What a supposed friend we have in Jesus

I am not sure what to think of religion, or at least the kind of religion most people have. I understand the purpose of it and all, but a lot of it is a mystery to me and, frankly, it just doesn't float my boat, if you know what I mean.

My parents were really cool when it came to religion. Their theory was that I should be at least given an exposure to the various religions and then make up my own mind what I wanted to do. My maternal grandparents were Southern Baptists, but it didn't really rub off on Mom at all, and I don't know what the hell my dad's parents were. They were probably so busy trying to scratch out a living on an apple orchard during the Depression that they didn't have time to think about what God was up to, and I can't say I blame them under the circumstances.

I went to every church imaginable when I was little. My parents would drop me off there and I would sit there and take it all in. These were different times, back nearly a half century ago, when there wasn't a goddamned pederast on every corner, so it was safe to just drop a kid off at church and then disappear. I guess all the child abusers worked in barbershops back then (see entry The Barbers of Seville).

There isn't a whole lot I remember about all those church visits. I do remember being given a little hat to wear during my visit to temple, and that an usher started to give me wine by mistake at the Catholic church and then realized he should be giving me grape juice instead. Other than those two things it was all a blur of the same old shit. The one cool thing was at one church they had a portrait of some guy named Zoroaster or something like that hanging up, and he had a great big beard with all these curls in it. I'm still not sure who Zoroaster was or why his mug was up in that church, but it was a cool picture.

But I did have two brushes with religious education. The first was at a Sunday school at the church I liked best. I must've been in about third grade. We had a blast and sang songs, but there was one thing I could not get past. The church graveyard was right outside the window of the room where the classes were held, and there was this one huge monument right smack dab next to it. It was from the '20s and was one of those really big ones, and I used to look at it in amazement.

This was a great distraction while I was being taught about God and Christ and the rest of that crew, and I am sure they were all wonderful folks but I just was fascinated by this big monument. It had a huge ball and an eagle on top of it. I wondered why someone would want an eagle on top of their gravestone. But I could not look at it without thinking of the poor guy buried there. What did he die of? What was it like to die? Did he have any idea that he had been lying there for decades? And it was interesting to think that he would be there forever. He is there right now, by gum, and when I draw my last breath he will still be there and he will be there when my children's children's grandchildren pass into old age.

Well, we moved, and that was the end of that. And I really didn't want to spend my Sunday mornings going to Sunday school anymore. The alternative was watching this TV show called Davy and Goliath. It was the standard religious Christian propaganda show for kids way back then. Did you ever see it? It was a weird puppet-stop-animation-type thing. I don't know how to describe it, but it was a little creepy. And I figured watching this show was as good as hauling my ass out to Sunday school.

The basic thing of this show was that Davy was the kid and Goliath was his dog, and they always got into some kind of jackpot that provided a chance for a religious message. The theme song for this show was a hymn that I later found out is called "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." It was a powerful damned song, too, bleated out on an organ that you could just imagine was about 150 feet high.

But the whole God thing never really made sense to me, even as a kid. I mean the standard Christian concept of God being a big guy with a beard who rewarded the faithful and smote the wicked. I saw too many good people being fucked with and not enough assholes being smitten or smoted or smited or whatever the hell it is you call it. For example, why was that fucking barber who did that to me (see Barbers of Seville) allowed to live to a ripe old age? And how about the neighborhood tough, older and much larger than me, who for laughs grabbed me from behind, knocked me down with a suckerpunch and then straddled me and beat me unconscious and then kept beating me until a kindly stranger came running and probably saved my life? Why was this monstrous fuck allowed to survive the day after that?

Who built God's throne? How did this huge throne sit in the sky? Who made his clothes? How did his robes get washed? Did they have Tide and bleach in Heaven? Where did he pee? What about No. 2, for that matter? I am sorry to engage in such blasphemy, but these are the kind of things I thought of when I was a kid. I guess I was a practical little bugger in some respects.

So for a while the sum total of my religious training was this TV show, and you can see from the questions that crossed my mind it did a piss-poor job of providing me with a healthy faith in God.

The other thing that bothered me about the show was that damned hymn, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." I never liked Sundays as a kid. I've always had a terrible tendency to not live in the moment and to be pissed off or depressed about the future. My wife says this is my most contemptible quality as a human, and believe me that is saying something.

So I hated Sundays because it was the day before Monday, and Monday meant my Dad was going back to work, and in my life there has never been anything as wonderful as the time I spent with him and it just tore me up to know he was going back to work the next day. Plus it meant there was school the next day, and that meant getting up in the morning, and who the fuck in their right mind wants to do that? So hearing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" set off this flood of angst and depression over the fact that Monday was just a day away.

Well, after a couple years, when I was 11 or 12 or so, I took the plunge back into religious training. The local Methodist church had something called Vacation Bible School, and they had all kinds of neat posters in school advertising it, something that of course would never happen today. The posters had a depiction of Christ looking something like a guy who would have hung out with Jack Kerouac, and there were crew-cut boys with freshly scrubbed faces and little strawberry blond girls hanging out with him. This seemed OK so I signed up.

There were about eight of us in the class, and I will be damned if there were any cute girls with strawberry blond hair there. It was all boys, and two of them were pig farmers, and God bless these people for what they do but when I was a kid the pig farmers were the untouchable caste and I assume it will not strain your imagination to figure out why. So here it was hot and all and of course there was no air conditioning, and here the eight of us sat in this stifling room, and two of the kids were covered with pig slop, which is something that you don't wanton your clothes, especially in a room in which it is about 97 degrees.

The woman who taught the class was about 30 and was not married, which in those days and in that particular place was nothing short of a scandal. She seemed pleasant enough, and despite the pig farmers and the odor and the heat we did our best to have fun. I would have liked it if Christ had showed up so I could see if he really looked as cool as the poster made him look, but I guess he had other things to do, or maybe he didn't like pig slop and 90-degree temperatures and I cannot blame him for either.

But virtually everything in my life that was touted by others as being a good thing has come to a bad end in one way or another, and this sure as hell was no exception to that pathetic rule. On the last day of this Vacation Bible School class, Miss Whatsherface seemed like she was in some kind of weird mood when we all showed up. I thought maybe one of the pig farmers was especially ripe or something, but turned out it wasn't that at all.

Once we got settled, she pulled the shades. We figured this meant she was going to show a movie or slides or something, but how wrong we were. After making sure all the shades were down, she became really stern and told us all to get on our knees on the floor, right now, and started really laying it on about how sin was the ruination of the world and the ruination of all God's little children, especially us, and how due to sin and the devil little boys did things like, well, amuse themselves in an impure and disgusting fashion, and how this was the sort of behavior God has no use for.

And here we were, poor little bastards, on our knees on the hard tile floor, with this sexually repressed nut coming around and berating us individually for our sins. CONFESS, she said...give TESTIMONY to how evil we were, how we were bad and had done bad things, especially the bad thing we were probably doing in private, and you can just imagine what that was. We were told that we had to confess to doing that, and if we did not confess it was too bad for us because God knows everything and that we were appearing before the eyes of God at that moment to cleanse our souls and the only way to do so would be to lay all the sin out on the table so it could be wiped away.

We were reduced to tears and did all sorts of confessing on our knees, and it was an incredibly traumatic experience. After what seemed like an eternity of this, she told us to get back in our seats, opened the shades and then went about her business as if none of this had happened.

That was it for me, I am telling you. Just as I think about that pervert barber I told you about, I think about this woman from time to time. As the years have passed, I've come to think that she was the one who engaged in self-abuse late at night while thinking about browbeating us poor kids with all this dogma and brimstone and talk of sin.

Well, sorry if that upset you, but this life is not an easy one. And people like that sure don't help us along the way.