The Bible has never been high on my list of personally-meaningful texts. Not for a lack of trying. As a child, I spent every Sunday morning dressed in my bleached-white altar boy garb, ineptly performing the ancient rituals of the Catholic Mass before a packed church, all the while pondering how I might get some of the girls from the congregation to talk to me and how I might beat the 7th level on Zelda (It never occurred to me that there might be a conflict between those two concerns). On Thursday nights it was off to "Sunday School" with the cool long-haired dude who would talk to me and about 5 other kids about Heaven and Jesus and Iron Maiden. Maybe it wasn't the impact he had hoped to have on me, but our Thursday chats inspired me to purchase Somewhere in Time, an album that undoubtedly helped me survive my sophomore year of high school. And it's hard to forget those terrifying monthly visits to the confessional booth, where I'd receive instructions to recite a number of Hail Mary's equal to the latest lie I'd told Mom and Dad. Five hundred Hail Mary's later and I still feel bad about not telling them where I was on New Years Eve 1989. Sorry guys. It wasn't Timmy's house. The truth is that this mystical world of my Irish Catholic heritage never developed into anything more than just something I had to do. Making matters worse, our church was to eventually experience a tragic, and all-too-familiar, incident in which our priest, Father Caparelli, took advantage of several young boys in our congregation. Why I was spared this treatment I'll never know. Like a few of the other kids at church, I had gone to the movies with Father Caparelli, and helped out with gardening of the church grounds. But for whatever reason, the worst I ever experienced was a pat on the rump that lasted a bit too long.
After the scandal broke, my parents were quick to switch churches and I spent the remaining Sundays of my childhood in the more relaxed and ritual-lite environment of a Lutheran Church, minus the whole altar boy part. There my adventures in Christianity continued. Each week, I sat through variations of the same Bible readings, hymns, and sermons. I faithfully mouthed the prayers I knew by heart. I took my weekly communion, and became confirmed. And I even joined the youth group, attending a number of camping and rafting trips in honor of Jesus (but mainly in honor of the three cute girls who were in the group). And through it all, the worldview of the church failed to capture my imagination. It never had anything to do with the whole Father Caparelli situation either. I've always been of the opinion that there are bad apples in every group out there, and I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of Christian priests are lovely, compassionate, and responsible individuals. The fact of the matter is that the Bible never gave me what my mind needed.
Fast forward twenty years, and I've got a bit more perspective on this disconnect. The basic problem has always been with the church's compartmentalization of good (God) and evil (Satan). Inner peace, for me, wasn't going to be found by rejecting and repressing all things deemed "evil", and accepting an all-good deity into my life. It was going to be found by accepting the "good" and the "bad" inherent in all things, identifying those things in this reality that perpetuate the good and bad, and finding ways to improve myself and the world with this real-world knowledge in mind. So when I left home and went to college, I became a fairly passionate seeker of knowledge. It didn't matter if it was scientific, spiritual, or artistic. It was all part of the puzzle. And, over time, I've managed to find the peace I never had as that confused kid in church. Meanwhile, aside from my occasional appearance at a Lutheran mass while visiting my parents, I've pretty much let go of my Christian upbringing. And in the 15+ years since my church-going days, I've probably built up my fair share of emotional reactivity to all things Christian.
Which brings me to the larger point of this post. Because one of the tasks of adulthood (in my humble opinion) is to try and reduce the emotional reactivity we develop towards those things we leave behind. For me, this means being able to read the bible with as much openness and curiosity as I might read a book more in my own comfort zone. And so, I thought I'd take the opportunity to revisit those mysterious and confusing chambers of my childhood, with the benefit of my adult calm and perspective, and see if there might be any wisdom the Good Book has waiting for me. I mean, I am talking about my heritage and my family here. And so, for a few weeks now, I've been reading about floods, and burning bushes, and people rising from the dead, and it's been...well, sort of fun, and kind of enlightening. So stay tuned for my next post, in which I'll be talking about how I've learned to read the Bible my own way.
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