... Imagine joining that to a religious environment that I at least experienced as one that expected moral perfection with a God who would judge those who did not measure up. I don't know that any of the preachers I grew up with would necessarily characterize their preaching in this way, but these were probably the points that stuck out to me as a child.
There was an emphasis on having certain religious experiences. The first was when you were "saved." You needed to be able to pinpoint a moment when you were sure God had saved you. The second was when you were "sanctified." You needed to be able to pinpoint a moment when God filled you with the Spirit like the disciples on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2.
The preachers of my childhood preached these events in dramatic terms. When I did not have dramatic emotional events to point to, I became uncertain of my "salvation," of my eternal destiny. Eventually I would have some moments when peace followed prayer and angst. I could point to them as these experiences as my moments.
But there was also an emphasis on the need for faithfulness. I was raised with the sense that even one sin returned you to a course toward hell. Whatever experiences I might have had in the past, they were completely contingent on avoiding future sins at all costs. Repentance needed to be immediate, in case something happened, and I would go to hell.
As a child, I was not afraid of sudden death, but I was afraid that Jesus would suddenly return to earth. In the late 1970's end times speculation had returned with a fervor because of books like Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth. A trilogy of films came out and we saw them as a church. A Thief in the Night pictured a wife waking up to find that her husband had disappeared in the rapture, and she had been left alone to go through a 7 year tribulation with unimaginable suffering for those who had missed the rapture but turned to Christ during that time when the Antichrist would rule on earth.
So from that moment as a 10 year old when I woke up from that nap, my "conscience" awoke, and I experienced great fears off and on for the next ten years or so...
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Reflections 2
I experienced those days of fear as torturous. In its most intense times, I would be asking God to forgive me of my sins many times a minute. I can't imagine the fear of a child being separated from his or her parents in a concentration camp. I can't imagine the fear of a child being abducted. But my fear was real to me, despite the fact that I can look back and realize it was not real outside myself.
My youngest daughter Sophie experienced some fear in the first grade. It was nothing like my fears as a child but it reminded me of it. She came home from school a few times afraid of the fact that her teacher at some point would yell at the class because of the problem students. Perhaps there were other elements to her fear then, but it led me to think there was probably something genetic involved that traced to me as well.
I think my fears in part stemmed from a sense of inadequacy I had. In part, that sense of inadequacy stemmed from being an idealist, having perfection as the standard. But I also was bad at attaining my own standards. I am moving a little beyond the sixth grade, I know, as I analyze.
I was never diagnosed as hyperactive, although one "identity-sharing" story we tell is when an elderly woman at a concert turned around from the pew in front of us and asked my mother if I had ever been checked. They didn't diagnose with "attention deficit" back then, but I certainly did have trouble in college and seminary focusing on reading. I'll return to that later.
In any case, I often had overly optimistic goals coupled with an inability to follow through with things I started. So I wanted to build a plane as a child. I think I wanted to be able to fly my Grandma Shepherd back and forth from Indiana. She stayed with us for a short time in the 70's before moving back to Indiana and dying in a nursing home in 1979. She was in a wheelchair by then.
I would not listen to the reason of my parents but stubbornly insisted on starting to nail planks of wood together. They often appeased my unrealistic ambitions. I was not one to listen to reason but was more emotionally driven. I was quite stubbornly persistent about such things. I could build an airplane and no one was going to tell me differently.
My parents of course were always right, but they usually let me find out for myself. They knew little to nothing about electronics or engineering. I was probably above average in intelligence but not smart enough to figure out such things on my own. At one point my father agreed to buy one volume a month of a new Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia for me. It was a deal going at the Grand Union grocery store down the street in Wilton Manors, Florida. We had an older set, but I wanted an updated one.
I did use those volumes and still have them today. Encyclopedias were the Google of the day. They were one of my only sources of information on the kinds of scientific things I was interested in.
At various times they agreed to subscriptions to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, then later Popular Electronics. One Christmas, maybe my senior year of high school, the family went together to buy me the parts to build a hexidecimal computer. Of course it wouldn't have done any thing but display digits. I'm sure that all seemed like so much play and craziness, but they appeased me.
One month I saw an add in the back of Popular Science, I think it was, for an opportunity to raise and sell fishing worms. It was of course ridiculous. Where would I have sold them? I'm not even sure they use worms much to fish in Florida. It's more shrimp and squid.
But my dad went so far as to buy a tub to put the worms in. I think I even tore up some newspaper in preparation. But thankfully for him, was soon on to something else. We never bought a single worm...
My youngest daughter Sophie experienced some fear in the first grade. It was nothing like my fears as a child but it reminded me of it. She came home from school a few times afraid of the fact that her teacher at some point would yell at the class because of the problem students. Perhaps there were other elements to her fear then, but it led me to think there was probably something genetic involved that traced to me as well.
I think my fears in part stemmed from a sense of inadequacy I had. In part, that sense of inadequacy stemmed from being an idealist, having perfection as the standard. But I also was bad at attaining my own standards. I am moving a little beyond the sixth grade, I know, as I analyze.
I was never diagnosed as hyperactive, although one "identity-sharing" story we tell is when an elderly woman at a concert turned around from the pew in front of us and asked my mother if I had ever been checked. They didn't diagnose with "attention deficit" back then, but I certainly did have trouble in college and seminary focusing on reading. I'll return to that later.
In any case, I often had overly optimistic goals coupled with an inability to follow through with things I started. So I wanted to build a plane as a child. I think I wanted to be able to fly my Grandma Shepherd back and forth from Indiana. She stayed with us for a short time in the 70's before moving back to Indiana and dying in a nursing home in 1979. She was in a wheelchair by then.
I would not listen to the reason of my parents but stubbornly insisted on starting to nail planks of wood together. They often appeased my unrealistic ambitions. I was not one to listen to reason but was more emotionally driven. I was quite stubbornly persistent about such things. I could build an airplane and no one was going to tell me differently.
My parents of course were always right, but they usually let me find out for myself. They knew little to nothing about electronics or engineering. I was probably above average in intelligence but not smart enough to figure out such things on my own. At one point my father agreed to buy one volume a month of a new Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia for me. It was a deal going at the Grand Union grocery store down the street in Wilton Manors, Florida. We had an older set, but I wanted an updated one.
I did use those volumes and still have them today. Encyclopedias were the Google of the day. They were one of my only sources of information on the kinds of scientific things I was interested in.
At various times they agreed to subscriptions to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, then later Popular Electronics. One Christmas, maybe my senior year of high school, the family went together to buy me the parts to build a hexidecimal computer. Of course it wouldn't have done any thing but display digits. I'm sure that all seemed like so much play and craziness, but they appeased me.
One month I saw an add in the back of Popular Science, I think it was, for an opportunity to raise and sell fishing worms. It was of course ridiculous. Where would I have sold them? I'm not even sure they use worms much to fish in Florida. It's more shrimp and squid.
But my dad went so far as to buy a tub to put the worms in. I think I even tore up some newspaper in preparation. But thankfully for him, was soon on to something else. We never bought a single worm...
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Reflections on Childhood 1
I think of the first seventeen years of my life with fondness. For that I am very thankful, for I know that many people in the world do not think of their childhood in such idyllic terms. Many try to forget some abuse or neglect they experienced as a child, when they were most vulnerable. Many have childhood memories of need and suffering.
I do not have memories of a concentration camp or being ripped from my parents' arms. I have no memories of growing up in the Depression or of war. I didn't run to a bomb shelter when the sound of planes came overhead. I didn't have drills in school where we pretended nuclear missiles were on their way from the Soviet Union.
Neither of my parents died when I was a child. They never divorced. In fact they are still alive and together today. I never once heard them yell at each other. I was never spanked in rage, and I don't remember them ever even yelling at me. It never occurred to me once growing up to ask whether they loved me.
That is not to say that I did not have fears as a child, at some points almost paralyzing fears. I see these as much a matter of my own genetics and my growing brain as anything else. I do believe the religious context in which I grew up accentuated my own innate tendencies. I grew up in an incredibly religious environment of a particular conservative Christian sort.
I did not experience this environment as oppressive. I was convinced that we did what God wanted us to do. We did have some family practices that I might have wished were different. We did not watch TV on Sundays--when all the best movies premiered on television. We did not go to the movies, so Sunday night was about my only chance to see Star Wars or ET. We also did not go out to eat on Sundays. Sunday was the "Sabbath," and we set it aside as a day of rest.
But again, I did not experience these practices as oppressive. They were a little inconvenient at times. Perhaps I was a little embarrassed to tell my friends at public school some of these things. But by and large I tried to defend them. I was a conformist. If any of these things came up, I swallowed hard and tried to defend the way we did things.
I do not consider my parents legalistic on these issues to this day. A legalist, in my opinion, is someone who likes rules for their own sake. My parents, however, made exceptions. They might make an exception after church Sunday night to let me watch something like Star Wars. They might eat at a restaurant on Sunday if we happened to be travelling. We lived more strictly than others but that, in my view, is something different than legalism.
Nevertheless, the matrix of ideas I grew up around were a cocktail of fear in the hands of my psyche. I was born to doubt myself. Once in college when I playing "Doubting Thomas" in an Easter play, an ex-girlfriend commented jokingly that I had been typecast.
It basically started one afternoon in January at a winter "camp meeting." I don't remember what the revivalist had preached that morning, but I laid down fine for a nap and woke up in desperate fear for my soul. I think I was in the sixth grade, about 10 years old.
Maybe during the nap the last synapse in a key neural passageway was added. Maybe it was the flipping of the switch toward algebra and abstract thinking. Whatever it was, the slightly hyper, always in dreamland boy woke up in a sweat to enter a phase of "hell fear" that would come off and on for the next ten years or so.
I do not have memories of a concentration camp or being ripped from my parents' arms. I have no memories of growing up in the Depression or of war. I didn't run to a bomb shelter when the sound of planes came overhead. I didn't have drills in school where we pretended nuclear missiles were on their way from the Soviet Union.
Neither of my parents died when I was a child. They never divorced. In fact they are still alive and together today. I never once heard them yell at each other. I was never spanked in rage, and I don't remember them ever even yelling at me. It never occurred to me once growing up to ask whether they loved me.
That is not to say that I did not have fears as a child, at some points almost paralyzing fears. I see these as much a matter of my own genetics and my growing brain as anything else. I do believe the religious context in which I grew up accentuated my own innate tendencies. I grew up in an incredibly religious environment of a particular conservative Christian sort.
I did not experience this environment as oppressive. I was convinced that we did what God wanted us to do. We did have some family practices that I might have wished were different. We did not watch TV on Sundays--when all the best movies premiered on television. We did not go to the movies, so Sunday night was about my only chance to see Star Wars or ET. We also did not go out to eat on Sundays. Sunday was the "Sabbath," and we set it aside as a day of rest.
But again, I did not experience these practices as oppressive. They were a little inconvenient at times. Perhaps I was a little embarrassed to tell my friends at public school some of these things. But by and large I tried to defend them. I was a conformist. If any of these things came up, I swallowed hard and tried to defend the way we did things.
I do not consider my parents legalistic on these issues to this day. A legalist, in my opinion, is someone who likes rules for their own sake. My parents, however, made exceptions. They might make an exception after church Sunday night to let me watch something like Star Wars. They might eat at a restaurant on Sunday if we happened to be travelling. We lived more strictly than others but that, in my view, is something different than legalism.
Nevertheless, the matrix of ideas I grew up around were a cocktail of fear in the hands of my psyche. I was born to doubt myself. Once in college when I playing "Doubting Thomas" in an Easter play, an ex-girlfriend commented jokingly that I had been typecast.
It basically started one afternoon in January at a winter "camp meeting." I don't remember what the revivalist had preached that morning, but I laid down fine for a nap and woke up in desperate fear for my soul. I think I was in the sixth grade, about 10 years old.
Maybe during the nap the last synapse in a key neural passageway was added. Maybe it was the flipping of the switch toward algebra and abstract thinking. Whatever it was, the slightly hyper, always in dreamland boy woke up in a sweat to enter a phase of "hell fear" that would come off and on for the next ten years or so.
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