It's Sunday night and I'm wondering what everyone else in the world is doing right now. As for me, I'm thinking. I'm thinking about one particular experience in my life that I just can't get over.
There I was, age 15, just a young person trying to figure out religion and life in general. I had a thriving yard mowing business that summer and one of my clients was my pastor. I mowed his yard in the summer and raked it in the winter. Often, he would take me on a 45 minute drive so that I could also mow a retirement lot that he owned. We had long, good talks in the car about his past, religion, and life in general. He loved Royal Ambassadors (RAs), which was the scouting-like program of the Southern Baptist Convention. I loved RA's too, and it was a big part of my life from ages 10-23. I went to RA camp many years, and during that summer of 1975 he was the camp pastor.
That summer at RA camp was really freaky. I remember standing in the archery supply room one evening, and I either had a great epiphany or a divine experience come over me, and a voice was telling me that I would be destined to become a great writer. For years I just brushed this off as nonsense, but it was still unforgettable.
Months later I began to notice that I hadn't seen the pastor at church in a while, and everyone was real mum about it. I started asking questions and after weeks I had learned what happened: the pastor ran off with the church secretary. Both had left their spouses. This incident triggered a downward spiral in my life. The church started to break down and people began leaving. My parents left. My dad apparently felt that he and our family needed more spiritual discipline, so he made us join a fundamentalist Baptist church. They wanted me to keep my hair short, wear double-knit pants, and carry my Bible everywhere. They were fascists, and my parents got out of there after about 9 months.
All these experiences had the net result of making me cynical. First off, I felt that if people really BELIEVED that all non-believers were going to hell, that every Christian would be banging on doors day and night. It took me from 15 to 21 to unravel the elaborate mind game of religion.
As for the over-sexed pastor, well it forced me to ask hard questions. I started to chip away at the veil of self-imposed ignorance that was placed upon me at birth. Once I started questioning, I could never turn back. The pastor had broken my trust. Sure, people used many excuses to justify it, saying pastors are under particular pressures, or that the Devil works extra hard at destroying the clergy. But shouldn't a pastor also be getting extra help from God? Who is stronger?
Cynicism has plagued me most of my life. I do believe in God and am not cynical or angry at the Creator, but I am highly untrusting of organized religion. Jesus was a rebel against the Jewish institutions that made faith cold and mechanical. And as soon as he died, the Christians simply built a new institution that was just as lethargic. I have a good relationship with my God, but my anger towards man-made religion is something I must continually deal with.
I never saw or heard from the pastor again. The church let his wife stay in the rectory until she could settle her affairs. She was a sweet lady, and the mother of five grown children. Why the clown at the top of this message? She made beautiful clown ceramics and gave one to our family. It sat in our living room for years. The symbolism of that clown was too much. Sometimes I would just sit in the living room and just hold it and look at it. Life is so weird.
No comments:
Post a Comment