Escape from "George-town"

By the age of 15 there were stirrings of the questions I would later ask, but for now they were buried by guilt and thus denied the benefit of honest inquiry. About that time the daughter of a family I hardly knew, but with whom my parents had lived for months, perhaps a year, came East to attend the same boarding school. Not having grown up with the other kids in the school, she was novel and she was also genuinely different for having grown up in Canada. Circumstances allowed us the opportunity to visit privately without the need for secrecy, and before too many weeks, a mutual crush had developed. But this crossed a line--the no-dating-until-after-high-school rule--and ultimately was coupled with my expressed doubts to justify my expulsion from boarding school.

There you go. That's one of my truly dark secrets; I was kicked out of boarding school.

By then my parents, with my two youngest brothers, then 9 and 3, had suffered the same fate, expulsion. Within months my remaining two brothers, ages 13 and 11, were also home. In retrospect this is fantastic, as I knew families still unable to contact sons and daughters who had forsaken "father and mother" for "the sake of the kingdom of God." Total BS, but that's how the conditioning makes you think.

I landed at Keene High School for the last 2 months of my junior year of high school and the whole of my senior year. I flourished academically because of discipline that had been instilled in boarding school. The first 3 days were overwhelming though, as I made the switch from 40 students in 1st through 12th, with my own class of 5, I think, to a high school with nearly 1800 students from 9th through 12th, and a graduating class of about 380.

My religious convictions gave me stability and a compass in this sea change. Here it seemed simple and clear; I was a Christian and (almost) everyone else was not, so decisions to form attachments or to be involved in activities were generally easy to make. Some of my choices then I wouldn't make now, but in general religion helped me survive psychologically without making me unduly mean or offensive, I think.

And at KHS I encountered the expectation of going to college for the first time in my life. That topic will be the starting point for my next entry.

Until then, peace. John

In the beginning

God created the heavens and the earth ("he made the stars also"-one of the great understatements of the Bible) is what I was told from my earliest memories. Awesome! Seemed reasonable. I mean, someone had to make all that stuff. A lot of the stuff I saw and worked with every day was made by someone too.

So for a long time it seemed reasonable that science was the study of God's work. But in a Christian school run by a community as committed to holy living as the one I attended, the concept of evolution was never seriously explored. Oh, we were told what it said in VERY limited detail, but just enough so we would understand how ungodly a way of thinking it was, how anti-biblical. No, it was enough to accept the Word of God in this matter. Besides it was far more important that we live a holy life, a life dedicated to pleasing God, by wholeheartedly pursuing him, by pureness in word and deed.

A lot was good about this regimen. We had the opportunity to learn a great deal of self-sufficiency living in a community that developed their own skilled laborers, going outside for training, but not for employees. Probably I benefitted more than others since by aptitude I was inclined toward technology, but the fact is I did benefit a lot. Oddly, that self sufficiency, that "mantra" repeated over and over of "think and pray" that applied to corporal and temporal decisions did not carry over into matters of the soul, spiritual matters.

In this arena George was God's vicar in the community. Not by title, mind you. And none would had admitted to it so baldly, I think. But the fact remained that he ran the show. If George pronounced for God on some matter, that was the last word. To argue with George was to earn shaming, isolation, or expulsion. My mom spent almost a year as a single parent while my dad wandered the eastern seaboard of the US "seeking God" because he had dared to confront George about his living arrangement with a young woman though he was legally married to a woman not in the community. Nowadays this sort of thing is somewhat more acceptable socially, but even now in most churches that claim to base their teaching on the Bible this would be considered an egregious transgression of God's moral law.

That year, at the age of 7, I learned from my mom how to use a sewing machine and made a pair of pajamas for my teddy bear. I also embroidered a simple needlepoint picture my dad sent as a gift. (See, I told you I was inclined toward technology.) Dad eventually did return, but this was not the last of his confrontations with George, and I'm proud to say that he never did give up his convictions so much that he got lost and swallowed up by the Charmer.

I have to stop now. This is going to be a ramble through my Christian past to the point of my eventual disillusionment with and deconversion from Christianity. It is my first attempt to chronicle my faith journey. Mostly I expect it will be from memory, so some who have known me a long time might on occasion find reason to challenge some bit of the narrative. What I do not think will be in error is the substance of the story, the sequence of faith experiences.

I hope that this story will be interesting to any who bother to read it. And if you so bother, thank you. If you find it interesting, or have questions, I would be glad to hear from you.

Until the next time, then....