lawyer's particularly condescending tone hit her nerves quick. She knew a thing or two about the Bible as well, and did not take kindly at all to his attitude toward Dad or herself, and she wasted no time letting him know so. And Dad certainly didn't interfere or interrupt her in any manner.
I really think inside he appreciated her doing what she did, as it was quite what he wished he'd had it in himself to say. After several minutes of my mother more than holding up her end of the verbal fight, the two men realised they needed to call it quits and leave. We never saw or heard from them again.
On something of a side note, I actually attended the local Catholic high school for my senior year. It was depressing for a lot of reasons; the only good thing about the whole year was that it ended, and I got a diploma for my trouble at the same time as everyone else.
Through the years we lived in that small Iowa town, there were always the relentless houndings from the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons. We grew adept at looking out our windows hoping to spot any of them before they turned up on our doorstep. If we saw they were in our block, we dimmed the lights inside and turned the television down, so it looked like no-one was home.
If we spotted two boys about 19 or 20 years old, out in suits, riding bicycles together, we knew they were Mormons. If we saw one to three people on foot, typically closer to middle age--JWs. The latter would almost always leave an AWAKE! or a WATCHTOWER in the screen door.
In 1990, at the invitation of a one-time co-worker of my dad's, my mother and I moved to Texas. Ever since the 1950s she'd read books by the likes of Emmet Fox and Norman Vincent Peale, the latter of whom especially appealed to her. She was also very fond of the Science Of Mind philosophy, and the Ernest Holmes book which is its centrepiece was top of her list. She tried explaining things to me out of it from time to time, but none of it resonated with me, or made a great deal of sense.
At times she also subscribed to the SOM magazine, and shortly after we settled in Texas she found by way of the magazine where a local SOM study group were forming. Mom and I attended one session. It was strange to me, to say the least. Mom found it a bit odd too, and wasn't too thrilled with the people there. Through the 1990s she began to detect what she thought was a drift toward 'new-age-ism' in the magazine's content, and she stopped reading it.
By the mid-1990s I found myself a still-single thirty-something. As I'm not a drinker and don't do the bar scene, friends at the time told me I'd ought to go to a church as a means of meeting people and possibly meeting a special lady. So grudgingly I began to go to this church and that, but I always felt quite out of place. These were all more moderate churches, run-of-mill Baptist or Methodist or Lutheran or such like, not Catholic nor the lunatic fringe Pentecostal types.
What hit me, that most made me feel a misfit, was that church in general was orientated toward families. People like me were the perennial odd ones out. Single, but also with no relatives or other family anywhere around: double whammy. There never seemed to be anyone that seemed like me in any ways I could 'click' with among what few others were also single, either.
I've worked as a recording engineer for many years, and in 1996 I recorded an album for a local Christian rock group. In the wake of the recording work I was also asked to help out with running their live sound. Big mistake. Across the few months I worked with them, there began to be a change in some of my behaviours and attitudes, and not for the better. I nearly lost some friends as a result.
I also saw the dark side of a person (the main band member) who represented himself as a 'Christian' to the world at large, but who used bits from the Bible to tyrannise his immediate family, and verbally and emotionally abuse and bully his children and step-children at home. He was positively obsessed with the notion of authority and of having to be the authority and head of his household....can you say tyrant? A wonderful anti-role model for me!
I started to sense that things with the group might be headed toward a cultish, communal living thing, such was his vision of how he saw the group evolving together in time, and his wanting everyone to move from or sell away where they were living, and all buy adjacent properties out near a remote lake, and build new houses there. Guess what I didn't do? It took me several months before I began to get my head cleared out again after breaking away from that group.
And about a year and a half after escaping that lot, and roughly a year after a breakup with a girl I liked, I asked someone who was a Christian (who I thought was a friend) if my just finding out she was pregnant by someone else, and how the pangs of post-breakup pain which were going through me again as a result, were normal.
Right. You know the rest. He asked me if I was a Christian, and apparently my saying 'yes' wasn't somehow enough. Started him straight into full-blown 'witnessing-spiel' mode. The creep went on and on for at least 45 minutes, I never got a word in edgewise, and I don't think he ever answered my question! (Remember what I said earlier about wishing I had an effective means of defusing this verbal fusillade?)
From the mid-1990s into the early 2000s I also had work troubleshooting, repairing, and installing sound systems in some churches as well. On occasion, following a substantial upgrade or a full-blown installation, a church would ask me to assist in running their sound systems, and also to help tutor others in properly running them.
Sometimes, these churches turned out to be those of the Pentecostal bent, and also were not part of any denominational affiliation. Hence they were what I later determined to be more or less personality cults, where the die-hard followers hung on the so-called 'pastor''s words as though he really WAS a prophet of God. The true lunatic fringe: everything but the snakes. I only ever was in attendance at one of these things on what I call a professional basis--to do with the sound system, etc.
One time, I was running the sound for a real whiz-bang show, a three day revival in a storefront church of this kind, started by a used-car salesman(!!). It was toward the end of the third evening, a Sunday. They had secured the services (no pun intended) of an author and speaker who'd written a book or two on what your dreams really mean. The 'pastor' told me that afternoon the author said he wanted me to join the line of people he would 'prophecy' over, as he would have a 'word of prophecy' for me that evening.
They'd bought several dozen short blank cassettes for me to record these impromptu 'prophecies' onto, and had me label and hand them to the appropriate people in the crowd afterward, so they'd have them for future reference.
After quite a while of this 'prophecy' business, the author grew fatigued. I was still the faithful engineer, doing my recording/live sound duties, and couldn't leave what I was doing. The 'pastor' decided he'd pray and 'get into the spirit' and pick up where the author left off.
The author and his wife eventually were sat near where I was. The man said to me at one point, 'Oh yeah, I forgot, I had a word of prophecy for you'. I said matter-of-factly, 'Well, it couldn't have been very important or you'd have remembered it, wouldn't you?' He had no response.
It wasn't long after that that I stopped going there, as much for my physical safety as anything else, as that 'pastor' was known to have a violent streak, which had shown itself in the parking lot of his former church he'd attended before deciding to become this 'pastor'.
He got very short-tempered with me once there. I got him calmed down, but I never went back after that evening was over. He wanted EVERYTHING at ear-shattering volume levels because in his mind that's how the black churches, the 'real' churches, always have things. (I humbly had other ideas.)
About a year and a half later he bought the biggest amplifier he could find. My partner in the sound system venture and I installed it, and found out that half their speakers had been blown since shortly after I left there, because whomever else he had running the system simply turned things up as high as he demanded, damn the consequences. They never knew the speakers (the tweeters to be specific) were fried!
Finally, by about 2002 I began to realise that most churches were hazardous to my spiritual health. Some much more so than others; the least dangerous were really just boring, and I seemed to be able to catch on to the 'shtick' of a given church and find nothing new on offer after about a 6 month period.
Coming from a musical family as I do, the music I heard in many of those churches--which tended often to be what's known as 'praise-and-worship'--really got on my nerves with its monotonousness and repetitive modes. The widespread use of 'sound tracks', as they call pre-recorded backing tracks of music, also grated on me.
And churches often made what I call 'seven-minute versions of three-minute songs' with too much repetition. Those were calculated to whip the congregations into altered states of consciousness through aural hypnosis. The sounds of excess.
Very early in my life I'd sensed a kind of peacefulness around Catholic churches. I don't know why, but still....my partner in the sound system thing was a Catholic, and he answered all my questions about Catholicism. (He hated that awful music I described above as much as I do, and he also assured me I wouldn't be subjected to any of it at Mass, either. I thought, SIGN ME UP, NOW!) This was in early 2003, and I was received into the Catholic church at Easter.
Later that year, my mother died. Grief can do some really crazy things to your head in addition to what it does to your soul. The day she had the stroke that ultimately killed her, I met a single mom in the next emergency room who hadn't had a date in a long time. She was a Pentecostal, but at first she seemed really decent and nice and such, and in the wake of dealing with losing my mom I soon found myself drawn to her. Her kids liked me too, and somewhat regarded me as a father figure.
She had no interest in my Catholic faith. I said to her if she and the kids ever wanted to go to Mass with me they were more than welcome, and that I would never, ever force the issue, and left it at that.
I made the mistake of going with her and her children to her 'church'. Twice. It was another small town quasi-neo-Pentecostal non-denominational zoo, replete with all the 'slain-in-the-spirit' showbiz trappings, and people claiming to hear from God. And as luck would have it, she was one of those who thought she heard from God too.
I'll spare you the irrational, delusional and quite hurtful things she began saying to me in the name of her God. Suffice it to say, around that time I met the pastor of another church who'd known her some years before. He had a word of advice for me about dating her: 'Run like hell!'. Enough said.
Due to a complex chain of events, I could not find a place to relocate to in the area where Mom and I had lived, and at the behest of someone I thought was a friend (part of a gospel group I'd recorded in 1989), I moved to north central Arkansas, seeking a fresh start.
This so-called friend actually knew a pastor who liked the idea of having a recording studio in his church. He saw it as not only benefitting his church, but also he had the idea of it being a service open to those from any other church in the area who wanted to record or produce well-recorded Christian music as well. (This was nothing to do with the Catholic church at all, either.)
In faith, you might say, and also based on what proved to be some empty promises and bad advice the so-called friend made me, I took literally all the money I'd inherited upon Mom's death, and cashed it all in to purchase recording equipment.
I also believed that God would bless me with enough business in the studio that I could float some equipment and electronic parts purchases on a credit card and pay things off properly....didn't happen.
Yep, I prayed and all the rest of it. I also had some bad run-ins with the church's music director regarding running their sound. They asked me to do it, and then tried to tie my hands at every turn, whenever I attempted to straighten out everything that was wrong with it. I also had bad scenes at other churches with their sound systems too....similar stories.
By 2006 I had had to get an apartment with a roommate, and take whatever jobs I could find around here. That meant minimum wage, and often part-time. My monetary situation grew ever smaller, and I let the church that allowed me to build the studio know I was on the verge of selling away all my gear to settle the debts.
One of the pastor's sons is a lawyer who's stepped in to handle the legal sides of all that scene, so for now, I still have the studio, even though there's virtually no business ever. I may make one album with someone a year if I'm lucky.
I still attended Mass off and on, and even gave what little monetary contributions as I felt I could manage, until a year and a half ago, when I moved to where I now live.
In 2007 I had four jobs (if you count the studio as one of them) including a short interval where I worked for another church, sorting out and running their sound system as one of them. That job ended because they would not stop a deacon from meddling with, and sabotaging, my work on the sound system, and thought me wrong to complain about it. They told some people that I didn't get along with their choir, which was total nonsense, whilst telling me to my face they simply couldn't afford to pay me to do the job anymore.
At least I now believe I'm cured of ever doing sound work for churches as far as running sound for services. Never again. Fix them for pay, get them sounding great, then get the (bleep) outta Dodge, is the only way to go, I've learned.
Those four jobs dwindled down to one plus the studio just before a car wreck in September 2007. I'm the only survivor of it, and had my right kneecap broken in the crash. I can no longer walk properly, am in considerable pain if I'm on my feet too long, and only can work in the studio when someone can give me a ride there. I am fighting to get on disability and I have had to sell parts of the studio off to help pay bills.
On a final, personal note, I am striving to get free from all the garbage of religion insofar as it's a man-made construct, and to that extent. I'm not ditching 'God' per se: I'm calling God that which formed all matter at the atomic/molecular level. Everything beyond that....erm....we'll see, won't we?
Honestly, I really have had nothing come of any prayers I ever offered. Hence why I at least used to ask others to pray for things for me, in case their prayers would work where mine wouldn't. Sometimes others would not do that, and would inject the 'God's will' mind game into the fray, or even seem offended that I asked them to pray for me, when I likely would not do so myself.
I am at least now able to be unimpressed and unmoved at anyone's saying they are a Christian, because I've found in the main that that has NO bearing on how a person really is. Actions truly do speak louder than words.
I have to watch my words and actions most carefully for as long as I live here, because of where I am at, and the people around me. They are very religious in the main, so I have to talk a good game to stay in their good graces (pun optional). Some times they try to pressurise me to go to church, and I have to tell them I'm not ready for that yet. I just say I've been hurt by too many things.
Truly, I've been the most at peace in myself in several years, being away from all churches since moving here.
And what would make me happy? If I could find a place (in my dreams it would be in the UK) where I could live 100% true to what I am spiritually (no charades!) without the backlash I'd get here in America, and be able to work in something I'm competent at and make a good living at it financially as well.
Cheers!
