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Kicked Out and Confused
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When I was a boy in Sunday school, the characters in Bible stories, especially the men, seemed about as attractive as Chickenpox. That I should admire and want to be like these dull, humorless fellows made no sense, just as it made no sense that I should never question the church’s teaching that the Bible was true and flawless. But it wasn’t flawless, and I did have questions—lots of them. Then, one Sunday morning, my teacher, red-faced with exasperation, flipped open his notebook, scrawled a note to my parents, folded it once, handed it to me, and told me to leave. Outside, I opened the note and saw that he’d written, “Johnny can come back to Sunday school when he stops asking so many questions.” Ten years old, and I’d been kicked out of Sunday school. My father was amused. My mother, whose social life revolved around the church, not so much. She told me to go back, apologize, and keep my mouth shut. (While I remember the anger, humiliation, and even sadness, I wonder now if I didn’t feel just a bit smug—and relieved.) Two years later, an event in a Roman Catholic Church (described in my essay, Who Am I?, under Other Publications) left me not so much unglued as confused and shaken. There was no one to talk to about what had happened, and certainly I had no grounding in scripture that might have helped to make sense of it. So I was left to grapple with the experience, itself, whatever it was, and its aftershocks. Of course, all of it was all taking me somewhere. |
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By: John R. Coats
On Tuesday, 02 March 2010
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Comments( 1 ) |
Views(1290)
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Comments(1)
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Brings back memories Boy, does this bring back memories. My dad was Southern Baptist, Mom was Presbyterian and I went to an Episcopal Day School through 9th grade. Dad insisted that we go with her to his church every Sunday morning (all 3 were no more than 1.5 blocks apart), but each week I had 5 days of Morning Prayer and hymns before school started.
By: Jenny Meadows
, On
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
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A Few Notes About My Blog
This is not a religious blog, because Genesis is not religious, not in the way we tend to think about religion—that is, belief in a formal or informal set of beliefs about a Supreme Being.
What you will not find in a reading of Genesis:
- Anyone trying to convert anyone else;
- People praying together. Yes, Jacob did pray. Twice. The first time was the morning after the dream about the ladder, the second, twenty years later, on hearing the scouting report that Esau was bringing 400 armed men to their reunion. This, the brother he’d cheated, who, last he’d heard, was "consoling himself by planning to kill you";
- Anyone whose personal presentation—i.e., manner of speaking, vocabulary, the sort of real and false piety now ubiquitous in the media—signifies him or her as a "religious" person.
What you will find in a reading of Genesis:
- Characters who occupy a deeply ironic, unique place in the human imagination. On the one hand, their moral/spiritual DNA is embedded in the foundations of Western civilization. On the other, but for biblical stories and commentaries, no proof of their existence is to be found in the vast archeological record. They are probably fictional creations, yet they have and continue to shape us as a society and as individuals, those of us who are religious and those of us who are not;
- Three thousand year old stories achingly human in their narratives of stupidity, greed, bravery, cunning, courage and the rest. In other words, stories and characters that are universal, that, if the reader wants, can be a conduit into the self, and into the deeper matters of being human. In fact, I would say that anyone who does a close reading of Genesis, who looks deeply into the characters, will find reflections of his/her own best and worst selves.
One last thing: Because these stories and characters have shaped us all, they belong to us all, the unreligious as well as the religious. Think of them as property held in common.
