My
parents were both Lutherans. My father was a pastor, my mother a
devout follower of the same religion. From birth until my fourteenth
birthday (at which point I rebelled more openly) I was for most of my life either in a church, on my way to a
church, or otherwise engaged in some sort of churchly activity. Among
my earliest memories outside of wild animal encounters as a toddler
take place in churches. I sang my first public solo, (at the age of
ten years) on Christmas Eve, to a packed house, at a church in
Shamokin, Pennsylvania.
All
around me were devout and loyal Lutherans who all sang the same songs
in the same fashion at the same times of year, their practices
unchanging from one decade to the next. While I, in general, have no
problem with people engaging in religious practice, I realized
recently (after deep and introspective thought) that I had abandoned
my own faith at a very young age. My belief in an invisible god, as
well as any respect I might have had for the doctrine of the Lutheran
church, those things faltered as early as the age of six or seven; by
my teens, they were long gone. It is well that I was a shy and quiet
child – if I had told anyone about my doubting, they would likely
have forced me into re-education classes, so as to keep me enslaved
to The Church. (I have never believed that thinking “bad”
thoughts, doubtful thoughts, would get me in trouble with a godhead
whose main message is love, forgiveness and compassion; thankfully, I
recognized at a comparatively young age my fellow Lutherans' fear of
eternal damnation for what it truly is: a thinly-veiled effort by the
church hierarchy to keep the people in the pews hating themselves for
sinning, and begging the pastor to do something about it.)
I was
a young boy standing in a front-row pew watching my father perform
the service. I can remember looking at all the people around me,
their heads bowed, their lips moving in unison, and I thought they
were all going to look up at some point to spring the joke and laugh.
I can recall looking at those docile individuals
standing in that wood-paneled church, looking at them and bouncing
the backs of my legs against the dark wood of the church's benches
while laughing to myself quietly. I have since that time not stopped
laughing at and mocking any organized religion that happens to cross
my path. The complexity and self-contradictory nature of the
thousands of different teachings found in the Christian bible had
become overwhelmingly foreign to me at that young age, so foreign and
confusing that I knew, in my deepest of knowing-places, that they
could not all be true. At that young age, for some reason, I was able
to see through the smoke-screen of canon and verse, and pluck from
the brambles of dogma the few tender fruits of pure and honest
meaning. In time, I have been able to utilize these fruits outside of
the framework of the artificial, and inherently corrupted, structure
of organized religion. (I wish sometimes that I had not lost faith,
that I could somehow become faithful again, and believing, that I
could abandon perpetual doubt, that
I could once again with impotent fury shake a fist at the sky and
curse the god who made me, but I do not believe in an external god,
only in the Majesty of the Human Spirit – I hold myself responsible
for my place in the world; I fix my problems instead of bitching
about them.)
Of
course, standing in that church and doubting quietly, I feared
Yahweh, that terrible and jealous god whom I had been taught from
birth to fear with abject and abiding terror. Once I had in my own
mind mocked him and laughed at him and shown him my young and tender
behind, however, I realized that the might of His Wrath (an emphasis
on paternalism pervades the Christian bible to the point that I am
shocked that any woman would practice that faith willingly) existed
only in myth, or in the tales of old. I knew at the age of seven years
that religious indoctrination was very much a form of mental slavery,
and I was abhorred by the fear-mongery and intimidation used by most
organized religions to perpetuate their existence.
Now,
many years later, I am so very happy with my young self for his brave
and clandestine decision to rebel quietly against the culture within
which he had been so enmeshed. That seemingly simple act of doubt,
along with Lao Tzu's Tao Teh Ching, has helped me to find the
path to inner peace, to primal simplicity, to a life without need for
self-aggrandizement or self-justification; now, the action is the
goal. I let the chips fall where they may, no longer constrained by
the stultifying and stagnant framework of a desperate and failing
religious organization. Now, my mind is free and elastic, while my
heart is empty and still.
Three
cheers for doubt, and for quiet and patient rebellion.
Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥
John
Paul Roggenkamp
