I wasn’t raised in a religious home in 1960s Baltimore. My mother, when pressed, claimed to worship the Sun god. Note: she never performed any rituals or ceremonies dedicated to the Sun god. And her grandfather was a minister, likely Baptist, which I always assumed as the reason for her impiety. My dad came from a family serious about church attendance. He didn’t continue on that path once he got out of Oklahoma. When asked, he’d always say, “If there’s a Hell, I’m going,” and left it at that.
Dad called his mother every week when long-distance rates were astronomical. And he rotated a call to one of his seven siblings each week after that call to his mother. With his brothers he spoke about their work and family. One of my aunts would take the opportunity to berate him about not going to church regularly. After one such call, “Are you taking those kids to church?” he started taking us to church. He’d pull up in front of the tiny Church of Christ on University Parkway and point to the front door. We kids would go in unaccompanied. Dad would go to the nearby Giant grocery store and do some shopping. After he picked us up from church we’d go home and he’d make a big Sunday breakfast. At that church, we never felt welcome. I guess the church leadership knew that four kids without a parent attending weren’t going to fill the donation baskets. At Sunday school we were taught all the Bible stories and for that I’m grateful because the Bible is the key to so many cultural references in our society.
Summers we’d drive out to Oklahoma to visit family. Dad only had two weeks’ vacation. It was a long drive back then, at least two days with a motel stay halfway, and once there the whole vacation consisted of driving from one aunt and uncle’s place to another so that my dad could visit everybody. We didn’t mind. We could play in a way that was different from Baltimore. Every day a new farm, new animals, new places to explore, then back home before the two weeks were up.
One summer when I was 12, I was allowed to stay in Oklahoma for the rest of the summer. I’m sure my aunt and uncle were disappointed with this lazy city boy. I was put to work weeding the strawberries, a job I was ill-suited for. I wanted to explore the woods and ponds and just putter around. It was summer vacation! And then I was sent to help haul hay (for money!). I was a big boy at 12 and could pick up heavy objects so I was eager to earn something while forgetting my city boy allergies. It was an awful hot day and the bales were heavy. I could barely get them on the back of the flatbed farm truck. But I was eager to earn my keep. At some point I woke up on the truck. Nobody really knew what happened… heat exhaustion, hay fever; I just passed out and dropped in the field. Everybody had a good laugh. They even paid me despite my failure to complete the day.
During that summer, I experienced the pleasure of Vacation Bible School! This was a week-long Sunday school smack dab in the middle of my vacation. I couldn’t object because I was a guest and this was what they'd planned for me. There were a couple of pretty girls in the school and that made it tolerable. Somewhere between a dozen and 20 kids my age would sit in a circle and read passages from the Bible. I was astounded to learn that those kids couldn’t read well at all. “Thou. Sh. Sh. Shawlt (corrected by the teacher “Shalt”) Shalt. Not. Be. As. The. High. High. High Po Cry Tees (corrected “Hypocrites”). It was taking forever to get through this and each reader in turn was having a hard time. Maybe I couldn’t weed strawberries or haul hay, but thanks to good Baltimore public schools at the time, I could read out loud and smoothly. Maybe I was showing off or maybe I was just doing my best, but my Charlton Heston came out. Not only did I read the words, but I put some emotion and emphasis in there. Stentorian tones. Nobody liked that one bit. None of those kids became lifelong friends. They felt I was shaming them when I was just trying to impress this one pretty girl.
Years later I thought that if they wanted kids to be able to read the Bible, they’re going to have to invest in better schools and better teachers. I realized they didn’t want the kids to be able to read the Bible. They wanted the kids to acquiesce to whatever authority figure was holding the Bible. Cherry-picking passages, misquoting some. If a kid could read, he’d be a threat to the status quo.
Sometimes we’d go “visiting.” It was supposed to be an outreach program, checking in with locals who hadn’t been to church for a while to see if their burdens might be lifted to bring them back into the fold. I remember one poor old woman, alone in the world, who had to work on Sundays as well as every other day. She was a smoker, too, but smokes were cheap back then. The church people pretty much told her to give up the smokes and tithe that money to the church instead. Then they told her that her everlasting soul was in danger of damnation because she chose to work instead of going to church. Her sin was trying to survive in an unforgiving world.
That still doesn’t sit right with me. The lesson I learned is that most of us are sinners because of the circumstances we face, not because our hearts are in the wrong place. After church one Sunday, I was introduced to an adult parishioner. He was a cheerful and outgoing man. When I shook his hand, he stopped mid-shake and told me I wasn’t shaking hands right. I hadn’t done much hand-shaking at that point in my life. He told me there was no life in my handshake and that I need to grasp his hand like I meant it and to look him in the eye when I shook it. Two or three good shakes and let go. I’m so glad he brought that to my attention. I was embarrassed, but mostly because of all the hands I’d shaken at that church. It was the most important lesson I ever received at church and it had nothing to do with religion. I wish I’d thanked that man at the time.