In the Shadow of Fundamentalism

Millstones

2007-07-07T03:25:00.001-04:00

“It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.” –Luke 17:2

Pastor Dave called this “the millstone award.” The first time I even contemplated the boyency of a millstone was about 1989 or so in a chapel held at the Saint Patrick’s building on Dennison Parkway in Corning. When Dave took over the church and school, he found some arrangements backwards to his way of thinking, and began to turn our little world upside down.

One of the first changes came in the form of our morning chapel seating arrangements. Harry Jackson, the first pastor, had moved all of the older kids to the front two rows. They were unruly at times, passing notes and joking; a distraction to the gravity of morning theology. In order to make an example of their bad behavior (explained as evidence of the evils of a public school education) Pastor Jackson moved those troublemakers to the forefront of our microcosmic universe.

When Pastor Dave arrived, he took exception to having their hulking, pockmarked, pubescent forms leering at him in the front rows. Why force the little ones to crane their necks? It was an affront to symmetry and logical order.

This was when I first heard about Millstones.

“Do any of you know what a millstone is?” he asked us. And of course we didn’t. Had we ever seen grain ground in a wind or water mill?
“A millstone is a huge piece of rock, shaped like a lifesaver. It’s used to grind big things into little things.” He had a way of speaking down to us and lifting us up at the same time. “How easy do you think it would be to swim with one of those around your neck?”

Turning his half smiling intensity on those older kids now slouching in their seats he seemed quite benevolent. “I want to save you guys from having to swim like that. Until you can be a GOOD example, and not make the little kids behind you stumble, I’m going to move you to the back.”

Pastor Dave’s entire philosophy was about being a good example, and earning a good report. He abolished a hateful system for punishment based on negative reinforcement, and began to reward good behavior instead. At that time his ideas seemed progressive and modern. There was freedom to breathe under his gaze, as long as you weren’t earning yourself a giant stone life preserver.

He taught us that Jesus cared about children. We read examples of Jesus being kind to kids, speaking to them when the adults were rude, even demonstrating that having a soft childlike heart was a sure way to heaven.

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” -- Mark 10:15-16
Childhood is a difficult period for anyone, in any culture. The path from defenselessness to self reliance is fraught with many perils. We awe and wonder at species which lay millions of eggs to have but a few survive, and yet humanity is much the same in its loss of the weak and defenseless before they even know the possibilities of life.

In Christian culture, however, children are the foundation for perpetuation of a once-oppressed religious culture. Evangelicals in particular cling to their interpretation of the bible as a guide for the future. We heard almost every day about the “end times,” and the “tribulations” we could expect as chronicled in the book of Revelations.

Wars, and rumors of war, famine, pestilence, the emergence of the Anti-Christ; our world was destined to be bathed in the blood of innocents and the machinations of devils and demons.

“I have dreams,” Pastor Dave often told us, “where tanks roll through our streets, and Christians are lined up and shot. What will you do when this happens?”

And so there was a sort of strict urgency to our education, like officer candidates during a time of war. “The harvest is great, but the laborers are few,” meant that we would all have to learn to reap souls for God’s kingdom as quickly and efficiently as possible.

No time for doubt, no time for dissent, these Christian soldiers in the bodies of children had to “get with the program” quickly, or find a new school.

And yet what of a child like me? I was moody and quiet, withdrawn into an inner world where I constructed worlds and wonders much more adventurous than a pew in a frigid church auditorium at 8 am. I was passionate, angry at times, and I asked questions constantly.

I still have the report card where Mr. Falkenburg wrote “Mark’s know-it-all attitude sometimes restricts him and hinders his ability to learn new information,” hardly qualities found in a good Christian soldier.

Within these report cards was a grading section for “Christian character,” and my grades there were always indicative of a strong internal disregard for conforming to the rules of the HCA system.

Puberty generated a flood of emotions unexplored and unprepared for. Confusion about my relationship to the universe, distrust for my parents and teachers, despair about my corpulence, and depression about my failure to draw the attention of any girl I knew left me more moody and despondent than ever. The last things on my mind were redoing algebra problems that made no sense to my artistic mind, playing the dented and tarnished heap of brass Mr. Rae gave me for orchestra, or memorizing the specifics of ancient Hebrew kings for tests in Bible class.

I wanted to know what I was living for, why was I dragging in these painful breaths, why was I suffering alone with no possibility for reprieve?

Somewhere in this struggle, my personality and its particulars became incredibly distasteful to several of my teachers, particularly to Mr. Falkenberg.

This might not have been such a problem, except as Principal of the school and teacher of several subjects including English, History, Bible, and even Gym meant that I had to be in his presence several times a day. Several times a day, several days a week, our wills collided and sparks smoldered.

I’ve heard people say, “We all think our teachers hated us,” but this was far more tangible than the hormone-inspired angst and paranoia of adolescence.

One of the issues between us was my problem with “talking in class.” I was insecure, and afraid to be unheard, and I was learning at 13 the power of humor as a tool for social acceptance. A few well placed jokes had the power to win friends and gather interest from your peers. Like all teenagers, I sometimes went overboard, and my voice has a tone and ring to it that carries over the crowd. Often, even in the non-HCA teen bible classes at church, I would be reprimanded for my comments to my friends.

Those teen classes had a formula to them, where Mr. Falkenberg would talk, laying heavy layers of theology on our souls, and then he would lighten the atmosphere with a witty observation or comment. In this pause the entire group would breathe a collective sigh, and break form and attention for a moment. It was a social art to know how many comments you could make in that small pause, and how loudly, before he launched into the next stage of his sermon. While all of us were learning these social boundaries, I found myself being reprimanded time and again for being “too loud,” even with threats to send me back to my parents for the remainder of the evening.
One night I turned to Spike before the start of class, “I’m tired of getting yelled at, man.”
“Yeah, you always get in trouble,” he agreed.
“I wonder what would happen if I didn’t say anything at all?”
“You should try it.”
And so the plan was enacted. I would lock eyes with Mr. Falkenberg and maintain unwavering discipline all evening. Nothing would deter me from showing that I could be as determined and austere as any adult in that church. Nothing would give him plausible reason to reprimand me and embarrass me in front of my peers.

The second or third pause of the evening everyone chuckled and laughed easily. I sat and looked into his eyes, almost without blinking. I felt Spike turn to say something to my in my peripheral vision, and then turn away when he saw my stony expression.
“Let’s see you yell at me now,” I was thinking, “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

As if he had heard my mind, his voice cut through the easy comments of the others into my icy silence.
“Cannonball!” it rang out like an assassin’s singular gunshot, “why is it that EVERY CLASS, you do this?”

I blinked. Was this a dream? Was I going to look down and see that I was in my underwear? All the voices and easy motions around me were fading in to hushed awe. All gazes were split between him and I.

“You waste the time of everyone here. It’s incredibly rude, and I’d rather you didn’t come back if you’re going to behave like this.” I could feel hot tears stinging the corners of my eyes. I refused to break. This was the very definition of unfair, unjust, impossible in the kingdom of God.

And so I never came back. That was the last time I ever willingly subjected myself to his classes. In my mind, Mr. Falkenberg’s theology and his idea of justice (social or biblical) was suspect. He was bent on humiliating me in front of my buddies and the girls that I liked. He was intent on holding me to some standard that was impossible. How could I say less than nothing? It was as if he would never be satisfied with me until I was someone else.

Mr. Falkenberg forbade me to draw in class; disbelieving my explanation that the doodles and sketches helped me remember things. Even though he was an self-proclaimed advocate of progressive education, and often used songs as memory devices, the concept that an artistic mind would be triggered to memory by images rather than dry words on a page was loathsome to him.

He banned my use of any science fiction or fantasy motif in creative writing, promoting that these genres are somehow inferior to other forms of fiction or prose. While I accepted this because he said it would “encourage me to grow as an author,” I felt as if I had been withheld from something I was good at… known for even.

The second major event that stands out in my mind came during my senior year. Every senior class took a trip of some kind with Mr. Falkenberg, a sort of celebration and vacation combined. My brother’s class went to Virginia beach, where they visited three venues of interest for each of the graduates. Spike and Adam Bailey hiked a section of the Appalachian Trail with him, exploring the splendor of the mountains and reveling in testosterone. Kelly and Amanda went to New York City, where they took in the culture of restaurants, shopping, and off Broadway shows with him and his wife.

And then there was me, the sole senior and the only member of my class. What could I possibly want to do with him alone? Where could I go with a man who ridiculed me in front of my friends where I would even feel like talking to him? I avoided the idea as long as I could.

Meanwhile the school continued to fundraise for a senior trip I was trying to escape. And the burden of tradition bore down on both of us with the passage of time. Around the third quarter of that year, Mr. Falkenburg brought in several brochures for missions trips. At first I had a spark of hope that he might agree to send me on a trip to another country with some group of strangers like “Youth With a Mission,” or even one of the missionaries partnered with our Church. Instead, he began to speak earnestly to the students in the class below mine about the possibility of a missions trip with them. Several groups offered cheap group packages for members of a single church or school, and Mr. Falkenberg began to lobby for the participation of what would be the largest senior class as soon as I was gone.

At this period in my development I had begun to read and research ancient European history. My love of “Morte d’Arthur” by Thomas Mallory lead me backwards in literary history, through the fiction of Stephen Lawhead (conveniently sold at even Christian bookstores) to a study of ancient Gaelic traditions.

They were a people I admired; the first I had read about who were equal parts poetry, romance, art, and war. They shook the foundations of their world, they flourished in the bronze age, and were brought first under Roman control before being almost obliterated by the Anglo-Saxons, and finally having their traditions erased by the Catholic Church. This story had romance, adventure, and the grand scope of a tragic ending that captivated my teenage heart.

And then Mr. F. came to convince me to spend my unknown funding on a missions trip to Mexico. Mexico? We were taught to follow our hearts, the Lord would give us a vision for a people to evangelize. The Pastor’s daughter loved India, my brother had been to Mexico and Spain, why couldn’t I be called to Ireland?

“They don’t need missionaries in Ireland,” he told me.
“What do you mean? It was on the radio a week ago… a man walked into a preschool and shot five little children! They have the IRA and terrorists!” I was again struck that this whole dispute was unfair.
“You know what your problem is?” he asked me in a room where only myself and the junior class could hear his acidic tone.
“I don’t have a heart for Mexico.” I said. Flatly and without emotion.
“Your problem is that you’re a coward. You’re afraid.” And he turned on his heel and left the room.
I was shaking. Every muscle in my arms and shoulders was tense, hormones coursing through my body and straining for action. I was ready for a physical fight, I wanted it with all but the tiniest corner of my mind.

How dare he call me a coward? How dare a man who uses his position to belittle a fat teenager call someone else a coward? How dare a man who never saw me in a fight, who didn’t know how terrified I was of this school and yet I still came every day… how dare that man call me a coward?

And so I stumbled a little further. I stopped going to Church. I stopped freely walking through those doors and looking at a man on the platform leading us all in songs about the “Steadfast Love” of the lord in a position of authority and power, who thought of me as a coward. Why should I participate when every event was under his scrutiny? Why should I place myself under his hand, when that hand caused me so much pain?

I was lucky for many years to have Pastor Dave as a shelter from that pressure. I think he saw me fading, withdrawing from all but what was explicitly mandatory. In my heart I was as far gone from there as I could be, my body alone belonged to them until the day of my graduation.

Most of the students I observed fell into two distinct camps, or they left the school quickly. They were either able to win Mr. Falkenberg’s favor, or to find a way to understand and agree with Pastor Dave. No middle ground, and few exceptions that I can remember.

When I graduated HCA, I faded from the spotlight like a whisper. I attended church perhaps 3 times during the following summer, and I saw the teachers in public perhaps twice more. I knew whatever future my life held wasn’t in the unforgiving glances of adults who saw me as spiritually inferior and devoid of character.

Occasionally I’d hear small reports of people asking where I was, what I was doing after I graduated. As far as I was concerned, the less they knew as a gossipy collective, the better for my mental health.

Sometimes those little messages carried through my mom, or a friend’s parent would surprise me. One of them came from a Monday night prayer service (which I had always hated, as they didn’t even include a message or music) with a guest speaker. During an intense round of prayer and supplication, one of the church elders announced that they had a vision from God. As he described his vision of the church parading through the streets, he suddenly asked “Where is Cannonball?” The way it was described to me by several people that were there, there was a hasty round of questions where I was, almost as if people had suddenly realized I was missing, when I had actually been gone for months.
Apparently his vision had included me, as a member of the worship team ministering to the public. This vision was not of the past, or the future, and that elder eventually left the church as had I.

Post HCA existence was a minefield. The “world” as we called it was not the den of evil I had been taught. There were no demons manipulating my co-workers, no apocalyptic wars on the horizon, Armageddon was far from the realm of bills and college. And yet, within that realm was a feeling of loss.

I could barely talk to students in my classes, feeling like they were of a different species. Steve, who had left HCA after a few short years, was almost a mystery in himself. He was charismatic, he attracted friends (although usually weird personality types), and he was known to the teachers and students. Better yet, he had a Plan for his future; a vision for a career and something beyond college.

Without the will to be a missionary, and any other real skill from high school, I had nothing to pursue. Although science and math escaped me, I was enrolled in the science program at the local community college. Wrapping my brain around calculus and biology, I felt trapped all over again, as if the fingers of HCA’s grasp extended beyond its doors into my life beyond.

I dropped out after a year, and worked full time as a minimum wage assistant manager at Blockbuster Video. In high paced, under-paid retail I excelled. I was employee of the month constantly, every district manager I met raved about my customer service skills. And while I felt devoid of some greater purpose for my life (and devoid of companionship) it seemed like the best I could manage to wear my uniform every day, and slowly pay down bills from a bad year of community college.

I chewed through the summer blockbuster rentals, the pop movies, the cheesy plots and big budget films in a hurry. What was left were quirky films, like 70’s exploitation, Japanese Animation, Science Fiction, and old kung fu movies. I moved from my histories of the Celts to a study of the Samurai while I immersed myself in Kurusawa films.

Little did I realize I was being observed as I began to gravitate towards something I couldn’t even name. I was questing for a way to find meaning in my life, or even in my death, and Bushido (the code of Samurai honor) seemed to offer an expression of this search. For them, you died either in battle, or you died in training. Either way, you were dedicated in death as in life to personal development and honor. It was supremely better than the crushing philosophy of Christian school, and the banal repetition of a minimum wage retail job.

The person watching me was a man from the generation ahead of mine. For several reasons he will remain anonymous in this tale, although he serves as important part of this final chapter. He observed me carefully, had several direct conversations asking me what I thought of the “Hagakure” or the “Book of 5 Rings,” and finally asked me a strange question:

“Would you want to train?”

I knew he had served time in the military, and possibly learned some martial arts there, but my opinion of modern armed forces was shaped by military guys telling me they thought “that asian shit was pointless.” I couldn’t imagine anyone intelligent throwing away centuries of martial development because a gun was easier. Guns jam, bullets run out, and there’s no honor in pulling a trigger and pointing in the general direction of your enemy.

But he offered a chance to get to know someone from the past of my church, someone who had left long before I was old enough to know why. In that, I hoped, I might find some answers.

The first night we trained, I sat on the dusty loose earth of a tilled field and saw a new world open before my eyes. My teacher said “warm up” and I finished my simple round of stretches quickly. I had no concept of warming up the muscles for an intense work out, and sat in the dirt waiting for our class to begin. He shrugged, and marched over to the corner of the grass and retrieved a large wooden pole. Suddenly, he started taking strange shuffling steps, and spinning the staff at an incredible pace. The wood blurred in the fading summer twilight, and became a continuous brown blur over the light color of his face and hands. With a shuffle and a pounding step, he leapt into the air and the staff did a rotation around his body. Dirt from his boots kicked up in little clouds as he would vary the patterns, or change the direction his body faced. Always his body was relaxed, and yet focused as if slaying hundreds of invisible enemies. His eyes were distant, and still I knew they saw my expression of awe sitting on the ground.

I had practiced with a bokken (wooden training sword) doing excersizes from books for months, and yet I had no idea people could move that way outside movies with wires, props, and sped up cameras. For the first time all the myths I had read about martial arts heroes seemed plausible, every door beyond what I thought people could do began to slide open.
And then the staff spun to an abrupt stop, and he turned to me, holding it out.
“You’ll learn this first.”

I had my doubts… extreme doubts. Obviously this person overestimated my capabilities. I had actually flunked gym several times because I was unable to dribble a basketball and run simultaneously. How could I spin a stick meant to hurt people and move my feet the way he did?

And yet, with patience and military discipline, he drove me to focus and control my body. Session by session, I slowly gained the skill and the rhythm until one night…

“Whoa!” we had been warming up before practice, spinning staves in the winter moonlight. He had suddenly stopped and exclaimed, leaving a puff of exhalation in the crystal air.
“What was THAT?” he asked.
“What?” I was afraid I had made another mistake of some kind.
“That move you just did”
“Oh, this?” I did a simple series of motions he had first taught me months ago.
“No, Jackass, that other move you just did. You know, the behind-your-back and over-your-shoulder thing.”
“Oh… I was just messing around…”
“Show me how to do that.”

Embarrassed I walked him through something that I had stumbled on while watching “Drunken Master” with Jackie Chan.

“That’s really cool, man.” We were sweating in the crisp air, and he slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re better than I am, now.”
“You think so?” no teacher had EVER said something like that to me.

“Don’t kill yourself. You’d get killed by somebody in high school wrestling, UNLESS you had a stick. I give you good odds with a weapon.”

And with that, something changed. I was good at something. I was actually good at something dangerous and athletic, and unique. And yet this thing was something to be kept quiet, unseen, unknown. I had to wear my achievement on the inside. No one from my old life even knew I was feeling this change, this sudden rite of passage.

At this point, my only contact with CHC was the periodic dinners or lunches we still had with Pastor Dave. From time to time, although I was never certain why, he would go to Appleby’s with Steve, Spike, and I. We would have conversations about sports (which I could barely follow), about our careers, our college (or lack thereof), and our lives in general. Sometimes I felt that lunch with us was a taste of nostalgia for Dave. Others I felt like we gave him a nonjudgmental respite from the demands of his parishioners.

One afternoon, I met him at the church for lunch, Dave spied the staves in the back of my car.
“What are you building?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Uh, those are actually bo staffs,” I wasn’t sure how to use the right words.
“Like Friar Tuck and Little John?”
“Sort of,” laughing nervously, this was not feeling like a happy conversation, “actually Japanese style.”
“Japanese? Where did you learn that?”
“Well, from ----.” Shoot, good job mentioning somebody else who left the church.
”Really?” a long awkward pause from Pastor Dave. I thought maybe if I just showed him he would see without judging.
I pulled the staff from my car, and began to fall into the pattern of rotations and steps that was my dance of death, and of life. Three seconds later he nervously cleared his throat.
“Hey,” he asked, “you’re not becoming one of THOSE people are you?”
“One of what people?” Asians? Buddhists? Killers? What was he worried about?
“You know,” he said, and then mimed stereotypical karate chops and kung fu punches.
“Oh,” so he didn’t see any change. “No, I’m just trying to get in shape.”

I went back to community college, with a lot of encouragement from my friends and a lot of conversations with my friend and martial arts teacher. Everyone encouraged me to find a place in the world, a niche that would give me some purpose.

“Take some art classes,” Spike said time and again, “you’re paying for it, you might as well do something you love, right?”

So even though I must have heard almost every day from Mr. Falkenberg when he’d reprimand me for drawing in class, “Drawing won’t help you like History class will. There’s no way to make a living with drawings,” I signed up for an introductory art class.
The professor for this class was the head of the CCC art department; a funny little man with stereotypically Irish features and thick glasses. The first day of class he explained that we might be mistaken about the course.

“I don’t want to scare anyone, but this isn’t some ‘cake class,’” Professor Higgins explained. “I will grade you on your development over the quarter. This means that if you don’t work in the class, you won’t get a good grade.”

Great, I thought, I draw all the time. I don’t think there’s very far for me to go.

“How I do this,” he explained motioning to the collection of boxes and bottles arranged at the front of the class, “is to set up the same still life the first and last day of the semester. You’ll all draw it today, and I’ll keep those sketches locked away. Then I’ll set it up again the last day and we’ll compare the two drawings. If you’ve worked hard in the class, even if you’re not an exceptional artist to start with, you’ll get a good grade.”

And so I sat, sketch board propped up from my corner seat, unable to see my classmate’s sketches but knowing that I was one of the elite in that room. As often as I drew, how could I improve greatly over one semester? I even signed the piece as he warned us the time for evaluation had come.

As we tacked our drawings along the cork runner for my first ever in-class art critique, I started to catch glimpses of the other student’s work. I shuddered at what I saw, and had to resist the urge to crumple my drawing and walk out. Next to theirs, mine looked like a child’s simplified scribble. It was the absolute worst in the class, worse even then the self proclaimed “non artists,” and I had been idly scribbling away all through high school.
The only reason I left it up there, and forced myself to stand tall when we reached my drawing at the end, was the spinning staff, and the challenges I had already begun to overcome.

“Now this is really interesting,” Dave said motioning to my drawing, “does anybody know what (Mark, right?) Mark has done in this drawing?”

It was an early morning class, and a lot of blank looks and stares passed through the room. I’m sure I was blushing, I was embarrassed to stand under that scrutiny.

“Mark has rendered the objects as icons rather than as values of light and shadow.” Was this a backhanded insult, I wondered.
“This is actually a type of psychological realism. He shows us the objects the way we think of them in our minds, rather than how we see them with our eyes. The trick of drawing realistically is to fool your mind into only drawing light and dark and everything in between, instead of drawing the idea of a bottle or a box.”

And with that, the gauntlet was thrown. I knew in those last minutes of that early class that I had a vital decision before me. I still had time to transfer from the class into something else; Calculus again, or another biology. Otherwise, if I stayed there in that class, I would have to devote myself to this task, and see how far I could go, or if my talent was an empty promise.

Under Dave Higgins’ tutelage I progressed from worst in the class to about the upper third in skill level. He featured my two pieces side by side at the student art show before I graduated, and earned himself the “Professor of the year” award during our graduation. Dave guided me with calm sure advice, and saw that I was determined to try and make something of my love.

And so, the final time I went to dinner with Pastor Dave arrived around the time of my graduation from Corning Community College. He had actually asked only Stephen to dinner, but Steve invited me as a gesture of our friendship. Seated over plates of General Tso’s chicken and crab Rangoon, Pastor Dave looked at me in a perplexed manner.

“Why are you here, ‘Ball?”
“Steve invited me along to hang out with you guys”
“Well I wanted to talk to Steve about his future, but it might not really concern you.”
“That’s okay, Pastor. ‘Ball and I are close friends.” Steve didn’t want to ruin the conversation.
“Yeah, but I want to talk to you as your Pastor, and I don’t have that ‘in’ to ‘Ball’s life anymore. He’s not part of my flock.”
“What do you mean?” I couldn’t tell if he was angry, or…?
“Since your mother left a few months back, I don’t see you as a member of the church. You’re under your parents’ covering now, wherever they attend.”

So seven years of schooling and training amounted to… what exactly? Was I just a lost investment to them? A stray sheep? A waste of good indoctrination?

Later in the evening Pastor Dave felt like catching up a little on current events.

“Can you imagine how all of this is going to change the world,” Dave asked us on the drive back from the restaurant. “The world is really falling apart at the seams.”

“Well, every era has its problems,” I was trying to be objective. My life was looking up, and I didn’t feel like wandering into a gloom and doom Revelations speech.

“But your generation has a lot to account for… especially with this stem cell research going on.”

I had heard this argument from evangelicals before. The problem was that stem cells can be found in healthy adult bone marrow, not just fetal tissue. When I had explained it, his stance didn’t waver.

“It’s still a sin,” he explained with great conviction, “any time man decides to delve into the realm of God he is committing a sin.”

“But Pastor Dave,” I couldn’t believe I was hearing this, where was the understanding man I’d dedicated my yearbook to? “They thought that when the microscope was invented, and again when they harnessed electricity, and then when the first nuclear experiments were done. Somebody’s always going to call it ‘God’s Domain.’”

“Yes but this is different. This is scientists deciding to Create Life.”

“Look, you have what, four kids?” I was out of energy for this kind of debate, “you and your wife have to have ‘decided’ to create at least one of them.”

Exasperated as I was, he threw his hands in the air, “I can’t believe you even allow yourself to think that way.”

“I can’t believe you won’t allow yourself to think.”

Each subsequent time I see Dave or Mr. F, I see their hair grey, their eyes have circles under them. They seem drained, anemic, sick. Each time I see Professor Higgins or my martial arts teacher, though they seem older, their heads are high and their bodies strong.

Perhaps this millstone award weighs slowly, year by year, before it drags a man into an ocean of his own tears. Perhaps guilt weighs on those minds with a power more sharp than my anger at those betrayals.

Either way, what I have learned is valuable in a teacher, is a man who uses his authority to build up his students. Where he finds a vacant lot in their soul, he lays a foundation that can be built upon. A foolish man digs down, undermining the foundations that are there, tearing down perfectly good construction for his own reasons.

Instilling children with fear, self loathing, guilt, and a sense of loss is perhaps (if God is indeed just) the surest way to lead one of them to “stumble,” and furthermore to fall a great height, to their soul’s destruction.

In the world of teaching and parenting there can be no higher purpose than to leave behind boys that grow to men, strong and confident -- men with skills and purpose, men who can provide for themselves and raise a new generation of strong men in the years to come. In this way a single teacher can father a nation, and bring about a positive change in his world.

The Jello Mold, Final Chapter.

2007-06-10T13:00:00.000-04:00

The Jello Mold, Final Chapter.

We had broken from the status quo-- some of us dramatically, some of us slowly and quietly. Some of us had been born outside the conventions created by and perpetuated by the social layers of Christian Hope Center.

What did that make us? I sometimes stared at the ceiling in my room in the dark and wondered if I was going to hell. How could I separate the action from the actor?

Those of us trained in the world of evangelical Christianity knew certain behaviors as sin, and unpardonable at that. Pastor Dave Hackett’s definition of sin was a blemish on one’s being caused by “missing the mark,” failing to meet the expectations God had placed on your life. This blemish was inconsequential in and of itself, and yet its existence as an imperfection would keep a soul from being able to enter the presence of God, an eternally perfect being.

And so we spent our days focused on failing and making up for those failures. My morning prayers in HCA chapel were filled with my searching my own heart for mistakes and flaws, and then begging forgiveness for those flaws. Never could I lift before God some success to be proud of, some achievement to applaud. I was constantly laying the diseased sheep of my life, as I saw it, on the Holy Altar and sacrificing it; knowing deep down that even the total sacrifice of my life could not atone for my daily failings.

What, I wondered in the inner recesses of my heart, about those who felt no shame or failure in their actions? Spike was sometimes quite angry and unapologetic. Steven spoke candidly about girls and being rich one day. Neither seemed afraid or ashamed of these thoughts, and yet they had stood by me as honorable friends, supporting me when no one else would. If I knew their hearts to be good and genuine, wouldn’t a loving God know as well?

Perhaps missing the mark was only sin if you knew what the mark was. Perhaps failing your own heavenly potential was only wrong if you had heavenly potential.

But this scared me more than the idea that I might go to hell. If this was true, it meant that there was no universal standard by which God operates; that heavenly laws were changing and flawed. The standards on my life would not be the same as those on Steven’s or Spike’s lives.

The Bible even said (and we heard quoted daily,) “to him who knows what is right, and does not do it, it is sin.”

And so, this made God a Being who punished the sin of knowing. Truly ignorance is bliss, as it can mean the difference between eternal damnation (or lifelong atonement) and eternal joy.

And for even thinking these thoughts I was condemned.
I’d like to say that one morning I woke up and let all this confusion go, but it was instead a very slow process of realization.

I remember sitting in a bar with my friends and several pitchers of beer. Stephen sat on my left, Matt Newcomb (a friend of Steve and Johnny who was studying to be a Catholic priest) to my right. Suddenly we sprang into theological debate. We talked about life and death, heaven and hell, and earthly purpose with absolute honesty. Over pints of beer we communed, and the image of the original apostles sitting and drinking wine with Jesus.

Yes, Jesus spent time with prostitutes and thieves and worse people yet; Jesus who turned ordinary healthy water into gallons and gallons of wine to get the people at a wedding feast drunk.

And though I had heard in my youth that He was exempt somehow from the rules that governed us, I was beginning to see all these exemptions for the dogmatic bullshit they were. Only in Bible times it was okay for Christians to drink alcohol? Only in the Old Testament could the faithful have sex outside of marriage, kill their enemies, have multiple wives, even fornicate with members of their own family (just think, who did Adam and Eve’s children have children with?)

Nowhere in the Bible does it explicitly say any of these behaviors is wrong, because if the Bible said this, we would condemn all of the founders of the religion to hell.

All the Bible says instead is “to him who knows what is right, and does not do it, it is sin.”

So what if “sin” was redefined for me?

Is it possible that a person with their own developed ideas on what is right and wrong has an internal moral structure, instead of an external one? In this case, jello mold or not, we remain strong. People whose morality is determined by external sources find themselves without identity when those sources are removed. They collapse. They degrade. They decompose into the pinkish mush that Pastor Dave saw in that unformed jello.

And yet, by imposing such strong external structure on us, the school doomed many of us to glean our morality from our environment. If the environment is amoral, then we too will be amoral. In the presence of drug addicts we would be drug addicted. In the presence of sexual promiscuity we too would be promiscuous. Never could we make our own decisions about whether these things were in our “character” to do. Never did we have our own personal reasons for participating or not participating in the behaviors of our peers.

Except those of us who had rebelled deep down, those of us who had questioned, and wondered if our teachers were honest and trustworthy. We happy few had begun to develop our own theories on how we should, or should not behave. And, in the years to come, those theories would become self development, and character.

When the mold was lifted, only those of us who had been in question already knew how to stand.

Jills part of the Story

2007-06-09T21:41:00.000-04:00

Jill is the first one to fully contribute, so read on...
That night was riddled with should haves. Well, for me, the list was immense. I should have driven slower. I should have stayed put. I should have embraced friends in a time of need and fear. Should have is a terrible place to be. I often wondered if I overdramatized the experience of that night because it was one of those crossroad moments people glorify or shame or turn about in the hand and wonder at its real significance. Some people considered what I chose that night as a right decision. Some people saw it as a desperate need to salvage what little I had left to hold. Still, others saw it as a regretful act of cowardice. I agree with the last two crowds.

My parents were out of the country for two weeks, and I had the fortune of an empty house. Two houses actually, since I was also house-sitting for a friend at the same time. Having that many guys crammed in my house with only my best girlfriend to help even out the ratio was such a riot. I liked that ratio, even if it scared the puritanical voice in my head. I enjoyed scaring that little voice that forbade me to sit next to my best buddies who happened to belong to another gender. Oooooh, so scary. I loved my boys, loved being around them, loved joining Shannon in attempts at confusing their understanding of the female psyche (whoops, should have kept that a secret).

The Pond was the sublime oasis few girls had the privilege of knowing as I had known it. I enjoyed the free air, the bonfires, the campy communal possibilities of the place. It was beautiful, and I felt honor knowing I was allowed there as one of the exceptions of the boys club. That was a big deal for me because I had already exited the school in a blaze of ‘teenage rebellion’ and was shunned by many of my former friends. I heard people talking in the church bathroom stalls to each other, how it was only a matter of time before I was another statistic, knocked up or deep into witchcraft. And don’t you just feel for Rod and Sue? They’ve tried their best; their boys seem to be making the right choices though. Maybe we should pray… Gossip veiled behind prayer requests. I still taste bile.

I wish I could say I was foolish enough that night have been drinking. I had taken a sip of Shannon’s drink and decided I didn’t like whatever it was. I wasn’t much for fruity sweet drinks. It tasted like cherries. Shannon, Spike and I sat huddled by the fire, watching the other guys be goofy. I wondered about the two with me; Shannon had hashed out a lengthy argument earlier at her house on Spike’s finer points and how she felt or didn’t feel. Her self-arguments were endearing in their simple complexities. She could talk herself into and out of something so well.

Since it was getting quite chilly for a summer night, I offered the house I was watching in Gang Mills as an indoor venue. It offered comfort and privacy if it was needed. It had already been a decent place to party as we had discovered earlier that week. We packed up the remaining bottles into my car. Everyone crammed inside the little Mazda, windows rolled down, and music blared on those tinny speakers. And I flew. Should have known better. Should have remembered the sharp curve of that turn from the day before. Should have seen that deer at the roadside as an omen, a warning sign to ease up. Should have.

Next, I was breathing curses under my breath - cursing the downward sliding gravel, cursing the giant oak stretching its arms toward us, cursing my tires for not gripping. Just stop, just stop, just stop, please, just stop. We had flown through brush, came face to face with that looming oak, but crested on top of a rock. I am not sure if it was a crunch or a slam; it was just hard and abrupt. I hit my head on the wheel – I had forgotten my seatbelt. A dark spray of Guinness misted through the car. Everyone erupted in a chorus of swearing and moaning. I checked Shannon’s arm, for she had been feeling the breeze before branches beat against her. She was fine, whimpering, but fine. Shit, I am so screwed. I stumbled out of the car, a purple hissing angry mess of a car. I began crawling backwards over branches and leaves, trying in some primitive way to rewind the immediate events. Stopping to clutch loose gravel in fists, I sat sprawled facing my wrecked car’s profile. Steve came over to me, then Jonathan. Everyone is fine. This will be okay. Shit, how are we getting out of here? Someone’s got to get the truck. I heard voices, but everything went numb. Every one of my senses fuzzed up. I think Steve walked me around trying his best to calm what was inevitable. Shock or a break – but not yet. First, we extricated my car, losing its front bumper as a final flourish to pending doom. The tow to my parent’s house was eternal; I had already begun rocking myself as I steered from behind. Once home, I retreated to my parent’s empty bedroom. With everyone else downstairs coping well enough with the situation and their inebriation, I grappled with enveloping walls of silence and dark.

My parents already did not trust me as much since my self-emancipation that had only decreased their faith in my ability to decide properly and maturely for myself. This felt like a box of nails for my coffin had just been chucked at my feet. A sealed fate. Judged. What the hell am I to do? Why isn’t anyone up here with me? I need help! I argued with myself, consoled myself, and rocked myself the entire night. What could I do? Even as my friends lay sleeping one floor below, I decided I had to ‘do the right thing’. Do the only thing I had been taught my entire life: repent. Repent of everything I had come to love and hold dear; for in only that action, I felt a possibility of redemption and future freedom. Even if it killed me, I had to turn from my wicked ways and return to the fold.

Looking back, my return only increased my isolation. Sure, my parents told me they were just glad I was alive. The rumors swirled about like wildfire; I had veered, wandered, and explored with an independent spirit. Disjointed and despised, I was never more bound by what was never forgiven or forgotten by my church peers or elders. And worse, deep down I knew I had cut off the only people that seemed to understand me or care if I lived and breathed. I felt utterly alone to face what remained. Yet, what remained? Little. I resigned myself to running away for a fresh start out west, a complete reinvention through hopeful pilgrimage. I had my course mapped, set aside supplies, even had a chunk of savings ready for this escape. Nothing would have stopped me, so I had thought. Yet, one phone call gave me pause. It was such a coincidental connection that I had to explore this option suddenly given to me. At some base level, it was my ticket out of the entire mess, my chance to start again.

anyone that would care to contribute should do so...

aparently it was waiting for me to aprove your comments

2007-06-09T21:40:00.000-04:00

sorry guys, silly internet...

The Jello Mold, part 2

2007-05-01T15:50:00.000-04:00

The Jello Mold

“What do you mean they might not be coming?” I was pissed. We had been planning this trip to Darien Lake for a while, and it was hard to get the time off from Blockbuster for something so trivial. I was, of course, the six time consecutive employee of the month, employees of the month don’t go to amusement parks and inconvenience their co-workers.
“Yeah,” Johnny looked off into the trees at the edge of the parking lot, “not sure I want to talk about that right now.”
“I don’t know that it’ll be a problem,” Steve smiled a nervous smile. “Everything is okay, right?”
“What are you guys talking about? C’mon, just tell me what happened.” I was out of the loop again. Living at the edge of nowhere and not having a car was keeping me from the little outings Steve and Johnny often had with Spike. They would come back with inside jokes, new friends, half-told stories. It was starting to frustrate me.
Suddenly a car rolled up. In it were several of our friends from Bath, a rural area about a half hour outside of Corning. Steve got out of the car, and walked over to convene with the other driver.
“C’mon Johnny, I know something happened,” how come he could always get secrets out of me, but he was more tightly sealed than a virgin’s knees on this one?
He leaned his head back against the head rest in front of me and seemed to nap. Whatever had happened the night before must’ve been good. He was exhausted.
Momentarily Steve returned, shaking his head.
“I think it’s off for today,” he said as if it were no big deal.
“Aw, man… what a waste of a day off.” I was more pissed about being out of the loop.
“Even if we started driving now,” Johnny looked at his watch or the car clock, “we’d be too late to beat the lines for most of the good rides.”

As we rode home from the church, they began to pour the narrative to me in bits and pieces, chronologically disjointed like a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Jill had a car accident. We hung out at the pond. Spike asked Shannon to marry her. Johnny drove his dad’s truck through the back roads at four in the morning. Shannon drank a whole bottle of Boone’s Farm wine. Spike has condoms in his glove compartment.
None of these facts by themselves seemed to have any place in reality, and yet they somehow tied into a story that took me days to sort out.
It began, as many summer evenings did that year, at The Pond.
Spike’s Hemmingway-esque uncle owned a property in the back woods with several cabins (unfinished) and a half-built house surrounding a large manmade pond. Cut off from the world and self supporting, this spot was a place where we often spent time fishing, talking, playing cards, and ducking the larger world outside our door.
We could drink alcohol there, although I still hated beer. We could swear, although I sounded like “the way a character in a Kung Fu movie forces the curse word,” as Spike observed. We could lay hold of that sense of freedom that meant adulthood at The Pond. And in the course of grasping it, we lost our childhood.
As I watched some inconsequential movie with my parents, isolated from transportation and youthful abandon, Steve and Johnny had helped coordinate a small gathering at the pond. They were there with Spike, Jill, Shannon, and a few bottles of cheap wine to liven up the evening.
From the tale, Shannon drank the wine fairly quickly. She had a lot to run from, as I would later understand when I did my own running. Somewhere in the course of the evening, they had braved the abandoned dirt roads under Jill’s urging, to leave the pond for a more comfortable setting.
It was unknown to me, from mixed accounts, why they left The Pond. It was unknown if Jill had been drinking or not. What was known was that, during a poorly executed turn on a gravel surface, her Neon had run off the road into the woods at its edge. A vast boulder of a rock tore up the underside of her car, leaving it to die in a puddle of fluids and steam in the darkened wood.
Uniting as only teenagers who have done something monumentally stupid can, they broke into groups. Jonathan returned to his parents house to get his father’s truck. He returned after an hour’s drive with chains to tow Jill’s deceased car to her home.
They spent the night in fear, in grief, in worry that all our parents would feel betrayed and label them as un-conformed; unfinished mistakes of the HCA system.

The next day our world changed.

What was Jill to tell her parents? How was she to face two prominent members of the congregation with a story of drunken debauchery in the woods? She would lose her freedom, whatever remained of her honor, her social standing in the church. Having been cast out by the school once, she must’ve feared a second shunning.
What were the rest of us to say, that were her friends. “Sorry you screwed up?” We promised, I promised, to help and stand by her.
“When your parents come home, we will all chip in to fix the car,” as if fixing the car would somehow fix the relationship that had granted her the car, and every other freedom and benefit that framed her life.
And so the entire group fractured like a piece of sunlit ice, slowly drifting on the frigid seas to disperse and be separated by tide and time.

My parents were called, informed by Jill’s outraged mother of how delinquent my friends were. Fortunate for me, on some level, to have been home with them instead of standing on the side of that road wondering how to make things go back.
I had already beaten that phone call, by telling them both what I knew of the story only hours earlier. I knew that I could earn their trust, and confirm the relationship I was trying to build as an adult by doing so. Unfortunately this also meant that my Mom liked Steve and Johnny even less for several years.
This event presaged a cascade of changes that seemed to confirm the jello sermon. Some of us were having premarital sex, one of the seniors that summer was pregnant, several people began to experiment with drugs and alcohol. I flunked out of college.
We seemed to be the disintegrating jello foretold by Pastor Dave. We had lost integrity, and no longer reflected our Mold, our origin in Christian school.

The Jello Mold, part 1

2007-05-01T15:15:00.000-04:00

The Jello Mold:

I remember Pastor Dave telling a story once in the foggy hour of morning chapel. He told about how, at a picnic with some of the less fortunate members of the congregation, someone had brought jello for the communal dessert. With the wry humor he seemed to radiate, Dave told us how this mold sat to the side, the waiting coup de grace of the afternoon feast.
As the food was devoured and summarily packed away, the jello in its mold was set in the center of the table, waiting the reveal of a delectable finish to an already satisfying feast. However, he told us, there was a flaw that ruined the unveiling moment.
When the mold was removed, masses of pinkish fluid ran out on the table. Puddles of half-set jello lingered behind like some culinary afterbirth, quivering with a quasi life of their own.
The jello had not been given long enough to set, and therefore could not stand on its own.
Dave used this metaphor as the driving vision for the school we attended. HCA was, he explained, our jello mold. It was the confining frame designed to give the unformed minds and hearts of Christian youth an opportunity to grow and “set.” As we firmed up in our beliefs, we would conform to this mold, and when it was lifted we would stand a perfect reflection of our environment.
As simple and understandable as his story was, I now see a fatal flaw in the logic that he used in the tale’s meaning.

Children are, and will be until the end of mankind, their own organic beings. They are not some liquid poured into a mold, but a living breathing being with genetically and environmentally inspired tendencies and drives. Like all living things, tight containment may lead to deformity, illness, and eventual death. To liken them to Jello in a mold, is to betray that one sees them as a commodity, like cattle, to be trained and confined and used as part of some form of commerce (in this case, heavenly.)

I remember several debates, held in my later classes before graduation, that showed I didn’t “take” to the mold in certain ways. Whenever we spoke about alcohol, and alcoholism, most of my peers were adamant to say that they would never allow those cursed liquids to cross the gates of their lips. I sat in silence, wondering what the fuss was about. Everything I had tasted at home seemed horrible, and it seemed that as long as I kept from intoxication, there was no possible contradiction to Godly law.
In fact, God seems in many occasions to condone the act of intoxication. Jesus turned water to wine, and the guests exclaimed how good that wine was. Who has ever heard of good wine, especially for a wedding celebration, that was non-alcoholic? Jesus drank wine as he broke bread at the last supper, and I have had wine with a good meal on many occasions.

We were taught about dating and relationships. The sad thing was that most of our teachers had been in horrifying relationships themselves. Few were qualified to be an example of how to meet, romance, and court a member of the opposite sex. Even though almost none of them met their spouses in church, kept pre-marital sexual purity, or asked their families’ blessings on the union they had all still married and created our generation.
These same people felt free to tell us to refrain from physical contact, to avoid being alone or in compromising situations with members of the opposite sex, to seek our mates within the confines of an accepted church, and to seek that church’s blessing on the union.
During one conversation I remember Mr. Falkenburg asking each of us how we felt about the concept of “dating.”
Having little to no experience with women, I told him what I still maintain to this day: a date is an opportunity to get to know a member of the opposite sex. They very in seriousness as the relationship begins to grow, and once the relationship is committed it becomes “courtship.”
His response was emphatically that he didn’t believe in “dating,” that it was a concept that led to many problems. He explained that all those early interactions should be done in groups, with others present, to prevent temptation.
When the question passed to the girl on my right, Jessie explained that she wasn’t worried about dating or courtship.
“Jesus will come back before then, anyways.”

So I was beginning to see that I didn’t conform exactly to the mold of the school, or perhaps even the church. In the teenage quest for identity, what did that leave me?

Friends. Indeed, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future,” as I heard the teachers say often.
Usually when they said it to me, the phrase was accompanied by a disapproving wag of the head. My friends were notorious troublemakers on some levels: the slick businessman, the artsy son of a homosexual, and the athletic vandal.
We supported each other, though. They encouraged me to draw, which was the only thing that made me happy. I encouraged Spike to write, Dave to skate, and Steve to make the deal of the century. We believed in a kind of future where each of us would be leaders in our field. Spike would write books that kids like us would have to read in school. Steve would be the first African American Donald trump type (alas he was beaten to the punch by Oprah.) Dave would be a pro baseball player and X-Games skater. We had bright futures filled with dreams and fantasies fueled by youth.
And yet, in his Jello lecture, Pastor Dave again had told us part of the truth.

“Some of you,” he said as I nodded my head in disbelief, “will not stand when the mold is removed. Look at the person to your right, now to your left. One of these people will be a drug addict. One of them will have a child outside of marriage. One of them may even be dead in the next ten years.”
To my right and left were Steve and Spike. I was sure I was sitting next to the exceptions that proved the rule.

When we look back at the time that the mold was lifted from us, one summer seems to mark the passing of our solidity. In that single summer, all the dreams of Godly lives and perfect Christian legacies ran out into the leaf-strewn side of a dirt road. Our company of peers and friends split, divided into factions with loyalty for those we felt we must keep as friends, and against those we felt betrayed by. Everything implied or intended by the act of being an HCA student faded into the humid air of the upstate summer.

However, I must tell this story as I heard it, since my promise was to only tell my first hand accounts. I must tell the tale as it happened to me, and let others tell their own story.

It began, for me, at the church parking lot, waiting for our friends…

perspectives on chapter 4, i.e. a teenager's case against fundementalism

2007-01-28T12:51:00.000-05:00

Sitting in the snow.
I could feel the crust melting slowly through the layers of my clothing. The fun would be the moment I stood. Somehow ice magically freezes into the weave of one’s fabrics and bonds with the layers beneath. It’s a small miracle when you consider how hot our body is, melting ice and radiating warmth, and how cold the snow is beneath us. It’s like the extremes form a truce, and there medium of exchange is the mesh of the cloth between them.
I wasn’t thinking too actively of these things. I was actually trying to catch my breath. Flexing my wrists to work out the severe aches built into their rotation, I watched my breath pour out in big wet billows of locomotive steam.
Gingerly I reached down with two thinly gloved fingers and peeled back the sleeve covering my right arm. In the sharp winter starlight I could see the rorschach pattern of purple bruises covering the inside of that arm. I knew from the feeling in my left that the two were a matched set.
It was 1999, and I had agreed to something that would completely change (and save) my life forever. A sort of an experiment on my part, and an exercise in patience for the man I was sharing a distracted conversation with.
For about nine months we convened in the elements, like some ancient church of stone. Three hours every Sunday night spent in intense competition - three hours that would change my whole perspective on HCA and what it meant.
What we did was unimportant compared to what we talked about. He was someone who had survived a similar Christian school almost ten years before. He had seen the formation of Christian Hope Center, and the regime change when David Hackett replaced Harry Jackson.
In that starry sylvan splendor I learned that I was at least partially normal, a shock to my mind made more acceptable by physical exhaustion.
Yes, it’s normal for young men under stress and in close contact with young women to form romantic attachments in their minds. It’s normal for those same young men to fear rejection. It’s normal to feel awkward expressing those feelings, confronting them, and eventually growing beyond them. This is the very essence of teenage melodrama.
What is not normal is feeling isolated and alone, being unable to discuss these feelings with anyone else for fear of religious condemnation. It is abnormal to have only a dozen or so young women in your entire world, so that rejection by one equates to rejection by the whole world. It is not normal to feel that those dozen women represent the ONLY acceptable matches for your romantic future, and that women outside this social paradigm are somehow inferior morally and spiritually.
All these ideas were implanted into our impressionable minds by our lives at HCA. As a teenager I heard constantly the verse: “Take not unto yourselves wives of the Philistines,” which was used as a Godly admonition to only marry a fellow Christian. Dating was expressly forbidden, and talk of sexuality was entirely taboo.
In short, we were socially stunted and romantically repressed.
And now, on this 28th day of January in the year 2007, I sit facing the age of thirty with the same issues.
Not once in my life have I had a long-term, viable romantic relationship. Not once have I had what I believe constitutes a normal courtship progression; from meeting, to friendship, to romance, to attachment.
While I have the strength to own that the mistakes and failings are my own, I have only recently had the power to recognize where I learned these backwards views on relationships and why I insist on enacting them whenever I am confronted with a romantic opportunity.
The failures are my own, but the inability to properly socialize and present myself as an acceptable mate comes from being raised in a fundamentalist atmosphere, completely isolated from contemporary cultural behavior.
Unable to learn from my peers or from women as an adolescent, I am now ill equipped to locate and communicate my intensions to a woman.
My romantic life is an incontrovertible argument against evangelical fundamentalism.

Chapter 4, parts 1 and 2

2007-01-24T23:46:00.001-05:00

Chapter 4

For Now We See Through A Mirror Dimly

Watch the news for five minutes.

Watch stories of human destruction: murder, rape, abduction, violence and gruesome hatred.

For every story of strength and honor, there are ten stories where the cancer of the human soul has destroyed an innocent life. Watching these, being aware of the world around us, makes one wonder what the meaning is. We ask ourselves: “In a world so demented and dark, why persevere? Why breathe, why wake up in the morning to a place where my life has no value, and my values have no life?”

For this reason I believe the concept of romantic love has so much of a hold on the collective human psyche. Love and hope are so tied to one another, it is nearly impossible to have one without the other, or to lose one without the other fading like the wisps of smoke that fade from incense.

The children of fundamentalism feel this even more potently. We are displaced from our culture, reminded daily that our beliefs and values are different from the norm. Not a day passes without our fevered acknowledgement of the love and sacrifice of God – a love that makes life possible and worth living.

This sense was magnified by my personality. As an artist, I could see the aesthetic of love with almost tactile clarity. I could taste and feel the concept of being accepted so completely, intertwined physically and psychologically with another person in a way that defies any purpose but love.
Furthermore, around the age of sixteen I began to dream about women. Hardly ever the lurid dreams designed to release sexual tension, these were imaginings of what it would be like to look into the eyes of a beautiful woman and see myself wholly reflected there. My romantic self would be completed in that reflection, empty bits and flaws glossed over by the warmth of her gaze in a way that only the fevered mind of a teenage artist can construct.

Part of my soul always existed outside the mainstream, as if a section of my thoughts was racing along in a parallel world. First this splinter of my psyche sojourned in the world of Arthurian legend, later I learned that the codes of chivalry were constructs of authors from the nineteenth century, and I began to research the roots of that fabled tree.
My investigations led me deep into ancient Britain, where a people once lived in tribal splendor.
The Celts valued everything that my teenage mind was clinging to for inspiration: art, poetry, honor, valor, and romance. How could I not be entranced by them?
And, although I would later find these values among other non-industrialized peoples (Shaolin monks, Samurai, and the African slaves in Brazil) the culture of the Celts became my idiom for a span of several years.

How do myths and legends describe the beauty of a Celtic maiden? She is pale, thin, a little sad, and a little artistic. She loves poetry and song. She dreams of freedom.
She is always, always gifted with one beautiful trait: hair that flames like morning sun reflected off the bronze weapons that Celtic warriors wielded in battle.

This image, held within my mind like a sepia photograph in a locket, would lead me to one of the harshest lessons about life and love I have ever learned.
Melissa was beyond me. I had come to grudgingly accept that there was a rift between us, a sort of misunderstanding, but at a deeper fundamental level. And why shouldn’t there be? She was athletic, active, on the move constantly. When did she stop and read a book? When did she pause to think deep thoughts?

Somehow, I surmised, there must be a woman in the world who would understand me on a deeper level. She must look beyond the outside, the trappings of the physical world, and see into the core of what makes me unique and special.
For a while I doubted that such a woman even existed. But over time I came to a sort of realization: I actually knew a female that understood me.

As I drifted from conversations with Melissa, and into discussions with her older sister, I found how many interests we had in common. I could wax poetic and she would understand. I could quote Shakespeare and she would appreciate the words.

And those eyes. Those eyes.
All surrounded by the most flaming red hair I had ever seen. A color so vibrant it defied earthly origin; so alive and powerful in our little world surrounded by drab colors and cast in the moody greens of fluorescent lights.

How could I not be lost?
She was like a character ripped from one of my stories, rent from the grey-green mists of the ancient Celtic world and set among us wandering around unnoticed. She towered over my imagination like mythological figures tower over mortals. In the center of my mind she was placed on a small altar like a goddess of ancient times. She was the Morrigan incarnate, inspiring my Celtic soul in the virtues of battle, sovereignty, and strategy.
And yet, while I painted these glorious colors on the canvas known to others as Amanda McKay, I forgot about her intrinsic humanity.
What I actually knew about the girl was a mere caricature of her whole personality. I had generated a woman entirely devoid of fear, insecurity, or human frailty and used her to crush the girl I actually sat beside.
I’m certain it was frightening there for a teenage girl atop my gilded altar. I’m certain it was a heavy burden to realize that she was the avatar of my inspiration, keeping hot air moving through my lungs and blood in my veins.

At my core was a great fear. I knew that, if I posed the question (although I was completely uncertain what the question was, let alone how it could be worded and spoken where other humans might hear it) she would certainly reject me. How, I wondered, could I be worthy of such a being?
I was painfully aware of my inadequacies, having been passively rejected once in favor of someone with better looks and more money.

So we existed in a sort of awkward quiet. I adored her in silence from what I thought was invisibility, she quietly held in her refutation of my feelings for fear that my fragile ego might shatter. It was a dance, a harmonious union made perfect in the irony of the distance between us.

This story extends beyond the boundaries of Hope Christian Academy, to the first college I attended. Even in the tentative grasp of the “real world” I held her as a walking ideal.

As Amanda, Spike, Steven and I began to set foot in reality we kept contact with one another like the survivors of a wrecked ship grasping one another’s flotsam to survive. We ventured to bars and clubs together, fascinated with what made those people drinking beer and smoking cigarettes so completely free and seemingly happy.
Many late nights we rode back from some disco with the echoes of thudding 90’s dance music in our heads. I often sat in the car and wondered if I could ever bridge the gap between us.

My first sign was at Christmas of 1997.
My first Christmas with a job was a powerful opportunity to buy gifts for all my friends. Although I can’t recall what I bought anyone else that year, I will never forget wandering aimlessly looking for something – some object that might hint at the quiet hopes burning like embers in the hearth of my heart.

I found a small bracelet worked into an intricate Celtic knot by chance. What caught my eye about it as I passed was that the metal reflected in a color that made me think of her hair. It was perfect for Amanda. It was perfectly from me. It was possibly the most perfect gift I have ever given anyone.

With clumsy fingers I handed her the small box at college, choosing a moment where the fewest eyes would spy my little demonstration of love. In my mind I had envisioned her seeing the gift, looking into my eyes, and finally making the connection. I dreamed of her returning my feelings. I was prepared to voice my Quixotical romance for her in that moment, to give utterance to my silent belief in fate and destiny.
What I was unprepared for was her one word response. It undid me, as only the organic response of a flesh and blood woman (and not the planned eloquence of a mythical goddess) can undo the machinations of a man in love.
“Why?”
She looked at the bracelet in its fiery knit glory and asked me why.
And I realized that if she could look me in the eye, or look at my gift, a perfect physical embodiment of my feelings and ask such a thing, she was not the graceful goddess I had imagined.
When the marble veneer cracked and I saw the flawed humanity beneath, I ran from it. She was as insecure as I was, as capable of error. How could I worship a goddess who could err? How could I devote myself to someone as unsure of life as I was?

Shortly after that year ended Amanda McKay left. She returned to Washington state where she still lives. But our story didn’t end when she left.

When I turned twenty-one I was still scarred from that single word. Why. It echoed in my brain like a gunshot on unprotected ears.

And sometime in the midst of my business with earning foolish money at Blockbuster video and whiling my life away without a purpose, I heard a rumor that sent me reeling.
Amanda McKay was pregnant.
At first it seemed like a silly and vicious thing spread around by those parents that were always too hard on the children of pastors and missionaries. I knew from observation that, as often as these children were exemplified as the apex of the “godly generation” they were condemned for the very humanity that occasionally led them to stray from the rigid expectations of the fundamentalist regime.

But this rumor was substantiated by her own words. Written in script that I had come to recognize and adore, photocopied, and mailed in a sort of chain letter of self immolation came an apology for Amanda’s sins.
I read in mixed awe and revulsion as the woman of my adorations explained how a moment of lust had filled her womb with an unplanned child. She asked for forgiveness from our church – forgiveness and understanding.

Ridiculous, I thought, to ask for forgiveness from the very people whose backwards attitudes about sex led to all sorts of wild experimentation and obsession with it in private school children. Ridiculous to ask for forgiveness from people who couldn’t know the real Amanda McKay other than her status as the daughter of a missionary family. Ridiculous to ask for absolution from faceless drones of some zombie collective when her real friends were hurt and confused at the loss of one of our own.

While I was still struggling with maintaining my purity, fighting to keep some vestige of virginity despite the raging power of my own sexual awakening, this former object of my adoration had given herself to someone as disposable and worthless as any other member of the “world” outside our greenhouse.

This is the lesson that all boys learn that makes them into men.

While we struggle with boyish issues, while we grow the testicular fortitude needed to express ourselves and assert our feelings and hopes to the women we love, some other man has strode in with an air of confidence and made a conquest of her. It is the root of the struggle to mate, as expressed by social mammals of all shapes and sizes. While we wish to assert our dominance over lower species, when it comes to reproduction some elements of nature are merely cleverly embellished by our intelligence and ability to communicate, not abolished by them.

And so, one night, I sat in the fading stupor of metabolized alcohol at a diner and lamented her passing from grace. I sat with my three best friends, and the second to last nail was hammered into the coffin.

“Steve, you should tell him,” Jonathan always had this sly little smirk that came with knowing your darkest secret. I thought this would make him the best psychologist in history, because it gave him some magical ability to get you to talk about embarrassing things with him in humorous confidence.

“Shut up,” Steve was more immune than I was, plus he was sober.

“Tell me what?” the silly smile still felt warm and fuzzy on my face as I poked my French toast playfully.

“Oh Gawd, not now,” Spike always avoids confrontation.

“C’mon, tell him about the Omega.” Jonathan wasn’t going to let up.

Steve had this car back in those early days of bars and clubbing. The Omega’s fatal flaw was that it had a bad transmission and couldn’t climb hills. Since my parents lived on a hill, Steve would pick me up at the stop sign a mile and a half from my house. This also meant I was often the first one to be dropped off after a night out, so I could walk to my house in decent time.

“What about the Omega?” I was getting suspicious.

“Oh Geez. Ball, pass me the ketchup.” Spike was trying to divert in a silly drunken way.

“If you are friends, you should really tell him.” Jonathan was showing a rare aggressive side. I would later understand that his status as an only child made him treasure our band of friends in a unique way. Our friendship, and his love for his girlfriend (now his wife) were the only things that could make him abandon his trademark passivity. The only way to make Jonathan violent is to threaten his friends or the love of his life.

We sat in silence.

“Tell him.” Jonathan’s voice was almost a growl.

“Okay okay.” Stephen seemed to relent, if only to get Johnny to let up.

After a deep breath: “Ball, you know how we used to drop you off at the foot of the hill?”

“Yeah, Steve, and I had to walk back in the dark with all those noises. Sometimes it was really creepy. This one time the light from the moon lit up the mist and…” somebody shut me up, please.

“Yeah, yeah.” Steve took another uncharacteristic pause. “You know, sometimes we would walk with you, too. Sometimes I would drop you off and it would be just me and whoever else was in the car.”

“Uhh… so?”

“Well you know Amanda used to go out with us a lot back then.”

“Before she was knocked up,” Johnny was being crass again.

“Wait…” a picture was forming in my mind. Something like: hey, we just got rid of the awkward, tubby, romantic guy. Now it’s just you and me in my busted car on this country road, sweetie.

“You know, it’s no big deal. Why did you bring this up, Johnny?” now Steve was diverting.

“Because he should know everything,” Jonathan was showing a little steel again. “It will help him get over it.”

“So you and Amanda…what?” I wanted to know, but then I didn’t want to know. I was caught.

“Well it wasn’t like we… you know we just made out and stuff.” Steve waived his hands dismissively in the air. “It’s no big deal.”

“Yeah but… was this when I was all, you know?” I was still chewing on the mental picture, wondering if I should believe him.

“Ball,” Johnny broke in, “when weren’t you retarded over that girl?”

“Everybody kind of knew, Ball.” Spike was trying to soften the blow.

“Yeah but if you had told me, maybe I would’ve…”

“You would’ve got mad at me.” Steve was finally making eye contact. “The same way you were mad at Matt Mosier when you found out he was screwing Janet.”

“But I would’ve gotten over it sooner or something.” So this meant Amanda was into… Steve? Interested in my friend? One of my best friends?

“No, you would’ve been mad.” Spike was being his philosopher self. “You know how you are.”

“You’re mad now, aren’t you?” Johnny breaking some of the tension. “Are you gonna hit him? Or just sit there and cry like a bitch?”

And like that, the choice was clear. My friend, my best good friend who had always stood behind me, or a girl who never felt for me how I felt for her.

But Now Remains: Faith, Hope and Love

Steve dragged me, some time after that, to the wedding of Melissa McKay. He has a way for taking me places where all these old ghosts linger, the same way Jonathan can get me to reveal my deepest oddities. It’s the power your friends, your chosen family, have over you that no one else has.

Blasting DMX tunes in Steve’s Chevy Malibu, we filled ourselves with a testosterone induced hardness for all those familiar disapproving faces. We would see all those parents who knew we were destined for hell, and face some of those girls who had chosen something other than us for their fate.

Dousing the music for a moment, Steve decided to share some of his wisdom during our car trip.

“You know, Ball,” has a formal way, very much like his father, of starting an important statement. “Amanda will be there.”

“Yeah? Fuck her. Put the music up.” I was going strictly to be an asshole -- and because Steve dragged me along. I don’t actually think I had even been sent an invitation.

“No, wait man,” here came the lecture, “this weekend is the perfect time for the ‘I wish you well speech.’”

“Yeah, I wish them all well. Now turn that music back up, bitch!”

“No, seriously. You know I never got over Lisa until I could sit down and actually say, and mean…”

“I know, I know. ‘I wish you well.” Blah, blah blah.”

“Just think about it, Ball. It could get this girl out of your system.”

“She’s not in my system. I’m over her.”

I was kidding myself. I saw her in the bride’s maid dress, red hair reflecting from a mile away. All the anger, the betrayal, the rejection came back to me in a single heartbeat.

The ceremony was endless, the reception was torture. Quietly nodding and looking serene when I wanted nothing more than to go back to the car and blast DMX until curses and pulsating bass overrode the whole ridiculous affair. I wasn’t just trying to be an asshole. I was an absolute asshole.

Steve brought her over to talk to us. I tried to act unaffected. I was a mountain, and she was the smallest insect beneath the valley below the mountain. I was above it, I was beyond it, but I’m sure I was obviously in pain.

“So, after this is all over, we should probably go get some dinner or something,” Steve was being his damned charming self. Probably the same self that did so well for him in the Omega, I was thinking.

“Yeah I don’t know if…” I was sending him a sharp mental signal. Dude, let’s not do this shit.

“I mean,” he seemed not to notice “that is if Amanda can get away. Can you?”

“You mean Grace? Sure, I guess I can head out for a little while.” She was conspiring with him. I knew it. “Just not to a club or anything, okay guys?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Just dinner, right, Ball?”

Like a robot I answered, “Sure thing.”

The whole way to pick her up he talked like Mick the trainer in the Rocky movies: You can do it. Don’t give up. This is the moment.

“I wish you well.”

And honestly I had prepared a whole way to say what needed to be said. In my mind I had made a mental image of me, falling through those teenage years, grabbing at anything that could hold me and give me purpose. In this image, I had grabbed at this girl, the first beautiful thing within reach, but she had been unable to bear my weight or my inertia. It was a poetic way of saying she wasn’t good enough for me, or perhaps that she wasn’t as good as I had hoped. The branch had broken, and I had kept falling towards the bottom.

Sitting in a restaurant eerily familiar to the place where I had hear the Omega Incident, I began to give my speech about falling and reaching.
Before I could finish my planned elegy, fat tears leaked from the corners of Amanda’s eyes and she stammered something completely unforeseen: “But I didn’t want it to be about looks!”

Those simple words quieted it. They soothed the pain. They dulled the empty ache in a way nothing planned or contrived ever could.
With that simple tearful lament Amanda McKay became entirely human. She was a goddess no longer, but instead a flesh and blood person falling as quickly as I ever had. For the first time I considered how she must’ve felt; how lost, how confused by my adoration. I suddenly realized she had been afraid to hurt me.

The altar in my heart, the reliquary where I had kept mementos of this female deity suddenly disappeared. Rather than being immolated in rage or dismantled in fury, it just evaporated into non-being.
At a loss for words and having forgotten my speech, I reached for something to fill the awkward silence.

“It’s okay, Amanda,” I finally managed, “I just wanted to wish you well.”

After we returned her to the McKay family, Steve and I sat in silence for a while in the car. We went to the park and smoked a pair of cigars and thought about old times. We were both writing an ending to a chapter in our personal stories, framing the tale in a way that made it happy to us.

In the car on the way back to my family’s house he finally spoke again.

“So, what do you think, Ball?”

“I think a lot, man.” I was smiling though. “I probably think too much.”

“No, I mean about the girl. I know she’s had a kid, but if you give it a few years…”

“What? What the hell is wrong with you?” I was genuinely shocked.

“I mean you’re both different people now. Maybe in a while you two could talk again. Compare notes or something.”

“Hey, Steve?”

“What?”

“Put the stereo on, bitch.”

warning

2007-01-24T23:46:00.000-05:00

this next part might be hard to read. it was hard as hell to write.

Chapter 3, part 11

2006-12-26T23:19:00.000-05:00

Love Covers All Things

I learned from this experience that love and hate are equally intimate. As much as I thought I loved Melissa, I hated my perceived competition for her attention. As much time as I spent fantasizing about our imaginary romance, I spent equal time fantasizing about combat with this other boy. In truth, we had become intimate in ways that made me uncomfortable.

Even though I had ceased to hate Adam, I still felt a strong sense of competition with him. He had still taken the only girl I thought I had a chance with, and I was at least partly convinced there was a way to win her back.

As members of a small Christian school, separated from normal school experiences by a great divide of culture and belief, we were clueless about certain experiences like formal dances and proms. One opportunity for all of us to feel a certain normalcy came in the form of the local teen formal held by a Christian radio station. Though I would normally have avoided the experience at all costs, my friends managed to convince me that it would be fun to dress up and go to a formal event. At the last minute I parted with my hard earned cash for a pair of tickets. I chose a ridiculous outfit of black slacks, laced poet shirt, suede vest, and chuck taylor sneakers for my formal attire… and I began to search for someone to ask.

All the girls I knew were already claimed, and Adam and Melissa were obviously going together. My options were so severely limited that I began to wonder if I might as well forget the whole idea. At the last moment, someone suggested that I ask the oldest of the McKay sisters to be my “date.”

I knew very little about Amanda, and I was slightly resentful of being stuck with someone as if we were both luggage. I think she wanted to go even less than I did, and I’m certain that going to a formal event with someone as fashion-ignorant as myself was a grim prospect. For some reason, perhaps because her mom wanted her to keep an eye on her sister, she agreed to accompany me.

Adam drove us in his family’s Chevy Suburban, and the quartet of us rode in idle conversation to the large hall where the teen formal was held. I remember wondering, as we sat in awkward silence at our table, if that night would EVER end. I was uncomfortable. I was out of place. I knew I would regret having agreed to this whole idea before the night was through.

As the event wound down, Amanda and I were equally disgusted with the entire experience and looking for our ride and our chance to escape and forget the awkwardness of the evening. We suddenly realized that her sister and my rival were nowhere in sight, and we became increasingly frustrated as we searched for the two teens so smitten with one another that they would be rude to all outsiders.

The moment of realization came when we strode into the parking lot to see if they had already left, and found Adam and Melissa alone in the darkened truck his parents had loaned us for the evening. I will never forget their perfect silhouettes created by the orange light from the street lamps in the parking lot. Like a scene from a romantic movie, their heads tilted and leaned as Adam and Melissa shared an intense kiss, oblivious to our observation.

Grabbing my stunned arm, Amanda dragged me inside the building and attempted to collect herself. Cautioning me to tell no one, probably in defense of her sister’s honor, Amanda left me standing alone to plot while she went to the truck to break up whatever romantic activities were proceeding in the dark.

I knew that this was possibly Adam’s greatest physical demonstration of his feelings, but it also represented his greatest lack of caution and tact. His moment of weakness was apparent, and I was determined to engineer his downfall.

After we left the formal, we stopped as a group at McDonalds for a diversion. I’m sure those romantically inclined wished the night would not end, but for me it was a mere continuance of pain and grief that I wished to be through with.

As I sat and fumed at my inconvenience, I struck up an idle conversation with Amanda.

“I will not,” I ordered myself silently, “like another girl for a long time.” I was quite through with pain and frustration, and even passive rejection was becoming a constant source of emotional distress.

But a new seed was planted even as the old flower withered and died.

chapter 3, parts 8, 9 and 10

2006-12-26T22:37:00.000-05:00

Love Hopes for All Things

How simply first love is won!

This woman, named Melissa McKay, won my heart with one simple act of mercy… or perhaps pity.

One morning before school my brother and I began to quarrel. He was a senior in the high school, and under the same types of pressure I felt in that closed and oppressive space. As I readied myself for classes, he ordered me to make him a lunch.

I chafed at the wording of it, but it was nothing less than a command from him, as if I were a servant. Rather than succumb to servitude, I spun on my heel and pitched the half-shelled hard-boiled egg in my hand at his face.

The throw went erratically wide, but his eyes lit from within with a rage I’ve seen in few other humans. He was on me in an instant, smashing his fists with a relentlessness designed to literally beat me into submission. He was walking away by the time my tired father walked into the room, but the damage was done. My eye was ringed with a beautiful knuckle printed purple bruise.

I avoided classes for days, moping at home in the realization that my black eye was a badge of my incompetence as a man. I was unable to defend myself, mastered easily by my own flesh and blood. I wore evidence of my weakness for the world to see.

Finally my parents told me I had to return to classes on that Monday. My dread was overcome by a more potent realization: Monday was the day of class pictures.

Dressed up but wishing to crawl into a hole and die, I shuffled into classes with the faintest of hopes no one would notice. Of course my friends noticed, demanded the story, and offered their sympathies, but nothing could lessen my inner pain.

This girl, who I then knew so little about, evidenced a very womanly compassion for my pain. She drew me aside in the hallway and opened the smallest purse I had seen a woman carry. Drawing out an array of tiny vials of makeup, she began to apply cold alien substances to my face, and converse with me in a distracted way that seemed free of prejudice.

I truly believe I saw in her eyes the kind of woman Melissa McKay could and would one day grow to be. She was strong, confident, and compassionate – a fit companion for any man who wanted peace in his home. I was lost in her eyes, grateful and determined to win her admiration.

With every high comes the unavoidable low. It is the way of balance, the way of life. All birth must foretell a death, riches fade, and beauty must eventually fade into the very Earth whence it came.
My newfound dreams of companionship were destined to be dashed in a way I could neither foresee nor avoid. My love-inspired vulnerability was destined to lower my defenses to pain.

I remember the day like it was yesterday; shuffling my books and papers for another average day in Christian high school. My friends were bristling this Monday with the adventures of the weekend.

Because my family lived so far off the beaten path, and my transportation options were limited, I often missed the little spontaneous adventures teenagers engage in. Unless the event was planned far in advance and cleared with my parents, I was destined to sit home and find out the details later.

Details were exactly what I could see in their eyes.

Spike seemed to hesitate, to bite his tongue on this news. Something about his look included a new emotion: pity. Steve and Dave firmly believed I should share the news, if for no other reason than my own entertainment.

They eventually overflowed with enthusiasm and told me a tale of a late night visit to an overlook in our city. This giant hill was known to people our age as a sort of make-out location. Sitting on one of the swings or benches overlooking the sleepy little city, one could feel free, isolated, and amorous without inhibition.

Spike finally explained that, as our group of friends approached those swings, they saw familiar faces that made them freeze with curiosity. Seated on the edge of our world and oblivious to the intruding gaze of my friends, my hope – my new interest – Melissa was in the arms of none other than Adam Schrader.

I swallowed the news like molten lead. It hit the bottom of my stomach and churned there, eating a whole in my fragile plan to gradually woo this woman with my subtle qualities and romantic nature. How could I compete? While I hesitated out of fear of rejection another had sailed in and won the day.

Furthermore, the object of her pseudo-public affection was a boy from my brother’s grade, someone three years older from a more prosperous family. He was well-liked in the church, well known and respected. He was tall, thin, he owned expensive clothes which fit, lived in a nicer home, and he possessed something I feared I could never have: confidence.

Love Never Fails

And so began my first heartbreak. Had I known the awful truth that dozens would follow, many more painful than the first, I might have thrown myself from a tall building on the spot. Instead I bore my disappointment with the silent set of my jaw.

I learned instantly that shy flowering love was no comparison with money, looks, and popularity. I learned that women don’t actually believe the drivel they promote about loving men for their hearts, but choose their mates by instincts every bit as powerful as men’s lust for the curve of the female breast.

While these realizations are a part of the human experience, they were compounded with the realization that there was literally no one else available. Every fish in my sea was literally taken from me by a rough hand, and I felt desolate in the wake of that realization.

I lived in the shadow of my misery, writing angry poetry in the evenings and cursing my lonely fate in the still silence of night. I withdrew from many social events knowing that I would see him looking at her, and her looking at him. Their hidden love would cause me to bleed within and ache for wanting something so simple.

I began to hate him. I hated the boy for being born. I hated him for being born better. I hated him for being everything I couldn’t be, and for laughing easily while I was in pain.

I memorized the Richard III speech from Shakespeare, dripping conviction with every word when I recited it for my friends. I was, as poor Richard stated, deformed and unfinished. And like Richard, I wanted to prove myself a competent warrior and a villain while this child of favor enjoyed the gifts handed to him on a silver platter.

I began to write short stories where I was a hero, brandishing my blade in the face of my tall and awkward enemy. He would draw, and our short exchange of blades would prove that my determination was more powerful than his privilege. I was not so naïve as to write that she loved me afterwards, but since that was already lost I craved some form of justice. In my mind, a world where the sympathetic underdog had no chance with the girl of his dreams was more of a prison.

Love Endures All Things

My epiphany came from the words of Spike’s older brother. He was driving us somewhere, and asked who we were planning on spending our evening with. In the course of conversation, he noticed my obvious distaste when Adam’s name was casually mentioned.

Although Spike tried to change the subject to avoid some sort of confrontation, his brother Aaron persisted and eventually drew a confession of why I so hated poor Adam.

“That’s ‘angst,’” Aaron said evenly, “have you ever heard that word before?”

I would never have admitted if I hadn’t.

“Well,” he continued, “in German the word ‘angst’ means ‘petty anger.’ Being angry at Adam is beneath you.”

“Yeah but he’s stuck up,” I was defending a shrinking patch of moral high ground.

“No he’s not. Don’t get me wrong, Adam is a bit goofy, and he’s not like you guys,” Aaron gestured casually at Spike and I, “but deep down he’s not a bad guy. He’s just normal.”

As I climbed out of the car, Aaron left me with some of the best advice I ever had as a teenager, “You should let go of this angst.”

And he was very right.

Chapter 3, parts 5, 6, and 7

2006-12-26T12:34:00.000-05:00

Love Does Not Boast

In addition to the new social pressures of high school, there were a host of normal difficulties that accompany the later stages of education. For the first time since fourth grade, higher math and science became very difficult for me to remember and follow. Perhaps partly due to the distractions of being in enclosed spaces with these young women, and perhaps because of all the social conflicts and changes around me I found myself losing scholastic ground.

My brother, then a shining example of what HCA was created to inspire, taught the required Spanish class in our high school. Even though he was himself only a student, he became faculty at HCA, and brought reports of my consistent failings in class home to my parents. This forced an unnatural conflict between us, continuing the rift begun in our early childhood.

Unable to evade the stress of school even at home, I took to long periods of sleep. Often I would sleep on the morning ride to school, on the evening ride home from school, after dinner, and all night until the morning again. Truly I began to hate and avoid my life as much as possible.

My issues with obesity began to ride on my mind as I watched my friends in their first high school crushes. I was always the quiet boy whom the women failed to notice, and not having any examples of ugly men with girlfriends or romantic success, I felt like my weight was dooming me to lifelong loneliness.

I often sat in the moments I was awake in the recliner chair in my room, locked in a duel of wills with God Almighty. Balanced on the roll of fat above my navel was the point of one of my father’s knives, its point drawing a small bubble of blood from my white skin.

“Send me to hell,” I thought (for the penalty for suicide is understood to be Hell.) “I am already in hell.”

Sometimes I would dare God, “Change things, or I will end this pain now. Prove to me You exist. Prove it.”

Other nights I would retreat to fiction. I escaped into the “Lord of the Rings.” I had adventures with the Dragonriders of Pern. I read about Asimov’s robot mysteries and delved into the spectrum of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Alone, in my room, I was an eclectic scholar of the human condition. Only when I left that sanctum did I cease to be interested in anything but survival.

In this same period of time I turned my mental focus upon the mysterious phenomenon of sex. Pouring over my mother’s textbooks from nursing school I first learned of female anatomy and the concept of orgasm. For all this fascination, I was forced to keep that information secret and hidden for years before I was even strong enough to admit I had an interest in sexuality.

I believed strongly that, although sexuality was a part of human nature, it was somehow even less pleasant than the functions of defecation. As such, no woman would ever be interested in me if I was attracted to her physical form or curious about her in a sexual way. Even though no living heterosexual teenage male can avoid being curious about women and sex, I thought I was alone in my obsession, and kept it hidden like a criminal hides his crime.

My outward face to the world was a cliché pulled from the pages of “Morte de Arthur,” the chivalrous code of the romantic knight. Medieval armor became my protection from the prying eyes of my world, and the cruciform sword was my defense against my most hated adversary, myself.

As I read Arthurian lore, I found the dark secret of King Arthur’s incestuous bastard child Mordred, and felt kinship with those romantic attitudes about forbidden sexuality. I rejoiced with Tristan as he drew his naked blade and lay it between himself and Isolde to keep his promise, and I saw Lancelot ruin an empire by indulging in physical temptation with Gwenivere.

That Medieval European mythology would perfectly compliment fundamentalist attitudes about sexuality never worried me. I was lost in a maze of circular thinking, viewing the female form as a source of destructive temptation and simultaneously believing the spirit of womanhood to be a redemptive force in the world.

Only Fundamentalist thought could so thoroughly divorce mind and body as to make these ideas seem feasible.

It is Not Discourteous

One of the prime experiences HCA had to offer the high school students was the annual trip to WEC, a missionary base in northern Pennsylvania.

Because of the vast number of stories about the pranks and adventures that occurred on the yearly WEC trip, I was naturally thrilled to imagine my chance to experience a genuine adventure, not to mention a break from the daily grind of classes.

Apprehension about the long ride not withstanding, I claimed a seat near my best friends in the back of one of our school vans and settled in for our rambling conversations about nothing and everything to fill the time. Unfortunately for me, I was in Pastor Dave’s van, and I knew from past experience that he would attempt to be involved in and direct our conversations as much as possible. Sometimes I wondered if he was afraid we would talk about something other than God or church, and did everything in his power to keep us from straying from his life’s work of molding young Christian minds.

Chatting in hushed tones, Spike and I sat and compared events from the “Fellowship of the Ring.” I was particularly fond of the section in the mines of Moria, wondering what strange things lurked in the depths of that awful dungeon.

About fourty-five minutes into the drive, Pastor Dave called Spike and I to the front of the van. Like guilty children caught talking in class, we faced his barrage of questions about our quiet conversation in the back.

Earning himself a harsh glance from me, Spike calmly stated that we were discussing the works of Tolkein.

“These are books you guys are reading?” Dave asked us.

“Well, I just finished and I…” I was about to try and change the subject. I could think of nothing less pleasant than to summarize the entire plot of those books for the pastor of our church and face harsh discussion about books containing sorcery and magic rings.

“Yeah,” Pastor Daved said almost to himself, “Those were good books.”

“You read them??” I blurted out.

“Of course. Did you know that Tolkein and C.S. Lewis were good friends? Probably a lot like you and Spike.”
I was floored. Speechless. I had no idea if he was serious of if it was some sort of trap.

What I learned from those few minutes of conversation before the subject was carefully turned to the wonders of Biblical literature was that David Hackett was a normal man, in most respects. He had once been interested in fine literary works, in beautifully crafted fiction and in the power of the word upon the page. On some level, perhaps long past, he was one of us.

It is Not Selfish

I often ask myself what kept me going to HCA. I hated my life, I considered suicide regularly, and I had nothing left to lose. So why stay?

There is but one power that can tame the mind of a teenage boy in turmoil. It is the power of the possibility of love.

Somewhere along the path, I believe at the end of seventh grade, the beginning of eighth, there was a sudden infusion of change into the upper grades of HCA. I heard about this change from my friends, who had been at the local mall the first night these beauties were spotted.

Four of my friends sat in the food court overlooking the escalators as four young ladies – the daughters of missionaries supported by our church – made their first entrance into our social scene. The joke, of course, was that the family was a variety pack of beauty, A redhead, two brunettes, and a blonde for our appreciation.

I learned that one of these four was in my grade, which I had endured by myself for quite a while. Arthurian romanticism poisoned me in the moment I learned this simple fact. A sense of fate, of possibility, and of change all dawned upon me simultaneously.

Here was the daughter of a missionary, sent into the world to save lost souls, and I was very lost. Here was a beautiful woman for the boy with no crush. Here was a classmate for the lonely student. In a world governed by the will of God and providence, this was no whim of Chance.

I was doomed from the moment I first saw her. Doomed to wish, and pine and write poetry and waste away inside at the miserable joy I felt in knowing her company. She was, quite literally, the most beautiful girl I had ever spent so much time with, and I felt increasingly attached to her. In my mind, she was the beautiful damsel of my Don Quixote impossible dream.

chapter 3, parts 1 through 4

2006-12-26T09:27:00.000-05:00

If I Speak With the Tongues of Men and of Angels

One of the most profound experiences any boy has around this age is his discovery of the opposite sex. While there are certain distinctions of personality, there is a universal sense of awakening that all boys feel as they awaken from boyhood to appreciation of this aspect of their design.

For me, it was a surreal and powerful change.

Walking back into HCA in the fall of my sixth grade year, I was suddenly aware of things I had never known existed. Like a scientist who makes an earth shattering observation of the nature of the universe, I was fascinated with what I was seeing, and afraid that perhaps I was a little crazy.

The magic of those moments is with me even today: the first time I saw these blooming women in my classes stand with their hand on their hip and think, the first time I really heard the music of their laugh, the first time I really looked into their eyes and realized that there was something otherworldly about them.

We were still memorizing Bible verses about lust and purity. We were still hearing about Christian character and temperament. How could I tell anyone what I was seeing? Who could share my observations of this new world without condemning me for wishing to see those bodies revealed in their glory?

There was no perspective to tell me that these feelings were normal, that God had designed me with these wants and the power to observe and appreciate womanly beauty. I lived in constant fear of the wrath of God, knowing that deep down he hated my powerful and unfailing attraction to the angels around me. My innocence was faltering.

In addition to these feelings of alienation and subsequent loneliness, hormones flooding my body increased my passions to a frightening degree. Anger became unshakable rage, fear was magnified to epic despair, and solitude became a throbbing ache at the center of my being.

Lastly, as a human isolated from human culture, there were few words or songs to lend me comfort. The music that lonely lovers listen to was unknown, most books about love were forbidden, and most films depicting romance were either boring or far too sensual for the elite children of our Great God.

Love is Patient

As I began to approach the transition to high school, I leaned heavily on the support of my friends. Although I lacked the strength to discuss what I was going through, moments of childlike levity let me forget the passions and worries that plague me every other moment. We often disguised our obsession for all things female by characterizing them as profound enemies, guilty of stealing our childhood before we truly appreciated it.

In this time, the teachers at HCA saw fit to take a strong interest in my personal life. Quarterly meetings with my parents brought report cards laced with negative observations about my character, and the final quarter of the sixth grade year brought one of the first powerful shocks of my new life as an adult.

My mom broke the news that Mr. Falkenburg, the principal of the school, and my current teacher Mrs. Kennedy had decided that I must adjust my social habits for the welfare of my soul.

I was expressly forbidden from fraternizing with the “older boys,” particularly Spike, with whom I had cultivated a powerful brotherly friendship.

Anger, sadness, fear, and righteous indignation swept over me in the moments after I heard this proclamation. How could I lose my closest friend? How would avoidance of the only person who remotely understood me benefit my soul? How could they not see the pain and confusion they were causing me?

For the first time, I acted in overt defiance of authority. I told my mother, without hesitation, that she needed to either remove me from that school, or countenance my friendships in silence. Begging her to have faith in God, and in her formation of my values; I pleaded with my mother to let this edict from the church leadership pass.

Seeing my grief and anger, my mother relented with a single qualification: she promised to arrange some social events with other children my age.

The only one of these events that I will relate occurred at the end of my sixth grade summer, and sent me spinning headlong into the dark, fanged mouth of my teenage years with reckless abandon.

Lori Kennedy, my sixth grade teacher, had a small awkward son in the grade below mine. While his intelligence eclipsed mine to an intimidating degree, he was even more socially awkward than myself.

I was invited to their house along with Luke Oliver, a boy I had been friends with on and off since the school began. Luke was an interesting character, as conflicted as all of us (and Spike’s cousin) with a deep current of anger.

We spent the waning moments of my boyhood in the Kennedy’s back yard having childish adventures. I remember the grass burning with sun-spawned heat beneath my bare feet as we quested for shade from the summer’s intensity.

As we ventured from cover one afternoon, I rounded the corner of the Kennedy house to find Lori standing brandishing an armed garden hose. With malicious precision she opened fire on our trio, spraying us with icy cold and intensely pressurized well water. For some reason I will never fathom, the prime target whenever this frigid fist of water hit me seemed to be my groin. No matter how I turned or dodged or ran, that stream pounded into my crotch relentlessly.

Something about all that icy pressure on my newly awakened manhood sent me into a rage. Perhaps I was angry for attention on a part of myself I feared. Perhaps I was merely incensed because the cold stung my sensitive bits. Or perhaps I was afraid because some primal part of me actually liked the feeling.

Regardless, I organized our trio into a unit, and we wrestled the hose from her grasp, chasing her into the house with the power she once held over us. There is a potent Freudian image to those young men chasing a single frail woman with a garden hose, I’m sure.

In a final confusing touch to the story, after about a half hour of play I returned to the house for something to drink. I found Mrs. Kennedy sitting on the floor in a quiet room, still soaked and crying wordlessly. Filled with guilt, I escaped from the house and wished with all of my passion to be free of these strange types of experiences.

Love is Kind

Entrance to the seventh grade of HCA was presaged by numerous warnings from my newest teacher, Mr. Falkenburg. While I had had some level of interaction with him since the school began, I was never his constant student. In the pre-Fall teacher’s conferences, he warned my mother about my negative habits and personality traits. My excitement of entering the final leg of my education was almost overridden by the fear that my lack of Christian character would lead to expulsion.

This fear was not without cause, several students that began the school with me had left for varying reasons. Usually we were told that so-and-so would not return because they had chosen to attend public school. The unspoken word was that these children had abandoned Godly education in favor of some type of hedonistic pursuit. They had faced the decision between God and the World, and found earthly delights more to their sinful appetites.

Now that I had one genuine friend, I could think of nothing more frightening than exile in the great unknown of public school. Horror stories about sex and drugs made me secretly panic at the thought. Even at that age I knew with certainty I would be unable to blend in with such an environment.

It is Not Jealous

When I look at that first year of high school, I find ironic humor in the “yin and yang” of it. My social experience can be categorized in the realm of extreme positive and its opposite, epic negative.

Nowhere were these opposites more firmly embodied than in the personages of Stephen Harrell and Mark Bryce.

Visually, they were the two most dissimilar people in the school. Steve was thin, lean, close to six feet in height, African-American, and radiated with a sort of derisive humor. Mark was short, fat (like me), had a bad complexion, was prone to the foulest gas, and mystifying for one simple reason: he was developmentally disabled.

Like the movie “Rain Man,” Mark was capable of remembering the most random of information and bringing that information into discussion at the least appropriate of times. He was strangely obsessed with my friendship with Spike, and loved to say little barbed comments like, “Cannonball, you fatty, I’m Spike’s friend not you.”

While these statements were so obviously ridiculous, they hurt because the teachers never contradicted these little insults or defended me. It felt as if Bryce and I were somehow under constant comparison, but I was unable to argue in my own favor. I was showered in guilt every time I accused him of wrongdoing. Of course he did wrong, he was “special.” Why couldn’t I just grow up and let it go?

And yet, the moment the teacher’s back was turned, there he was leering at me with his moon face, reminding me that I was fat, that I was an outcast, that I had so little to look forward to in a day.

And, like a strange tasting medicine to my illness, there was Stephen smiling in the corner. Each time Bryce would fill the tiny room with an unfathomable stench I could turn and see Steve barely keeping his laughter inside. Steve could talk Mark out of the best part of his lunch and make it seem as if it was the deal of the century. Steve could almost get away with more than Mark Bryce could comprehend.

At first I wasn’t sure what to make of this thin, dark prankster. Sometimes his humor would be at my expense, and my Christian seriousness required that I somehow personalize each of these jokes and bring them to the intermediary of Jesus Christ for approval. I also knew that he had been to Public School, and had values (or so I was told) that might be in conflict with the godly teachings of HCA.

But laughter heals, and nothing was more of a balm to my seething pain than his ability to make me laugh without reservation or control.

In addition, Spike and Stephen had known each other for years of Sunday school. Their childhood bond was almost stronger than our similarities, and made for interesting stories and conversations.

The fit of Stephen into our friendship, and the fit of me into theirs was almost perfect. We became like the Three Musketeers, divergent personalities in full compliment as a way to fight a common enemy.

Intermission

2006-12-26T08:09:00.000-05:00

Intermission

I have to apologize to my readers for a moment. It has been weeks since I even allowed myself to sit and consider these things and write carefully about the days of HCA and those events that first inspired me to make this record. Though my life has become more busy since I first began to set my thoughts into order, I have to admit there are very selfish reasons why I have withheld for so long.

To be honest, the period of time I was beginning to reach in my story is perhaps the very darkest time in my life. Walking back into that environment, if only in thought or word, is a frightening ordeal. Perhaps this seems a bit melodramatic to those of you reading this, but allow me to submit a simple explanation.

Whenever I go through a period of extreme stress, confusion, or conflict (even now, a decade since I wore that uniform and walked the halls of HCA) when I sleep I have the same recurring dream: that I have been sent back to HCA to finish some missed class. Without fail, the best way my subconscious can express its extreme displeasure with some part of my present life is to remind me of those years at Hope Christian Academy.

Fortunately for me the worst experience I can boast is eight years of fundamentalist Christian schooling. And yet, my psychological response to that experience is very similar to flashbacks and depression experienced by veterans of bloody wars and victims of abuse. Thought should be given to the present plight of those who graduated from these schools, what happens when the bars of the cage are opened and we walk free in the world?

When our identities were determined by the terms of such a rigid and strict environment, with almost no bearing on real world social strata or interactions, we must invent ourselves again or face the concept of failed integration into society and inability to cope with the real world.

A wise friend of mine gave me this little bit of advice: if I’m truly healed, nothing from that part of my life can hurt me. And so, with this in mind, I plunge back into the darkness.

Chapter 2, Parts 3, 4, and 5

2006-09-03T19:07:00.000-04:00

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.

Chapter 2, Part 2

2006-08-29T19:11:00.000-04:00

LaFevre Dreams

Joan LaFevre was the type of woman most parents dreamt of recruiting during the late 1950’s. She was single, without a prospect of marriage, and educated as a nurse. She was progressive enough to feel that exposing children to literature and music was important, and fundamentalist enough to believe that such material should be strictly regulated.

She began our mornings with ballet stretches, led us to lunch with passages from C. S. Lewis’ “Narnia” books, and sent us home with a creative assignment each afternoon.
In all, she seemed like a perfect teacher until I realized that her creativity and mine were unable to coexist. This became painfully apparent during our first school reading contest.

The contest was held with some outside source; schools with the most books read per student could win an entire set of encyclopedias for use in the school library. HCA was small and poor, and any type of gift could be well useful to the student body. I was thrilled with the idea of reading books competitively, and felt like this was a chance for someone of my bookish nature to excel.

That weekend my brother and I went with my father to the book store. While on a quest for books that my brother would enjoy, I wandered idly through the shelves before finally asking my father the question weighing on my mind.

“Dad, what are some really important books? I mean books everyone should read.”
“You mean classics?” he looked amused.
“Sure, classic books. What books do they make people read…?” I had no idea what I was really asking. I merely wanted to bring home books that would test my mind, and show how smart I was.
“How about Shakespeare? Or Homer?” he was on the edge of laughing.
“Are they good?”
“Some of the best ever written. I tell you what, if you promise to actually try to read them I will buy some for you. If you give up, then you have to give the books to your brother.” Was that pride on his face?
“I won’t give up.” I certainly wasn’t going to concede some books to my brother.
“You’re sure?”
“Promise.”

And with that I brought home three shiny Signet Classics of “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “The Iliad.”

Ms. LaFevre had instituted a policy that all reading materials for the contest must be brought to her for approval. This, she explained, would prevent smart fifth graders like us from wasting our time with silly books like “The Cat in the Hat,” and cheating the intent of the contest. On Monday morning I proudly set these three literary classics before her for approval.

“You want to read these?” she asked?
“My dad says they’re important,” I felt tall and mature when I said this.
“I don’t know,” she looked skeptical. “Let me hear you read this one.” She lifted the corner of “Hamlet” and eyed me critically.
“Where do you want me to read from?”

Flipping through the pages she found something in particular, placing her index finger on the passage she indicated for me to begin.
For the first time I began to read, “To be, or not to be. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…” I read haltingly, but it made sense. I had, after all, learned to read on a King James Bible. Shakespeare was dense and poetic, but I could make the words out confidently in the stillness of the classroom.

“I’m still not sure you can do this,” she seemed to be staring. “Let me ask Mr. Falkenburg if he thinks it’s okay.”
“Okay,” I said. Of course it would be allowed. My dad called them “classics.” He said everyone should read them. Why not now?

At the end of the day I found all three books in a neat stack on my desk with a small yellow note with the words “inappropriate reading material.”

That evening my father was furious. “Shakespeare? Inappropriate? What kind of people are these?” he was almost yelling at my mother.
“They should be happy he’s even trying it at his age.”
“Maybe they think it’s too hard for him,” she placated.
“Maybe it is, but why not help him read the books then? Encourage him.”
“We’ll just have to find him some other books,” she sighed.

In the end, I read only one book for the contest; the hardcover version of “James Herriot’s Dog Stories,” a fat eight hundred page collection of his experiences as a British vet.

The day I finished the book I plopped it on Ms. Lafevre’s desk proudly.
“Finished it finally.”
“I’m not sure you could read all this.” She said it with that same look. I was very confused by that look. My dad was happy when I finished something, but she seemed upset.
“I did though.” Why didn’t she believe me.
“Okay, let’s see…” she flipped through the heavy volume’s pages. “What was this story about?”
“That was about Mr. James going to do surgery with another vet somewhere in England. The other vet liked to drink beer, and they stayed up all night drinking and James said he felt sick. What are pickled onions? He said they were eating them at the bar…”
“Okay, okay,” she cut me off. I would talk all day and ask questions if she let me.
“How about this chapter?” she flipped to a new page.
“This is about some lady that brings James a smelly dog with gas. He can’t find a home for it for a while until he meets an old man who has no sense of smell. Then the dog lives with the man and…”

And so she went through the entire eight hundred pages (fifty different stories) asking over and over for a synopsis. Each time I told the stories as though they had happened to a family member.

“You really should’ve read something smaller. Here we are at the end of the contest and you have only read this one book. You should be less lazy, Mark. You’re very bright when you apply yourself. And you could have helped your school by reading more books…”

“I’m sorry,” I looked down at the floor and blushed. What she didn’t know was that I had read “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and the “Iliad,” before even looking at the James Herriot book. I wondered if I had sinned… but my dad said they were “classic.”

Chapter 2, Part 1

2006-08-29T18:33:00.000-04:00

I’m Right

Fourth grade progressed quickly for me, with a minimum of mishaps. I had been in trouble a few times, spanked twice, but the year stands in my memory as mostly unremarkable.

The following year the system of HCA began to crystallize, and my life took a strange and surreal turn. To begin with, there had been some fear among the teachers that our older students (those in eighth through tenth grade) were full of “worldly values.” The decision was made to prune the HCA tree, and send these willful minds back to the public schools. This meant that in 1989 my brother became the oldest child in HCA, and the top of our social pyramid.

In addition, rather than having the teachers I had begun to understand in the fourth grade, I was shifted with the younger class under a teacher named Joan LaFevre. At first I was quite excited with how things had changed, although I was sad that I had been shifted socially further still from my main friend, Spike. Secretly, I was happy because I learned that Shannon had been held back a grade, and this shift of teacher allowed me to still see her every day.
The main reason for my distaste and disinterest in Ms. LaFevre, was that she had been the cause of some considerable pain for me on the last day of the fourth grade.
Our final day of classes had been spent at Clute Park on the shores of Seneca Lake. The sun was shining from behind fluffy white clouds, and we were all giddy with the concept of the freedom from classes for the summer. Mr. Falkenburg, the school’s principal, had announced that (although the weather had been slightly chilly,) students in the fourth through tenth grades could wade in the lake rather than swimming.

Because I loved the water, because I was fascinated with the lake, and because it would give me a chance to walk with Spike and talk about aquatic mysteries and comic books, I was fairly happy with this announcement.
Even though Joan was the teacher for the two grades below mine, and I was no real concern of hers, she stopped me as I was stripping off my shoes to walk into the lake.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Going wading.” My smile was huge.
“No, you aren’t.”
“But Mr. Falkenburg said…”
“I am also a teacher, and I have decided that it is too cold for you. You’ll get sick.”
“I’m not going to swim,” I pleaded, “I just want to walk and look around!”
“You know what disobeying me means. Some day you will thank me for this.”
Then she turned her gaze from me and ended the conversation with “Find something else to do.”

So I wandered off puzzling about the chain of command, and wondering if I could avoid a spanking by circumventing her to ask Mister Falkenburg if his original edict still stood. I was taught by my parents that such a thing was disobedient, and decided to try and find some other type of entertainment.

Wandering through the playground I found younger children occupying themselves with swings and monkey bars. There I found an older boy from Spike’s grade pushing squealing kids on the merry-go-‘round. Here, I decided, I could still hang out with an older student and feel grown up.

Jumping between the welded steel bars of the merry-go-‘round while he paused, I stood my ground and asked him how fast he could get it to spin.

“You’ll want to hold on tight,” he warned me.
Suddenly he began to sprint with his shoulder against the bars, and the inertia began to pull me off the giant metal disk. Further and further I drifted as the wheel spun, until my feet were waiving in the air, and my fingers alone kept my grip on the vertical metal bar of the merry-go-‘round.

At last my chubby fingers gave up, and I flew through the air several feet until I skidded face first through gravel. My knees were shredded and small bits of stone were ground into the wounds. Blood poured down the fronts of my legs and began to pepper my socks. Worst of all, in front of all these people new to my life, I began to cry.

As I was dragged off somewhere and teachers began to roughly scrub the dirt out of my knees, I looked at Ms. LaFevre with distrust.

“The worst that would’ve happened if I was wading is that I would’ve gotten wet,” I thought.
“Now I’m bleeding. I won’t thank you someday. I won’t thank you ever.”

Chapter 1, Part 2

2006-08-29T18:31:00.000-04:00

Set the Stage

The first morning was fitful and misty as we all stood outside the brick and blue exterior of the former St. Patrick’s Catholic School building. Wisps of dew and fog lay across the busy lanes of Dennison Parkway as we collected in little groups chatting idly with our friends and nervously waiting for the first day of classes at Hope Christian Academy.

Most of what we knew about this school came from that first meeting, and a hastily Xeroxed handbook containing our dress code, the school’s system of written rules, and the outline of our disciplinary system. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was the philosophy of the school’s architects, and all of our parents had to sign a corporal punishment waver that released our professors to spank students in cases of extreme disobedience. There was also a complicated demerit system in place, designed by the principal and his fellow teachers to document and track our sins in a public forum. The system, given the acronym “H.O.W. I. A.C.T.” was intended to observe and mark each infraction by type and by frequency. In their logic, the teachers hoped to identify behavioral problems and modify them be keeping a record of consistent types of misbehavior.

The “H” stood for “hullabaloo,” any form of noisy and distracting mischief committed by a student in an otherwise quiet class setting. “O” was for “out of order,” for whenever a student committed any act that was outside expected behavior. Incomplete homework assignments would be noted with a “W” for “work not in.” “A” stood for “attitude,” and was used to discipline a student for a blatantly uncooperative demeanor. Social complicity was enforced with “C” for courtesy. Talking in class would be awarded a “T.”

The most dreaded category in the entire system was the “I,” which stood for “intentional disobedience,” the most grievous of offenses. A student earning an “I” for direct contradiction of his teacher’s orders would be sent immediately to the office for corporal discipline, and a note sent home to his parents.
The system was designed with a large cork board in every room. The board bore the names of each grade’s members in descending vertical order, and seven envelopes horizontally from the name to mark each type of offense in the “How I Act” system. The numbers varied by age, with tolerance for disobedience lessening by high school, but the basic premise was that perhaps fifteen total infractions in a week, or six in a single day could earn a student a spanking. When the student was spanked, the teachers were instructed to clear the slate, and start counting the daily sins and failings anew.

While I was apprehensive about these demerits, or “tallies” as they were called, I felt that a good boy like me in my fresh white oxford shirt, grey slacks, and maroon clip-on tie couldn’t possibly be so unfortunate as to earn himself a reputation as a troublemaker.

Still apprehensive about the new society in which I stood, I scanned the other children standing outside the glass doors of our new school searching for familiar faces. My older brother, a gregarious and humorous sort, was standing and chatting with other boys in his grade.

My eyes came upon two people immediately: the first was my first love, Shannon Little. She was a sweet little Hailey Mills look alike with giant blue eyes who I had known since I was six. Her father and mine worked together, and her family had recommended Christian Hope Center to mine when we first moved to the Corning area. I stole a few glances at her standing in a plaid jumper and remembered us drawing in crayon on the floor of my father’s office when we were little. Her excitement about how real and amazing my crude little drawings were made me want nothing more than to draw every minute of every day for the rest of my life.

The second person I noticed because he made me feel less out of place. This chubby little fellow with glasses and a crooked tie looked like I felt: brainy, socially awkward, quiet, and slightly uncomfortable in this setting. To add to our immediate kinship, he held in his hand a nearly concealed Transformer, a small token of his interest in what passed for high science fiction at our age.

I knew this boy’s name because his mother taught Sunday school at the church, and his older brother and mine were becoming close friends. Everyone who met him noted how incongruous his introduction seemed; this chubby little boy was called Spike. I knew nothing of the story how he got his name, or if he had a real name, all I knew was that he was also out of place, and would be easy for me to talk to.

I can’t recall exactly how I broke the ice, or what precipitated our chatty exchange about the transformer in his hand, but I immediately admired him for being smart, and for being aloof. Where the rest of us seemed to be looking for comfort, or for a clique to join, he stood by himself in the mist and thought.
Grades at HCA were broken not by age or by teacher, but rather by quantity. Usually two close grades were grouped together under a single teacher, and since the school only went as high as ninth or tenth grade, the number of teachers was small. I found, to my disappointment, that Spike was grouped with the high school kids, and no one was quite sure where fourth and fifth grade belonged. I realized quickly how disorganized this experiment had become.

Chapter 1 ,Part 1

2006-08-26T19:53:00.000-04:00

Children of a Greater God.

This story begins in a small suburban region in upstate New York, far from the bustle and chaos of the urban sprawl of New York City. This green valley, known as the Twin Tiers, consisted of several sleepy towns linked along the arterial passage of a single noteworthy highway, and economically fueled by a handful of thriving factories and industrial centers.

The most powerful of these industrial leaders is a company known as Corning Glass – famous throughout the world for their production of fiber optic materials and glassware. Corning Glass grew so rapidly in the 1980’s that the surrounding neighborhoods were quickly filled with executives and low level managers living the suburban dream.

Upstate New York is a grey and dreary place for almost eight months of the year. The hills and mountains shade the Chemung valley from the warm embrace of the sun, and keep the inhabitants of the valley from more than a few hours of light and heat in the winter. In the late summer these same hills become the canvas ofa huge pointillist painting comprised of seemingly limitless dots of gold, amber, and scarlet.

Natural beauty aside, there is little the Twin Tiers has to offer its inhabitants aside from cold and isolation through most of the year. While gazing towards the heavens brought little warmth and hope from the sun, most of this valley’s people look upward searching for solace in a more ephemeral embrace. Religion thrives in upstate New York. Birthplace and home to the Mormons, the shakers, the seventh day Adventists, and numerous other offshoots of baseline Christianity, upstate New York is a virtual haven for those who believe or wish to believe.
Our parents believed.

In the 1970’s, the refugees of America’s psychedelic age began to raise families and build stable homes. They “sold out,” abandoning bohemian idealism and questing for a means to offer their children some shred of normalcy and the opportunity to integrate with capitalist society as a whole. Many of them became as fanatical about rigid religious belief as they had once been about cultural revolution and protest. They clung to the teachings of their churches, and behaved as if they had never challenged society or questioned the paradigms and taboos of their own parents and families.

My parents were involved in one particular splinter of the Protestant tree, known commonly as the “Evangelical Charismatic” sect of Christianity. Spike succinctly defines Charismatic Christianity as: “A belief that an individual can have direct contact with the Christian divinity and that the proof of this contact are the ‘gifts’ or ‘charis’ of the Holy Spirit: glossolalia (speaking in tongues), healing, visions, prophecy, and other miracles of supposed supernatural origin.” [is this your definition or are you quoting?] The churches they attended from the moment of their denouncement of the Hippie lifestyle were all halls of worship that included these activities. Members of the churches commonly gave prophesy, acting as the mortal vessels through which His will and voice could be heard.

When the quest for employment and fiscal stability moved my family from the culturally diverse immigrant town my father was born in to the sleepy foothills of Elmira New York, their quest for a new Charismatic Church began. Friends of my parents who had made a similar move recommended a small young church presided over by a thunderous and intelligent African-American minister. His congregation was renting a space from another church for their Sunday meetings, and their services were full of young families and squealing children. This church called itself the “Christian Hope Center.”

“Hope for what?” you might ask.
Hope for their children, their future, and hope in the shining idealism of their new-found faith.

In 1987 a group of parents from this church, concerned with the bend of modern society and the affects this was having on their children, held a formal meeting to discuss the concept of creating a small learning environment in which their precious progeny could learn, an environment free of drugs, foul language, sexuality, and petty crime. I remember sitting with my parents while Pastor Harry and a tall thin youthful blonde man (introduced proudly as a Christian with a degree in education who was qualified to mold our young minds) explained their vision for a place called Hope Christian Academy. This was a school taught by an elite and select band of Christians from our church and attended by their own children. This was an envelope, a bubble free of outside influences and distractions where the Christian youth could pursue academic study free from carnal distractions. This was the dream of our religious parents made tangible.

Forward

2006-08-25T14:32:00.000-04:00

Fundamentalism (American Heritage Dictionary.)
"1. A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism.
2.
1. often Fundamentalism An organized, militant Evangelical movement originating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century in opposition to Protestant Liberalism and secularism, insisting on the inerrancy of Scripture.
2. Adherence to the theology of this movement."

This book serves as a warning, a memorial, and a morality tale about the perils of the fundamentalist culture with regards to the development of children.

From the age of six onward I was exposed to the most rigid and total Evangelical Christian thinking of the era. I spent my mornings singing Christian songs, my textbooks were laced with Christian propaganda, and my transcripts were influenced by my ability to recite verses from the King James version of the bible.

When you read these tales and observations, understand that not all of my experiences were negative. There were many positive aspects to growing up in a culture with such rigid ideals and values. This book will be an excercise in portraying evenly the positive and the negative without dwelling solely on what went wrong.

I have struggled, these past few years, to find a reason and a means to express these ideas and experiences, and I believe my stories can be defended with this in mind: we now live in an era when religious fundamentalism violently threatens each and every person in the world. Ideologies and theologies are now adhered to so strictly, that deviation from dogmatic precepts is seen to necessitate martial retribution. In an age where religion, fundamentalism, and politics are so fully intertwined, an understanding of what fundamentalism does to children and how that will affect society has great value.

Finally, a word on the format of this book:
In the Shadow of Fundamentalism is published in an online format. The reason for my choice of format comes from the fact that it will allow the small band of friends I have from those days to interract and participate in the creation of the manuscript. Stage by stage, as this text is written, more voices than my own can be heard. By speaking in chorus each of us can tell give our unique experiences and observations, and by working together I believe we can make the world understand more about the dangers of violent fundamentalist application.

Please read what follows with an open mind, and with the understanding that not all men who have faith wish to be among the Faithful. Not all of us with beliefs can hate those who do not believe in unison. Faith and Religion are two very different animals, our stories prove this to be true.