How I came to understand religion.

 

My mother sent me to Sunday school when I was four. She told me it would be fun and I would enjoy myself. She said there would be singing, storytelling and playing games.

It was not fun, and I did not enjoy myself.

The stories they told all had weak endings.

These were not stories for a little boy. I wanted bloodthirsty endings that left me thrilled and chilled. Jack and Jill shattered their skulls before careering down a hill. There was no miracle second act where they came back to life healed – they were dead.

The three blind mice weren’t shown sympathy for their disability; they didn’t have their sight restored by the farmer’s wife. Instead, she doubled down and cut off their tails with a carving knife.

Little Red Riding-hood’s grandmother was ripped apart by a wolf. Then a hunter took revenge and carved up the wolf. There was no counselling to understand the mistakes made. By the age of four, children know what to expect when a wolf arrives.

The only story that had any substance seemed to be Noah and his boat full of pets. Noah built his ark in his backyard. His neighbours teased him. Then the flood came, and Noah stood on his boat’s deck and watched all the people who had teased him drown.

“Who’s laughing now?” I imagined him saying.

The lesson was clear, if someone teases you, meticulously plan, then move to a safe place so you and your family can watch that person’s slow and panicked death in comfort.

After Noah had watched all the screaming and wailing from his floating gated community, he went sailing for forty days and forty nights. He sent out a dove that came back with nothing, and that was pretty much it until the dove came back with an olive branch.

The Sunday-school teacher made a big fuss over that branch. She said it was a sign from God to reward his true believers. I thought I must have misheard or she missed a page or something.

“Excuse me,” I said with my hand high. “God killed all Noah’s friends and neighbours, along with all the other animals in the world, and then sent him a twig?”

“As a sign of his love,” she said.

“Did it at least have an olive on it?”

“It was a sign of dry land.”

It turns out, unlike me, Noah was so impressed by that twig that it distracted him enough that he ran his boat aground. My four-year-old self was entirely unimpressed with this story.

The other stories they told us were about Jesus. I kept waiting for him to face danger and change into a superhero suit, but all he did was wander around in a toga with his friends. He did do magic tricks, but none of them were showstoppers. Feeding people bread and fish wouldn’t go over at a four-year-old’s birthday party. Jesus turned water into wine – hardly an age-appropriate story at that stage of my life. 

Walking on the water was cool, but Jesus didn’t seem to do anything with it. He just walked and never put the skill to good use. Then he died and came back to life – but the moment he came back, he left again. Jesus wasted a perfectly good opportunity to haunt people, I thought.

Then the Sunday-School teacher let us sing songs. I liked singing songs when I was four. We sang a lot of them at kindergarten. My favourite was Humpty Dumpty, who fell off a wall to be maimed for life. Good stuff. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again. That’s a story a four year-old-boy can understand.

The Sunday school songs were about Jesus loving me.

I wanted to sing Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty made me laugh because he fell down and broke his crown – how funny. At least the story of Humpty had a comical main character; a big fat round man who did crazy stuff like falling down and breaking apart, never to be put back together again. No resurrection for Humpty. Also, there were King’s horses and King’s men which were cooler than the bunch of hangers-on Jesus seemed to cruise around with.

The people in charge of my Sunday school refused to let me sing Humpty Dumpty.

There was only one thing for it, escape in protest. I took off and ran out of the hall where my Sunday school was being held. I climbed up a tree in the front garden of the small suburban church.

Climbing trees was also something I was very good at when I was four. I was so good they couldn’t get me down. They couldn’t even reach me because I was so small that the branch I was able to climb up into was so thin and fragile if they tried to climb to me the branch would have broken, and they’d risk me falling down and breaking my crown. I was also a very patient child. After an hour up the tree, they decided to call my mother, and she had to come to the church hall to coax me down. This was my first day at Sunday school.

My mother tried sending me to Sunday school one more time because she heard they were having a day to welcome new children. She assured me again there would be games and cake, and she was sure this time I would have fun. I did not have fun.

For some reason the Sunday school decided the way to impress young children and ensure they returned on a regular weekly basis to learn about Jesus was to have a clown.

This was a Church of England Sunday school with progressive leaders who played guitars and were always telling everyone to turn around and shake their neighbour’s hand. I’d been refusing to go back to Sunday school for sometime after the whole tree climbing protest over what songs should be sung, but now there was a clown and I loved clowns, they were funny.

At this point in my life I had been entertained by a number of clowns at my friend’s birthday parties, and they told great jokes, made balloon animals and did silly things like farting out powder through their pants. For a four-year-old, this is seminal comedy. Once we even went to see a circus in a big top and we sat there and smelled the animals and saw the five little clowns driving around in what looked like a Smart Car, but smaller. The doors to this car wouldn’t stay closed and the horn made you laugh because it was so weak, so, I guess, exactly like a smart car.

When I arrived for this Sunday school entertainment extravaganza I was disappointed. The clown was a mime. No one had told me this clown would not be talking. On TV and at my friends’ parties, the clowns talked and told jokes. The better party clowns made balloon animals. This Clown’s big-ticket item was playing the guitar while the Sunday school teacher sang more songs about Jesus loving us. I was having none of it. I was certain this clown could talk, and I set about proving this. I tried to trick him into talking.

“I really need the toilet,” I said. He mimed walking and pointed to the small door at the far end of the hall.

I tried goading him into talking.

“How do we know you’re a real clown because you don’t seem to know any of the routines, at least not the funny ones?”

I tried to guilt him into talking.

“It’s bad to pretend you have a disability when you don’t. My mummy told me that, like pretending you can’t talk.”

He pretended to pull himself away from me on an invisible piece of rope. I chased him and stamped on his toe, which took four attempts because, in his enormous clown shoes, it was hard to tell where his real foot was. When I honed in and found his big toe with my heal, he grabbed me by my ear and pulled me behind a bookshelf.

“You’re ruining this for everyone,” he said with genuine anger in his voice.

“You can talk!” I screamed.

They rang my mother to come and get me.

Years later, when I started primary school, they gave us afternoon milk as a way to keep us all healthy. Some of the kids couldn’t afford fresh milk at home, so this was a way to make sure the poorest kids had milk at least once a day. The milk came in tetra packs, stored in a wire basket in some unused hallway waiting for the recess bell when the little cardboard packs would be handed out to each child.

The moment that bell sounded, the milk monitors would take that wire basket and walk around to every class. Every student would be given a tetra pack of warm claggy milk. I hated this part of the day beyond everything else, even math. I have always hated warm milk because of this ritual to help the poor. To this day, warm milk makes me retch. 

They also had Christian education at my school. Every Christian child at the school was required to go to a weekly class of religious education. It was taught by a woman who, at the age of six, seemed to me, too old to be alive. She was so old her hair had turned mauve. She also talked about how much Jesus loved me.

“Why hasn’t he come and said hello, then,” I asked. My grandparents loved me, and even though they lived in Canada, they still came to see me once every two years, so where was this Jesus guy if he loves me so much?

“Jesus is always with you and watching over you,” she said.

“Like a ghost?” I asked, “Because he died, you know?”

She seemed pleased by my knowledge of Jesus dying, and she started in about how they tried to kill Jesus, but he kept coming back to life, completely ignoring how spooked we all were about being told a dead man would be watching us, always.

I went to my father and told him I couldn’t stand drinking milk. I also told him I couldn’t stand religious education. My father was a practical man.

“You can choose one of the two and I’ll write you a note to get you out of whichever one you choose,” he told me.

That’s how I came to choose Jesus over warm milk. It’s also how I came to understand that religion is more economic than spiritual. If you side with religion, you can bargain your way out of almost anything.