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Flirting with religion
I briefly belonged to a fundamentalist religious group while in high school.
It all began (doesn't it always?) with a girl.
Well, strictly speaking, there were two girls. Their names were Jane and Joan Mitchell, and they were identical twins. Each was pretty (in a wholesome girl-next-door way), with fair skin and an abundance of freckles. They dressed in identical outfits, so that it was all but impossible to tell them apart until one had known them for a fair amount of time.
But gradually real differences between the two girls emerged. Joan was a little more filled out than Jane - her contours were rounder, gentler, softer; whereas Jane was just a mite thinner, leaner - meaner? This extended to their personalities as well: Joan was all sweetness and goodness, whereas Jane was sardonic and witty and acerbic.
Of course I formed a crush on Joan the Good One. (If I were choosing now, I think I would find Jane by far the more interesting of the two to be and converse with.)
The Mitchell twins and I were raised in the First Presbyterian Church of my hometown Verona, NJ - a moderate religious denomination by comparison with others. (Though from the standpoint of my present beliefs, I wonder how a religion which holds that Jesus was the Son of God and Rose from the Dead could be considered 'moderate'?) When I was in the ninth grade, I began studying the pipe organ with the organist there. And I joined the Youth Fellowship which met on Sunday evenings. A significant draw to get me out those nights was to see the twins and other girls there. (I must confess: the religion was incidental.)
That year I had a seminal experience as a budding composer: I heard a performance of Handel's Messiah. I was able to relate to the drama of the religious texts set to music, and strove to create that sort of thing myself. So for the first time in my life I began to comb (rummage?) through the Bible in search of 'settable' texts: texts which might find a resonance - whether through cadence or imagery - with my decidedly vague compositional ideas. (Note that in searching through the Bible, my needs, as with the Youth Fellowship, were not religious in the narrow meaning of that word.)
Our sophomore year began. After a few Sunday nights of not seeing the Mitchell twins, I asked someone where they might be. "Oh, they started going to another church." Which church and why, I wondered. "To a more fundamentalist one," I was told.
I was upset at this news, as anyone would be who feels that they have been abandoned without reason.
Someone told me that they belonged to a group called 'High School Born Againers', or 'Hi-BA' for short. This group met each Wednesday after school. I decided to join.
I started out interested in a girl and in writing music; but somehow I found myself ensnared in a new exotic religion.
Was I more attracted to their church building? Hardly, since they did not even have so much as a storefront. We met in the living room of someone's apartment. We sat in a circle on the rug, and mostly prayed. In doing that, I thought I was doing something daring: I felt like the first Christians must have felt. For, indeed, this was a religion outside the mainstream and unsanctioned by our traditional upbringing. One thing it did was proselytize.
By contrast, the Presbyterian Church was reticent, reserved, as befit those who wished to retain their middle and upper-middle class dignity. Proselytizing was unseemly, perhaps because it seemed lower-class. Any religion which wore its beliefs so blatantly on its sleeve was beneath contempt.
(Besides, the Presbyterians had a beautiful brand new church building to 'proselytize' (so to speak) for them to draw in new members.)
My mother was not pleased with my new religious affiliation: I was taking my religion (as I also would my music) too seriously. (She believed that Religion should be taken with a requisite amount of seriousness - but no more.)
I became what is quaintly known as a pain in the ass. I recall attempting to convert my brother while he sat at his desk pasting stamps in his Master Global Album: he impatiently waved me away as one would a pesky mosquito. (But the mosquito keeps coming back...)
One night during that period, I did something which some people might regard as heretical: I awoke in the middle of the night inspired as from a dream, turned on my light, and wrote down (or was it 'inscribed'?) 'Psalm 151' - my modest effort intended as an addition not merely to the biblical canon, but to the Bible itself (in King James form.) This offering (which in retrospect I think should have been a burnt one) has fortunately been lost!
We had all been given Bibles in fourth grade Sunday School (mine had the words of Jesus in red letters.) Now, in tenth grade, I began carrying mine to school for purposes of 'evangelical outreach.' The book began to fall apart with all this extra use, thus showing that, in buying books whose bindings were glued rather than sewn, the church had gone cheap. But then, it was probably assumed that I would only use the book discreetly - i.e. for non-evangelical purposes.
There in school I managed to find the ear of one poor chap named Bill McKnight on the bleachers in the gym during lunch. As various girls jitterbugged with one another to bebop music out on the floor (it was 1958), I spouted biblical texts such as 'For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' (This even though neither Bill nor I came from particularly well-to-do families and had no real prospects of becoming rich.) With such borrowed eloquence (and I think that's what I was really attracted to - the cadence of the language) did I make my first (and, as turned out, only [and, alas, all too temporary]) convert.
A couple of weeks later I was at a meeting and the leader was asking us to pray for various people, and he asked me if I would pray for Bill McKnight. I said of course I would be glad to. I envisioned a moment that night (or a few nights later - was the matter so pressing?) when, in the coziness of my bed just before I went to sleep, I could offer up to God a few words for poor Bill (whom I already resented a bit, as he had erred in not having come to any of our after-school meetings. Perhaps I would get even by deliberately delaying my intercession for him with the Almighty...) Unfortunately, the leader intended that I should pray for Bill right at that very meeting. So not only would I have to come up with something on the spot, it would be in a public situation and thus be scrutinized by people more expert at this than I was. Soon enough it became my turn. I said something like the following:
"Oh God [I thus began], I ask Thee, that if it be thy Will (yea, even if it not particularly be thy will [they say Thy will is inscrutable; but I am not trying to scrutinize it so much as direct it...])"
Was I trying to sweet-talk God? Regardless, I had tied myself up into so many rhetorical knots that I never did reach the subject of my petition. The leader had to intervene at this point and make the simple request to bring Bill back to us. (Many years later, I knew a devout Catholic woman who would say, "God always answers prayers; but sometimes the answer is 'No'.")
A group of us went to a convention of the Moody Bible Institute in Newark that year. I recall a huge auditorium of young people in the thrall of religious ecstasy. I myself was in a quasi-thrall - that is, 'one part' of me was in the mood to be spiritually transported, but at the same time 'another part' was watching everything with a critical eye.
At a climactic moment, we were asked to come down to the front (while singing 'Just As I Am Without a Plea') to dedicate our life to Christ by becoming missionaries in His Name. I wanted to walk down there badly; but I hesitated (always a bad sign) as I agonized over whether I was suited for such a calling (remember: I could not even construct a coherent prayer in my own language!) I finally concocted a compromise which I thought would please me and God: pace Albert Schweitzer, I would become a 'missionary' as a church organist right there in America!
The irony of all this is that it turned out the Mitchell twins were not even in Hi-BA. But I had gotten sucked in and I couldn't think of a way to extricate myself.
As it turned out, the way (as opposed to The Way) came that same sophomore year. I sat next to a fellow named John Seery, another member of Hi-BA, in homeroom (I recall Jane Mitchell being in that homeroom too.) John was a bit more zealous than I was (I remember him telling me that he was building a tract rack (for all his religious tracts) in shop (I was building a birdhouse.)) We had ordered paperback books from a catalogue our teacher had, and I had gotten one about the Wild West - perhaps a Zane Gray western. John regarded my book for a moment; then he suddenly grabbed it from my hands and, with a look of grim resoluteness, tore it in half. "You shouldn't be reading this trash!" he declared with finality. I said to myself (I was too cowardly and wimpy to say it directly to John) that if the choice were between reading what I pleased and that form of religion, I would choose reading.
I never went back to Hi-BA. And I finally lost interest in Joan Mitchell as well.
P.S. Shortly after I was hired by the Rivers School in 1995, there were a couple of inservice days for faculty. These were sensitivity sessions designed to help us recognize and combat prejudice.
In one exercise, they wished to demonstrate the multiple ways a group of people can be divided into subgroups. And so at one point they had us separate by religious affiliation. 'The Protestants come here, the Catholics there, and the Jews over there.' Everyone dutifully sought out their group - that is, all but three of us. Ron Newberg (the older physics instructor), Venkatesh (a member of my math department), and I stood stock still. When the leader asked why we hadn't moved, Ron replied, 'We don't belong to any of those groups - we're agnostics!' ('The old cliché', I muttered humorously - 'Science and Mathematics!') The blushing organizer apologized and hastily created a fourth area for Agnostics, to which Ron and Venky repaired. When I didn't move, I was asked what was wrong. 'Well, as agnostics they're hedging their bets. As for me, I'm under no such illusions - I'm an atheist.' A fifth space was provided for me.
How far I had fallen since high school!
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