Thinking back to my most earliest of memories, I remember the wonderment of life. I can still smell the pugnent floral breezes and experience being mesmerized into hypnosis watching the white linen sheets dance to an unheard accompaniment on the clothes line. Mother seemed like a god to me the way she hung that laundry so effortlessly and happily. The cool grasses beneath my naked arms and legs tantalized my senses as I watched eagles soar on the early summer convections of rising thermals.
Admidst the beauty of a budding canopy of pecan and oak trees, I felt the full impact and enormity of the gift of life and promised myself that I would do everthing in my power to feel like I did at that moment forever. I was not yet five years old and it seems like yesterday.
Whether it was that day or another one, I do not recall. But it was in that state of mind of total appreciation and ectasy that I had my first bible study. Mom took a seat with me on the ground and we started to study the Paradise book. My reality was soon shattered. I learned about hatred. I learned about murder..... murder of little children like me. I learned about fear and revenge. Of course mother was a gem and did her best to save me from being destroyed.... she only wanted the best for me. She told me how to avoid such a fate. I loved my mother but my fear of the terrible scenes and pictures in the book were greater. They bothered me a great deal. They still do to this very day.
On that day I ceased existing as a human being and became a human doing. That wonderful and magical state of being was usurped and replaced with a state of perpetual doing....doings meant to avoid such a terrible fate as the children in the Paradise book.
Over the Christmas holidays recently, I reflected on my good fortune of being introduced to such a world view. I decided to pull out that old Paradise book and simply catagorize the nature of the illustrations. I certainly couldn't read at age 4 (this was before phonics friends), so I read through the pictures.
Here's what I found.
Murder ........................... 32 images showing hundreds of killings, many of children
Violence ........................ 2
Paradise ........................ 10
Witnessing .................... 4
Bible ............................. 4
Misc. ............................ 14
Sin ................................ 5
Sadness ....................... 1
Political Domination ........ 1
Fear ............................... 2
Betrayal ......................... 2
Prayer ............................ 1
Christ ............................. 5
One image stuck with me above all others..... all through these years. It was one where the earth opened up and swallowed dozens of people. One of the people falling to their death was a little girl about the same age as I was at the time. She was holding her little doll who was falling down with her to her death. Her little puppy also didn't make it, he was falling too.
Fully fifty percent of the images were terribly destructive for a young developing mind. No wonder my feelings of security soon vanished. Looking back, I feel like I had been raped. A childhood that was meant to be experienced as peaceably and secure as possible was stolen by a bunch of greedy religionists who never even had children of their own.
What the hell were they thinking?