God Vs. Religion: The Methodist Rejection

Church started making me nervous when I was about five.

It was around that time that my mom had some sort of spiritual awakening. I don’t think I ever knew the details of her story — what got her reading the Bible, praying, believing in this crazy idea that God got wrapped up like a hard candy in a human body and started walking around down here on earth.

All I remember is watching her, with her cup of coffee, the ash of her cigarette growing long, and her big blue leather-bound Bible. She would read, and periodically she would look up, ponder for a moment, and utter a vague, “Humph!” before diving back into her reading. Through the years, that Bible took a beating. Eventually, the blue binding was gone, and the book itself separated into three big chunks of pages that she’d carry through the house with her coffee, holding them together, stray loose pages sticking out and shoved back in. It was well loved and well used.

Anyway, whatever happened between my mom and God, I went along for the ride by proxy. Dad wouldn’t step foot in a church for his own reasons, but he didn’t care if my mom brought me down to the local United Methodist Church, a dark red brick picturesque building with a rich, green lawn, in the center of town.

The next thing I knew, I was standing on the altar with a bunch of parents holding infants, and some guy was putting water on my forehead. The only reason I remember his name to be Reverend Maloney is because it rhymed with bologna (because that’s how a kid’s mind works), and he was kind, with a sweet smile that didn’t make me feel as if didn’t belong there. His smile always included me.

That first baptism did not have much of a spiritual meaning for me at all. In fact, the thing I remember the most about it was the dress, and the fight I had with my mom over it. It was white, with a yellow sash. Mom was on a yellow kick that year, but my favorite color was blue. She painted my beautiful blue bedroom yellow, and I hated yellow. And when we were shopping for that dress, there were yellow sashes and green, pink sashes and blue. I desperately wanted the dress with the pretty sky-colored sash. I got the sunshine one instead.

Here is what I remember about Calvary United Methodist: the eerily beautiful Doxology, popcorn in Dixie cups for a snack in Sunday school, the picture of blonde Jesus, with blue eyes. I would stare at that picture and wonder about him. Why did God have to kill him? He looks nice enough. The truth is, I knew Jesus personally already (I’ll get to that in the next installment of this series) but this guy in the picture I didn’t know at all. This guy in the picture was just, well, a guy in a picture, who looked maybe like a movie star, or a rock singer, what with the long hair and all.

I’m not sure if it was church that started making me feel like I was not enough, but let’s just say church didn’t do me any favors, either. I quickly started feeling nervous whenever I walked through the doors. I would hold my body tight and close together so I didn’t accidentally knock over some imaginary glass of milk or precious glass creation. I started lowering my voice, to not be too loud or exuberant. And here is where I first got kicked out of something — I got kicked out of the children’s chorus.

I don’t remember loving it, but that didn’t make the rejection less hurtful. I am not sure why I didn’t make it to too many rehearsals. Was it because mom was slacking (very likely) or because I gave her a hard time about going (just as likely)? I’m not sure what it was, but I remember the day of the concert. My mom and I walked through the parking lot, where we met the choir director and a few other grown ups. We stood in a circle, four or five tall oak trees and one tiny little sapling, staring up at them. The choir director looked down at me and with great disdain, simply said, “Oh, no. No way. Absolutely not. No.”

My mother put on her most acquiescent voice and said, “Oh, okay,” and never noticed my humiliation. All the tall oaks looked down on me. Was that pity, or disapproval, and would I have known the difference anyway? It all felt the same to me: horrible.

Looking back, as an adult, of course I understand that the choir director was completely within her rights to deny me a place in the performance. Of course I get it. I also know she could have been kinder; I know she was maybe putting perfectionism over inclusion. I know Jesus probably wouldn’t care if I knew all the words. And I know she didn’t mean to forever altar how I would feel about church.

But when you’re a five year old kid, you don’t get any of this. You just think you’re not welcome because you’re not good enough. You start to think that maybe it’s not them, it’s you. You hear the words and sense the disdain and understand you’re being ignored, and so you start to just be as small as possible so maybe no one will notice that you’re not really right.  The whole world starts to feel like a secret club, and you’re the only one who doesn’t know the password. Your whole life becomes about trying to figure out the password, and you think maybe if you can just be good enough, you’ll figure it out as if you had some kind of magic decoder ring to the secrets of the universe.

That’s when that thing that’s inside you that shines bright like the sunshine yellow on your sash, that wants the whole blue of the sky, starts to get covered up, shoved down, pressed deep into the dark recesses of your soul, and you only let it out when you’re completely alone, playing in the back yard. Or later, when you write bad poetry that, under the duress of a required assignment in creative writing, you show someone and then they give you an award that you don’t think you really deserve. Or when you’re on stage, in a bad play. Or when you kiss a boy.  That’s when you start to think that maybe someone somewhere thinks you are good enough.

Often, you are mistaken.

I didn’t know it, but I was always searching for that blonde haired, blue eyed Jesus.  I didn’t know I’d already met him, back when I was three or four. He didn’t have blonde hair, but he had very dusty feet.

And I didn’t meet him in church.

This post is the 2nd in a series called God Vs. Religion, in which I’m exploring my own religious roots and my experience of God. Next up: the day I first met Jesus.