Me and Jesus, part one
In reading something that drood wrote yesterday, I was reminded of a topic that I've been meaning to write about myself. I have a strange history with Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, and that history has a big influence on the spiritual path I'm on. And exploring that history tells a lot about who I am and how I got to be where I am today, in a philosophical sense.
I think the story really begins at a point before I was born.
My mom was raised in a very small, mostly Baptist town in the middle of Texas, with a population of somewhere around 6000 people. And she came away from that experience with a fairly strong dislike for Southern Baptists. I remember her telling me bits about her teenage years, when the "fun" thing to do on a Saturday night was to sneak off to the popular makeout spot, spy on the "bad" kids who got drunk and fooled around, and then gossip about them the next day when they were trying to not look hung over and guilty in church.
Even though, in my opinion, this suited her disposition just fine, she had no problem disowning her Baptist heritage and converting to Catholicism to marry my dad, since he was allegedly raised Catholic himself. But it really did seem to me to be just a formality, just so everything would look proper and nice, because I can't remember them ever going to church. They must have, at some point, and perhaps they did even after I was born, but I cannot remember it.
So, with that little bit of ceremony aside, I imagine that church would have never been an issue for them again, if it hadn't been for me and Mikki entering the picture, as we did.
I think that my mom's background emphasized appearances, and living up to community standards (or at least appearing to). That's the bit that she swallowed with a big spoon. So it was very important to her that she be a mother, because this was the sixties (my parents married in 1960, on Valentine's Day), and that was just what she had always thought she was destined for, coming of age in the fifties, in a small town in the middle of Texas. It might sound really cynical of me, and harsh, to reduce her maternal instincts and motivation to have children to something so base and simplistic, but I never saw any compelling evidence that her mental process transcended that. Men and women get married and have children, which the mother raises and the father financially supports; it's just what people do. Nothing more needs to be said! What wasn't said out loud, but that I picked up on anyway, was that a woman was judged by how well her children turned out, and a man was judged by how well he provided. It was a very rigid set of rules, really.
So when she and my dad couldn't make their own children, for various medical reasons (after years of trying, something that even with the help of pictures of them in their late teens I cannot imagine), they resorted to adoption. And the way that adoption was done then probably put even more pressure on my mom to be the perfect parent when her chance came, and to have the perfect children, because apparently there were a lot of interviews and home visits and such. My mom is very good about making a good impression and maintaining appearances, so she and my dad passed, and about seven years after my parents married, Mikki came along, and I came along two years later.
I mention all this background in an effort to explain how religion was handled in my household. I think their handling of this issue demonstrates my parents' attitudes about a lot of things fairly well, particularly my mom's.
One of the few bits of background information that my mom and dad had about my mother was that she was Irish, and Catholic. (She's actually half Irish and half Austrian, but for whatever reason the Irish part is all that made it into my parents' heads. Maybe because of the pairing with Catholic, I don't know.) So anyway, I think that my mother might have said something to the agency, when she was getting interviewed and they were talking about placing me, about it being important to her that I be exposed to the church, because of her own upbringing. Back then, there was a huge effort in placing adoptees where they would fit in easily; they didn't want a red headed kid to be placed with Italians, for example, because then it would be so obvious that the kid was adopted. (the shame! the horror!) So apparently, the fact that my parents were married in the Catholic Church had some bearing on my placement.
My mom latched onto that part. It therefore became really important to convince everyone that they were good Catholics, to emphasize that part of the package. There were follow-up visits from the adoption agency, after all, to make sure that the placement went well.
Now, I need to interject something here, about what I've learned in meeting my mother, receiving counseling from the adoption agency, and attending a support group that included several adoptees, birthmothers, and even a few adoptive parents. It's fairly common for adoptive parents to have what they delicately label "fertility issues." Simply put, it's normal for infertile couples to feel, deep down, like maybe they aren't supposed to be parents, like this is God's way of punishing them for some inner fault they have, like they don't deserve children. In a responsible adoption setting, prospective adoptive parents nowadays get counseling to examine this issue (as well as a slew of others), to get in touch with it and to consciously let go of it, because understandably it might end up being a big problem if it remains lurking around, unconscious, in an adoptive parent's psyche. It's important to address, because otherwise it's quite common for adoptive parents to try to be Superparents, to prove their worthiness to have children (and, by extension, to expect that their children turn out Exceptionally Gifted, to help validate their exceptional parenting). There's often a fear in many infertile couples, when they adopt, that if something goes wrong, it will just prove that they shouldn't have been trusted with children in the first place, and their children will be taken away from them, so they had better be extra good at it or else!
We know all this now. We learned all this by studying people in my age bracket, and older.
So obviously, my mom didn't have the benefit of all this counseling and insight. To make matters worse, when I was a tot the common belief was that an infant was tabula rosa, the blank slate, perfectly clear and empty, clay to be molded by the environment. And adoptive parents were taught this, actually encouraged to pretend that the children they were adopting came from the (adopted) mom's womb. It made sense to do that at the time, since they really thought that the brain just suddenly switched on once a baby hit air, or something, and it played into the whole fantasy that all those ugly infertility issues (that nobody really acknowledged, or necessarily knew about, anyway) could just be swept under the rug. Again, we now know that heredity plays a role in a person's development, and that the fetus begins taking in experiences in the womb, and already has the beginnings of a personality when s/he lands outside.
In short: the mother was told to pretend that she hadn't just carried this baby, in secrecy, for nine months, hadn't gone thru childbirth, hadn't signed said baby away to total strangers, and the whole thing never happened. Meanwhile, the adoptive parents were told to pretend that the baby they brought home was just like all the other babies who weren't adopted, that there was nothing different about raising an adoptee. Pretend that things are The Way We Think They Should Be and ignore The Way It Really Is, and everything will be just fine.
So, let's put all this background together.
Because I sounded like a perfect match, from what the agency was telling them, my parents figured it was very important to play up my dad's Catholic background. I was exactly two years, one month and one week younger than the daughter they already had, and the right gender (yeah, it does sound like shopping for accessories at a department store, but they specifically requested a boy, because they already had a girl), so they really wanted me, because I would fit in so well with their vision of what they wanted. So it was important to get me baptized once they got their hands on me, and for both Mikki and me to attend C.C.D. classes when we got old enough.
For the non-Catholics: CCD (I think it stands for Continuing Christian Development, or it might be Catholic instead of Christian) is kind of like Sunday School. Except that it's usually not on Sunday. And it's often taught by a lay person (a fancy term for someone who isn't a priest or a nun or a brother or monk or any of the other Official People, but just a normal churchgoing Catholic person), and often done in someone's home. At least, that's the way it was, in my (initially) very white suburb of very Hispanic San Antonio.
So around the age of five, each of us started going to these classes, to keep up appearances. There was just one problem for me, though. I had never been to a Catholic Mass, ever, in my short little life. In fact, we never went as a family, ever; I don't think that my mom has actually been inside a Catholic church, with a couple of important exceptions, since she was married in one. To make matters worse, when Mikki was seven (about the time I started going to CCD myself), her teacher told her class that we all deserve damnation, that nothing we could ever do would make us worthy of salvation, that we all deserved to burn in Hell. He was trying to drive home the point (consistent with Catholic doctrine) that we really need Jesus to save us (doo-dah, doo-dah) but all he did for Mikki was give her nightmares. She couldn't sleep for a week, and woke up screaming every night. It really scarred her poor little seven year old psyche. So my mom arranged an appointment with a priest, who wasn't the fire-and-brimstone type, to sit down with her and calm her down. And in the course of talking to the priest, she more or less got permission to skip the CCD classes from then on.
So she was off the hook. But I wasn't. I still had to go. Never mind that my older sister was completely traumatized by the same classes (taught by different people, but still), and she didn't have to go anymore. I didn't have any such excuse. And since I'm a boy, I was expected to not be a sissy and let a little thing like eternal damnation get to me, like it did to her, if it came up in one of these classes.
So, I felt very trapped, and probably a bit like I was being punished since it was something that Mikki didn't have to do. I was not told why Mikki didn't have to go to them anymore (just something about having some nightmares, but she's just oversensitive so the priest let her off the hook), and I still never went to Mass. In fact, I went to CCD every year, from the age of five till I was thirteen, without ever going to Mass. I have this vague sense of knowing that I must have gone for my first communion, when I was about six, but I don't remember it.
So, there were two aspects of dread for me around CCD. One was the unspoken understanding that I had to do well, because it was a class, and Mom had very high expectations of me (of both of us, really), especially anything that even smelled like "school." And she would probably get really angry if I didn't do well. I already knew what a horrible, unpredictable temper she had, and her willingness to subject me or Mikki to it, and my dad's unwillingness to shield either of us from it. Second, I learned, thru my tendency to sit back and quietly observe, that everyone else went to Mass with their families. And keeping up the appearance that we were the perfect family was very important to my mom. So I had to go along with it and pretend I knew what they were talking about. I learned pretty early on to fake it well enough.
I think that I learned a lot about my place in my family, and the world in general, from the unspoken expectations in this arrangement.
I think that I learned a lot about pretending to be whatever other people expected me to be, in part, from my CCD classes. And I think unconsciously I associated God and Jesus and Religion with this lesson for a long time.
My association with Catholicism took a turn, though, when I was thirteen. I was at a point in my life when I felt totally alone, isolated, like there was no way that I could allow the real me under the act to be exposed, probably related in part to my experience with CCD. I was suicidal most of the time during my eighth grade year, beat up often (physically and emotionally) for being perceived to be gay... and then, Mikki, and one of my best friends, got me involved in the High School youth group at St. Matthews. Technically, I was too young, but it was close to the end of the school year, and they'd let me slide in, since in about another month I'd be old enough. I really wanted nothing to do with it, but they coerced me into hiking with them at Lost Maples State Park for a day in April. And we ended up having a Mass, out in the wilderness.
I was secretly terrified. Not only was this the dreaded religious ritual that I had been pretending to know all about for most of my life, but this particular group of people was very... huggy. And I was so distrustful of people that I rarely let another person touch me at the time, even just to shake hands. I had heard about this part in the Mass where everyone gave each other the Sign of Peace, which I expected to be a hug. With all these strangers.
Somehow, though, I made it thru my first Mass, and people respected my boundaries and didn't force a hug on me, and the whole mystery of Catholic Mass didn't seem so scary after all.
I started going with Mikki to this church a couple of months later, joining the High School Choir that sang at 11:00 Mass. And most of the people seemed genuinely friendly and accepting. Given my experience in middle school, where often people would pretend to be my friend only to find a way to humiliate me later, it took a while to accept that these people were genuinely friendly and weren't simply playing out some nefarious plot with me. Slowly, I started letting people hug me.
And it was like a dam bursting. Once I let it in, I became some kind of hug monster, and actually got a reputation for giving the best hugs, which persists. I was still relatively quiet, but I slowly started letting myself fit in.
Eventually, when I was about fifteen, I started working with another group at said church, the YES group (Youth Evangelizers for the Savior, also sometimes referred to as Youth Experiencing Scripture). Actually, I was already a part of the group, but that was the age that I started participating actively. Basically, every Sunday became a routine of waking up early, going to choir practice and Mass with Mikki, doing homework during the afternoon, and then attending this Bible study in the evening. At first, I did my usual thing, sitting in the back like a big lanky sponge and soaking it in, but eventually I accepted the invitation to take more of a leadership role. This group hosted weekend retreats twice a year, for the high schoolers at that church, one in the Fall and one in the Spring, and I had been to a couple, and I was starting to let some of the bits about God being about unconditional love sink in. I had had a few really intense experiences with this group, on those retreats, and while I didn't have the words to describe what was happening at the time, from my current perspective I think I was letting in love without conditions attached for the first time in my life. Mikki had always loved me unconditionally (well, except for when I was quite a bit younger, and she discovered how fun it was to pretend she was dead or trick me into drinking pickle juice or tattle on me) but I don't think I really took any of that in, because it was in the framework of my very dysfunctional family. Here, I met people who truly didn't expect me to be anyone in particular, except myself, and they validated me. And when that wall I had put up around myself started to chip, and I let myself feel that love... the first time it happened, I bawled, totally out of control, and several of them simply reached out to me and held me, and continued to validate me. I think that those experiences saved me, in a sense.
So when they talked about giving something back, about sharing the experience and the love, I tenatively volunteered to help them give a day retreat for a poor parish on the South Side. They made my role in said retreat pretty simple, given my lack of experience (and probably given my quiet and still hesitant nature): all they wanted me to do was read some stuff out loud in a skit. I got to play God. (The significance, and the humor, is far from lost on me.) My girlfriend played herself, and I was just supposed to be this voice that represented God talking to her. Seemed simple enough.
About two weeks before this retreat took place, I developed a liver infection. The source of the infection (really, a lot about the infection) is still a mystery. They said it was like mono, but it was apparently a virus, and one they had never seen before. They didn't have anything to prescribe for it at the time, other than lots of rest and liquids, and reducing my fat intake. It left me pretty weak for a while, but after a week or so I started to recover.
The day of the retreat, though, I was feeling horrible again. And I tried calling several people to back out of my part in the skit, but I couldn't reach anyone. Finally, my dad said, pretty simply, that I made a commitment to be there, and I should just go and get it over with. So reluctantly, I let him take me to church. I expected to be there for maybe an hour, and then come right back home and go back to sleep.
But when I got there, the leader of the YES group asked me if I could hang around after the skit and give a personal testimony. I asked her what I was supposed to say, and she answered, with a great big smile on her face, her enormous blue eyes lit up like a four year old's on Christmas morning, "Just ask JAY-zus!"
I was terrified, of course. My immediate reaction, internally, was something like, yeah, right, ya big scary freak! This was a pretty hardened group of high school students, all looking more or less like they belonged in Future Inmates Of America. Most of them were giggling and whispering what sounded like slurs in Spanish under their breath, from what I could see.
But then the detached, logical part of my brain kicked in, and I asked myself: Do you really believe all this stuff you've been studying every Sunday for the last year and a half, or not? And if you don't, then why the hell are you wasting your time here?
So I decided to give it a shot. I vaguely remember saying a little prayer before I started speaking, after the skit, something about give me the words to do Your will, and then I just started talking.
In retrospect, it was my first true taste of the metaphysical. I channeled... well, something that day. I don't remember what I said, and didn't remember it even moments later. All I remember about the experience was that I didn't know the next word coming out of my mouth until I was already speaking it. I also remember the feeling in my chest, that warm glowy feeling that I now associate with my heart chakra opening up; it's the same sensation I get when I give or receive a really good hug. Whatever it was I said didn't come from me, or my own head; that much I was certain of at the time.
When I came out of it, and stopped, and felt done, I finally looked around. And to my surprise, the whole room was staring quietly up at me, their sneers gone, hanging on my every word, most of them with tears in their eyes, if not rolling down their cheeks. The people that I had been silently attending this YES group with were floored. I had never spoken up before, and suddenly when I did, whatever it was, it must have been good stuff.
It was quite a transformational experience for me. Suddenly, my participation in the church choir, and in YES group, took on a much deeper meaning for me. I was definitely sold on this whole Christianity thing at that point. And I remember, somewhere around that time, the topic came up in YES group about accepting the Holy Spirit into your life, giving yourself over to Him, letting Him guide you on whatever path He chose for you, and being born again. And given my experience, I did so freely.
Only, I don't think that I had any real concept of what that meant at the time.
I'll get into what it did mean for me in Part Two, probably tomorrow, because this has become a lot longer of an entry than I anticipated.
I think the story really begins at a point before I was born.
My mom was raised in a very small, mostly Baptist town in the middle of Texas, with a population of somewhere around 6000 people. And she came away from that experience with a fairly strong dislike for Southern Baptists. I remember her telling me bits about her teenage years, when the "fun" thing to do on a Saturday night was to sneak off to the popular makeout spot, spy on the "bad" kids who got drunk and fooled around, and then gossip about them the next day when they were trying to not look hung over and guilty in church.
Even though, in my opinion, this suited her disposition just fine, she had no problem disowning her Baptist heritage and converting to Catholicism to marry my dad, since he was allegedly raised Catholic himself. But it really did seem to me to be just a formality, just so everything would look proper and nice, because I can't remember them ever going to church. They must have, at some point, and perhaps they did even after I was born, but I cannot remember it.
So, with that little bit of ceremony aside, I imagine that church would have never been an issue for them again, if it hadn't been for me and Mikki entering the picture, as we did.
I think that my mom's background emphasized appearances, and living up to community standards (or at least appearing to). That's the bit that she swallowed with a big spoon. So it was very important to her that she be a mother, because this was the sixties (my parents married in 1960, on Valentine's Day), and that was just what she had always thought she was destined for, coming of age in the fifties, in a small town in the middle of Texas. It might sound really cynical of me, and harsh, to reduce her maternal instincts and motivation to have children to something so base and simplistic, but I never saw any compelling evidence that her mental process transcended that. Men and women get married and have children, which the mother raises and the father financially supports; it's just what people do. Nothing more needs to be said! What wasn't said out loud, but that I picked up on anyway, was that a woman was judged by how well her children turned out, and a man was judged by how well he provided. It was a very rigid set of rules, really.
So when she and my dad couldn't make their own children, for various medical reasons (after years of trying, something that even with the help of pictures of them in their late teens I cannot imagine), they resorted to adoption. And the way that adoption was done then probably put even more pressure on my mom to be the perfect parent when her chance came, and to have the perfect children, because apparently there were a lot of interviews and home visits and such. My mom is very good about making a good impression and maintaining appearances, so she and my dad passed, and about seven years after my parents married, Mikki came along, and I came along two years later.
I mention all this background in an effort to explain how religion was handled in my household. I think their handling of this issue demonstrates my parents' attitudes about a lot of things fairly well, particularly my mom's.
One of the few bits of background information that my mom and dad had about my mother was that she was Irish, and Catholic. (She's actually half Irish and half Austrian, but for whatever reason the Irish part is all that made it into my parents' heads. Maybe because of the pairing with Catholic, I don't know.) So anyway, I think that my mother might have said something to the agency, when she was getting interviewed and they were talking about placing me, about it being important to her that I be exposed to the church, because of her own upbringing. Back then, there was a huge effort in placing adoptees where they would fit in easily; they didn't want a red headed kid to be placed with Italians, for example, because then it would be so obvious that the kid was adopted. (the shame! the horror!) So apparently, the fact that my parents were married in the Catholic Church had some bearing on my placement.
My mom latched onto that part. It therefore became really important to convince everyone that they were good Catholics, to emphasize that part of the package. There were follow-up visits from the adoption agency, after all, to make sure that the placement went well.
Now, I need to interject something here, about what I've learned in meeting my mother, receiving counseling from the adoption agency, and attending a support group that included several adoptees, birthmothers, and even a few adoptive parents. It's fairly common for adoptive parents to have what they delicately label "fertility issues." Simply put, it's normal for infertile couples to feel, deep down, like maybe they aren't supposed to be parents, like this is God's way of punishing them for some inner fault they have, like they don't deserve children. In a responsible adoption setting, prospective adoptive parents nowadays get counseling to examine this issue (as well as a slew of others), to get in touch with it and to consciously let go of it, because understandably it might end up being a big problem if it remains lurking around, unconscious, in an adoptive parent's psyche. It's important to address, because otherwise it's quite common for adoptive parents to try to be Superparents, to prove their worthiness to have children (and, by extension, to expect that their children turn out Exceptionally Gifted, to help validate their exceptional parenting). There's often a fear in many infertile couples, when they adopt, that if something goes wrong, it will just prove that they shouldn't have been trusted with children in the first place, and their children will be taken away from them, so they had better be extra good at it or else!
We know all this now. We learned all this by studying people in my age bracket, and older.
So obviously, my mom didn't have the benefit of all this counseling and insight. To make matters worse, when I was a tot the common belief was that an infant was tabula rosa, the blank slate, perfectly clear and empty, clay to be molded by the environment. And adoptive parents were taught this, actually encouraged to pretend that the children they were adopting came from the (adopted) mom's womb. It made sense to do that at the time, since they really thought that the brain just suddenly switched on once a baby hit air, or something, and it played into the whole fantasy that all those ugly infertility issues (that nobody really acknowledged, or necessarily knew about, anyway) could just be swept under the rug. Again, we now know that heredity plays a role in a person's development, and that the fetus begins taking in experiences in the womb, and already has the beginnings of a personality when s/he lands outside.
In short: the mother was told to pretend that she hadn't just carried this baby, in secrecy, for nine months, hadn't gone thru childbirth, hadn't signed said baby away to total strangers, and the whole thing never happened. Meanwhile, the adoptive parents were told to pretend that the baby they brought home was just like all the other babies who weren't adopted, that there was nothing different about raising an adoptee. Pretend that things are The Way We Think They Should Be and ignore The Way It Really Is, and everything will be just fine.
So, let's put all this background together.
Because I sounded like a perfect match, from what the agency was telling them, my parents figured it was very important to play up my dad's Catholic background. I was exactly two years, one month and one week younger than the daughter they already had, and the right gender (yeah, it does sound like shopping for accessories at a department store, but they specifically requested a boy, because they already had a girl), so they really wanted me, because I would fit in so well with their vision of what they wanted. So it was important to get me baptized once they got their hands on me, and for both Mikki and me to attend C.C.D. classes when we got old enough.
For the non-Catholics: CCD (I think it stands for Continuing Christian Development, or it might be Catholic instead of Christian) is kind of like Sunday School. Except that it's usually not on Sunday. And it's often taught by a lay person (a fancy term for someone who isn't a priest or a nun or a brother or monk or any of the other Official People, but just a normal churchgoing Catholic person), and often done in someone's home. At least, that's the way it was, in my (initially) very white suburb of very Hispanic San Antonio.
So around the age of five, each of us started going to these classes, to keep up appearances. There was just one problem for me, though. I had never been to a Catholic Mass, ever, in my short little life. In fact, we never went as a family, ever; I don't think that my mom has actually been inside a Catholic church, with a couple of important exceptions, since she was married in one. To make matters worse, when Mikki was seven (about the time I started going to CCD myself), her teacher told her class that we all deserve damnation, that nothing we could ever do would make us worthy of salvation, that we all deserved to burn in Hell. He was trying to drive home the point (consistent with Catholic doctrine) that we really need Jesus to save us (doo-dah, doo-dah) but all he did for Mikki was give her nightmares. She couldn't sleep for a week, and woke up screaming every night. It really scarred her poor little seven year old psyche. So my mom arranged an appointment with a priest, who wasn't the fire-and-brimstone type, to sit down with her and calm her down. And in the course of talking to the priest, she more or less got permission to skip the CCD classes from then on.
So she was off the hook. But I wasn't. I still had to go. Never mind that my older sister was completely traumatized by the same classes (taught by different people, but still), and she didn't have to go anymore. I didn't have any such excuse. And since I'm a boy, I was expected to not be a sissy and let a little thing like eternal damnation get to me, like it did to her, if it came up in one of these classes.
So, I felt very trapped, and probably a bit like I was being punished since it was something that Mikki didn't have to do. I was not told why Mikki didn't have to go to them anymore (just something about having some nightmares, but she's just oversensitive so the priest let her off the hook), and I still never went to Mass. In fact, I went to CCD every year, from the age of five till I was thirteen, without ever going to Mass. I have this vague sense of knowing that I must have gone for my first communion, when I was about six, but I don't remember it.
So, there were two aspects of dread for me around CCD. One was the unspoken understanding that I had to do well, because it was a class, and Mom had very high expectations of me (of both of us, really), especially anything that even smelled like "school." And she would probably get really angry if I didn't do well. I already knew what a horrible, unpredictable temper she had, and her willingness to subject me or Mikki to it, and my dad's unwillingness to shield either of us from it. Second, I learned, thru my tendency to sit back and quietly observe, that everyone else went to Mass with their families. And keeping up the appearance that we were the perfect family was very important to my mom. So I had to go along with it and pretend I knew what they were talking about. I learned pretty early on to fake it well enough.
I think that I learned a lot about my place in my family, and the world in general, from the unspoken expectations in this arrangement.
I think that I learned a lot about pretending to be whatever other people expected me to be, in part, from my CCD classes. And I think unconsciously I associated God and Jesus and Religion with this lesson for a long time.
My association with Catholicism took a turn, though, when I was thirteen. I was at a point in my life when I felt totally alone, isolated, like there was no way that I could allow the real me under the act to be exposed, probably related in part to my experience with CCD. I was suicidal most of the time during my eighth grade year, beat up often (physically and emotionally) for being perceived to be gay... and then, Mikki, and one of my best friends, got me involved in the High School youth group at St. Matthews. Technically, I was too young, but it was close to the end of the school year, and they'd let me slide in, since in about another month I'd be old enough. I really wanted nothing to do with it, but they coerced me into hiking with them at Lost Maples State Park for a day in April. And we ended up having a Mass, out in the wilderness.
I was secretly terrified. Not only was this the dreaded religious ritual that I had been pretending to know all about for most of my life, but this particular group of people was very... huggy. And I was so distrustful of people that I rarely let another person touch me at the time, even just to shake hands. I had heard about this part in the Mass where everyone gave each other the Sign of Peace, which I expected to be a hug. With all these strangers.
Somehow, though, I made it thru my first Mass, and people respected my boundaries and didn't force a hug on me, and the whole mystery of Catholic Mass didn't seem so scary after all.
I started going with Mikki to this church a couple of months later, joining the High School Choir that sang at 11:00 Mass. And most of the people seemed genuinely friendly and accepting. Given my experience in middle school, where often people would pretend to be my friend only to find a way to humiliate me later, it took a while to accept that these people were genuinely friendly and weren't simply playing out some nefarious plot with me. Slowly, I started letting people hug me.
And it was like a dam bursting. Once I let it in, I became some kind of hug monster, and actually got a reputation for giving the best hugs, which persists. I was still relatively quiet, but I slowly started letting myself fit in.
Eventually, when I was about fifteen, I started working with another group at said church, the YES group (Youth Evangelizers for the Savior, also sometimes referred to as Youth Experiencing Scripture). Actually, I was already a part of the group, but that was the age that I started participating actively. Basically, every Sunday became a routine of waking up early, going to choir practice and Mass with Mikki, doing homework during the afternoon, and then attending this Bible study in the evening. At first, I did my usual thing, sitting in the back like a big lanky sponge and soaking it in, but eventually I accepted the invitation to take more of a leadership role. This group hosted weekend retreats twice a year, for the high schoolers at that church, one in the Fall and one in the Spring, and I had been to a couple, and I was starting to let some of the bits about God being about unconditional love sink in. I had had a few really intense experiences with this group, on those retreats, and while I didn't have the words to describe what was happening at the time, from my current perspective I think I was letting in love without conditions attached for the first time in my life. Mikki had always loved me unconditionally (well, except for when I was quite a bit younger, and she discovered how fun it was to pretend she was dead or trick me into drinking pickle juice or tattle on me) but I don't think I really took any of that in, because it was in the framework of my very dysfunctional family. Here, I met people who truly didn't expect me to be anyone in particular, except myself, and they validated me. And when that wall I had put up around myself started to chip, and I let myself feel that love... the first time it happened, I bawled, totally out of control, and several of them simply reached out to me and held me, and continued to validate me. I think that those experiences saved me, in a sense.
So when they talked about giving something back, about sharing the experience and the love, I tenatively volunteered to help them give a day retreat for a poor parish on the South Side. They made my role in said retreat pretty simple, given my lack of experience (and probably given my quiet and still hesitant nature): all they wanted me to do was read some stuff out loud in a skit. I got to play God. (The significance, and the humor, is far from lost on me.) My girlfriend played herself, and I was just supposed to be this voice that represented God talking to her. Seemed simple enough.
About two weeks before this retreat took place, I developed a liver infection. The source of the infection (really, a lot about the infection) is still a mystery. They said it was like mono, but it was apparently a virus, and one they had never seen before. They didn't have anything to prescribe for it at the time, other than lots of rest and liquids, and reducing my fat intake. It left me pretty weak for a while, but after a week or so I started to recover.
The day of the retreat, though, I was feeling horrible again. And I tried calling several people to back out of my part in the skit, but I couldn't reach anyone. Finally, my dad said, pretty simply, that I made a commitment to be there, and I should just go and get it over with. So reluctantly, I let him take me to church. I expected to be there for maybe an hour, and then come right back home and go back to sleep.
But when I got there, the leader of the YES group asked me if I could hang around after the skit and give a personal testimony. I asked her what I was supposed to say, and she answered, with a great big smile on her face, her enormous blue eyes lit up like a four year old's on Christmas morning, "Just ask JAY-zus!"
I was terrified, of course. My immediate reaction, internally, was something like, yeah, right, ya big scary freak! This was a pretty hardened group of high school students, all looking more or less like they belonged in Future Inmates Of America. Most of them were giggling and whispering what sounded like slurs in Spanish under their breath, from what I could see.
But then the detached, logical part of my brain kicked in, and I asked myself: Do you really believe all this stuff you've been studying every Sunday for the last year and a half, or not? And if you don't, then why the hell are you wasting your time here?
So I decided to give it a shot. I vaguely remember saying a little prayer before I started speaking, after the skit, something about give me the words to do Your will, and then I just started talking.
In retrospect, it was my first true taste of the metaphysical. I channeled... well, something that day. I don't remember what I said, and didn't remember it even moments later. All I remember about the experience was that I didn't know the next word coming out of my mouth until I was already speaking it. I also remember the feeling in my chest, that warm glowy feeling that I now associate with my heart chakra opening up; it's the same sensation I get when I give or receive a really good hug. Whatever it was I said didn't come from me, or my own head; that much I was certain of at the time.
When I came out of it, and stopped, and felt done, I finally looked around. And to my surprise, the whole room was staring quietly up at me, their sneers gone, hanging on my every word, most of them with tears in their eyes, if not rolling down their cheeks. The people that I had been silently attending this YES group with were floored. I had never spoken up before, and suddenly when I did, whatever it was, it must have been good stuff.
It was quite a transformational experience for me. Suddenly, my participation in the church choir, and in YES group, took on a much deeper meaning for me. I was definitely sold on this whole Christianity thing at that point. And I remember, somewhere around that time, the topic came up in YES group about accepting the Holy Spirit into your life, giving yourself over to Him, letting Him guide you on whatever path He chose for you, and being born again. And given my experience, I did so freely.
Only, I don't think that I had any real concept of what that meant at the time.
I'll get into what it did mean for me in Part Two, probably tomorrow, because this has become a lot longer of an entry than I anticipated.