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.