In the Shadow of Fundamentalism

Chapter 2, Parts 3, 4, and 5

Falling from Grace

I was barely treading water, it seemed. My grades were holding, but each successive report card sent home had fewer good things to say about my “Christian character.” Every week I was merely one tally away from being sent to the office, and notes were consistently accompanying me home to my parents.
In retrospect I realize that I was not so ill behaved, but I lacked a contrite and repentant spirit about it. This was largely in part due to my growing dislike for Ms. LaFevre. She had committed the worst imaginable crime in my estimation: she contradicted my father.

While I still hadn’t reached the stage where I considered my father to be a friend, I knew his position in my life was unshakable. He was a rock of Mediterranean consistency in my life, my home, and at the dinner table. No outside opinion or rule could replace his most powerful tool for communicating cultural value – his stories.
For people of Mediterranean origin, storytelling is a very powerful and refined art. I learned about my relatives through these stories, about our family history, about my own origins, about my father’s childhood, and through stories I learned to cook. There were few (if any) eleven year olds I had met who knew step by step the process for making homemade sauce.

With a type of odd pride I carried that idea in my heart. No matter what that woman had told me, the books my father bought for me sat on my dresser as treasured possessions. No matter what she said about the exploits of saints and martyrs, my father’s life story was my Gospel. The harder she pushed me, the more I enshrined the man.

That’s when they started praying for him.
My father felt there was something wrong with Christian Hope Center from the beginning. He was pragmatic and stubborn, and he found the six or seven hour Sunday services to be extreme and draining. I even recall arguments between him and my mother about forcing us to sit, still and attentive in our church clothes, for so long every week. He maintained that it wasn’t natural for normal little boys; it wasn’t healthy.

I’ll admit he had some issues with anger, particularly at authority figures. His father was a hateful man, and any new male intruder awoke those old instincts of fight or flight that his father had beaten into him. Aside from these issues, my dad saw the inconsistencies. He saw leaders saying one thing and doing another. He saw hypocrisy at its finest, and it awoke a passionate Italian defiance in him.
He liked the idea of the school at first. The concept of sending us somewhere elite that could refine and mold us appealed to his Darwinian views. Like all parents, my father wanted his children challenged, molded, and recognized for their greatness. That’s why he was so angry at the obvious ignorance and lack of cultural awareness that led my teachers to bar me from reading Shakespeare.
My parents were from the psychedelic generation. As a couple they had stood in the rain with signs and patched bell-bottom jeans protesting the Vietnam War. They once believed in free love and free mood altering substances. In this spirit, my father protested things he was now powerless to fight in the only way he knew how. He stopped going to church.

So total was the coldness radiating from his decision in that close knit and closely watched atmosphere that he became a terse subject of discussion. Teachers began to ask me to pray for him in morning chapel. Adults in the church used to ask how he was “doing” in a way that was laced with guilt and judgment. I was enduring a fraction of what Spike had experienced six years before, but we were both too unaware to make that comparison.

In addition to all these factors, Ms. LaFevre had begun to institute a policy designed to fill me with the correct attitude with regards to my mistakes and failings. Each time I broke a rule my penalties were doubled and sometimes even tripled. When I failed to complete my homework, I would receive a tally for “work not in” and another for “courtesy,” because an incomplete assignment was discourteous to the entire class. If I talked in class she would make me walk to the board and place a paper slip in the envelope for “talking,” and if I walked slowly I was commanded to put in another for my incorrect “attitude.”
The negative reviews from my teachers, the notes being sent home, the record numbers of tallies for a member of my class…all these factors were guaranteeing that I would be pushed from the school.
But then something miraculous happened. I was saved.


David and Goliath

Halfway into the second year of HCA, there was a huge political event that occurred at Christian Hope Center. As a child, I was only privy to bits and pieces of information. Half-whispered rumors indicated an internal coup de ‘etat of sorts, a struggle for power. Somewhere within those rumors was a thread of truth, but I fear it has been lost to all but those who bear some guilt in their deeds.
The results were public, however. Harry Jackson, cofounder of the church, announced that he and his family would be leaving. A man I hardly knew (but whose size and presence sometimes frightened me, even if he was always kind to the children) was being replaced with a man I’d never heard of.

The day of the change arrived, and creative Ms. LaFevre gave us a special assignment for the new pastor. He was touring our transplanted location in the basement of the Church, and observing what he could about his new flock. During his tour, she informed us, we were to each tell him a little story or Bible verse to lift his spirits. The only thing that came to my mind was a long winded joke my father had told me: the one about the two carrots walking down the side of the road.
“Shaggy dog” jokes were a specialty of my father’s at the time. These long jokes could be told with variation and detail, making them organic and realistic each time they were recited. The trick dad taught me was to tell the joke in a rambling fashion, so that the listener didn’t realize that there even was a clever pun until you dropped it on them as a part of the story.

I stood in nervous quiet as each member of my class recited some little poem or some scrap of cute information intended to win the heart of this strange thin man with skinny arms and wide features. His children stood off to one side looking at us as if we were aliens planning to sacrifice this man to our pagan gods.

At last my turn came, and I began to ramble through the story. In this version, the one carrot was picking up change from the gutter and whistling as he walked. I could picture the gruesome scene in my mind where a big red semi with a Mac bulldog plowed into his fragile orange body, carrot shavings flew everywhere.
And then I lowered the boom, evenly saying the words I had been worried I would stumble on: “I’m afraid he’ll be a vegetable for the rest of his life!”
For a moment we all stood there in the quiet, and my mind began to race through the possibility that I had offended this new pastor.

After a moment’s pause he erupted into a braying laugh and clapped his arm around my shoulders. “That’s the best joke I’ve heard in a long time,” he wheezed.
Then he asked Ms. LaFevre (who had suddenly gone quite unnaturally pale) if he could borrow me for a little experiment. For the following half hour this man toured me from class to class with my one joke comedy show. Every time I said the punch line he let fly with that same squeaking chuckle, and every time the students looked at me as if they were seeing an entirely new creature. I was confused and a little embarrassed that someone loved my silly joke so much, but happy to be noticed and encouraged in my sense of humor.

David Hackett’s revolution took shape in the weeks that followed. As if he knew the source of all my woes, the man began to institute changes designed to place the imprint of his personality on the processes of HCA. We all wondered during those days what would happen next. None of his responses to things were what we had come to expect from a pastor, or even from a dynamic leader. He would often laugh when we didn’t expect it, and grow stern when we thought he would laugh. The only thing we could predict was that our lives were changing.

One of the first major changes Pastor Dave made in HCA was the total abolition of the tally system. No longer, he explained, would children be rewarded for bad behavior, but instead they would be rewarded for each day’s goodness. The substitute he created was a form of currency called the “Good Report” system.

In this system, a day free of missteps and errors would be rewarded with a small Xeroxed bill. On Friday mornings students could take these bills and exchange them for trinkets and baubles in a small rolling cabinet known as the “good report store.”
What’s more, the man endeared himself to me by doing something I was all too familiar with: he taught by telling stories. He grew up catholic, just like my father, and he told stories of his immigrant neighborhood youth that seemed eerily similar to many stories I’d heard at home. He was the first person at the school who validated what I had learned from my father instead of repudiating it.

David Hackett took on all the conventions of the social system at HCA and began to turn them upside down. He recognized and dealt with socially hidden children like me, and he jovially lowered people who had come to be revered, like my brother.
Then came the day that Pastor Dave stamped me with the same imprint he had begun to press into the school: a form of recognition, a rite of passage, and a means to reform social cliques and hierarchies. A nickname.

One miraculous day, the man who oversaw and regulated gym classes for the entire school (Principal Kim Falkenburg) was ill. Normally at this time of year Mr. Falkenburg was putting us through the horrors of basketball, a game I particularly loathed. Running, shooting, and dribbling were things that I felt were impossible in combination. They were a senseless waste of my time. I cared nothing about winning a game with no consequences, and a game in which my disadvantages as an obese child were so obvious.

With Kim out of the picture, David stepped in as substitute gym teacher. Rather than contain all of our youthful energy on an indoor round of basketball, he led us to the seldom used side yard of the church building for a game of kickball. I little realized that this game would give me a chance to surprise people around me yet again.

Few people could have predicted that each time the ball was “pitched” to me, I would sink into my hips and get my foot into the sweet spot on the pink sphere. No one expected that the ball would be vaulted time and again over the three-story pine tree on the corner of the church lot, while I trotted my chubby bulk from base to base. No one knew I had it in me, not even me.

The third or fourth time I launched the ball into orbit, David Hackett exclaimed, “There goes another cannonball!” And by the name Cannonball I was afterwards known.


A New Heart

With his family (a wife, three daughters, and little boy still in diapers,) Pastor Dave brought a world of new connections to both the church and the school. He introduced us to other churches he had associated with, he invited pastors and friends from around the world to come and speak with us, and he made his customs and rituals a part of our daily life.

The school was a happier place for me as I neared the end of fifth grade, a place where I could imagine growing to be like the older children. They seemed mature, balanced, excited, and healthy. When I was so young, there was much to look up to.
The final event of that year was our spring recital and kindergarten graduation. As the ceremonies drew to a close, Pastor Dave took the microphone and began to announce that he had a new award to give. With my brother and a few of the other older boys in tow, a chair was brought out on stage and robes were arranged on it. With a paper crown in his hand, Pastor Dave startled me by reciting the joke about two carrots walking down the side of the road.

When he reached the punch line there were a few chuckles from the audience (most of the assembled flock of Christian Hope Center) but he was cackling away with reckless abandon. When he could finally make a serious face, Pastor Dave asked me to come to the stage.

He explained to me, and to the audience, that he had decided to give a special award to one student. I stood there as robes were put on me, and a paper crown lowered on my head thinking there was something strange about all this. Especially if my brother was helping.

I was seated on my new “throne” and was announced the recipient of the first ever Hope Christian Academy “king award,” and then, oddly, asked to bow my head for prayer. As I sat in this ridiculous position feeling Dave’s hand on my shoulder like a flame, I felt a wave of uneasiness from the crowd. I thought to myself “He’s holding something over my head. Maybe my brother’s making faces.” I knew there was some form of mischief afoot.

With the word “Amen” a cold sweetness was pressed gently into my face, and I realized I had been given an experience reserved for clowns and celebrities on television shows: I had been “pied.” A wave of silliness and relief passed over me… this man had a sense of humor, I was free to be as odd and as joyous as I wished. I sat and laughed as the whipped cream ran down my face, and I thought things were finally making a little sense around the world of HCA.

posted by NY Monk @ 7:07 PM