Posted on the BaptistLife.com forum 2001.03.25
Just thought I would refresh your memory on my point of entry as a Christian. Many of you weren't around last time I told my story, and some of the others may have forgotten some pertinent details; or I may, knowingly or un-, have changed my self-disclosures ...
I was brought up in a liberal Baptist church (University BC, Seattle; ABC [and, now, AWAB]). My dad was the American Baptist campus minister [dually accredited by the Disciples of Christ, so we attended University Christian once a month] at the University of Washington from a year before my birth till his death when I was 14. My mom was a social worker before my birth and what she wittily called a "lady of leisure" [translation: housewife and full-time mom] after I was born (not counting a previous stillbirth, I was the first of her four children). Both of my parents had attended Northern Baptist churches since childhood. I have heard that my dad (who had a BD from BBDS and an STM from Andover Newton) expressed relief that the historicity of the Virgin Birth hadn't come up at his ordination council. I know that as an undergraduate at Whitworth (he ended up graduating from the UW) in the late '30s he had an inerrantist professor who treated Scofield's marginal notes as an integral part of the Scriptures, which permanently soured him on KJV and anything remotely fundamentalist.
I always considered myself a Christian as a kid, an identification that largely expressed itself (aside from the Sunday morning event) in open-housing marches, school-integration boycotts, writing letters to Dr. King to keep his spirits up in jail, and the like. I got the distinct impression that God was in some sense a silent partner of the left wing of the Democratic Party. My dad taught courses on The Secular City, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and the "Death of God Theology" [topics he would later revisit in Japan] at Seattle's Free University and tried unsuccessfully to get the church to let him offer Bible studies at the Blue Moon Tavern, an historic Seattle Beat Generation hangout where pot and beer vied for top honors. In seventh grade I was, at my own request, a voluntary racial transfer student, taking the bus across town every day from my overwhelmingly white North Seattle school to a Central Area school that was 72% black (and 98% non-white). This was an expression of my Christian convictions. I recall that once when I was maybe 12 peer pressure led me to want to be baptized, and my father advised against it, saying I wasn't ready. He had been baptized at age 8 himself, and was all in favor of delaying it. Looking back now from my 47th birthday to my baptism at age 36, I think Daddy called that one correctly.
The 1967-68 school year, when I would normally have been in eighth grade, my dad (having completed 14 years as Campus Minister) was granted a year's sabbatical, which he spent as a Visiting Fellow at Waseda University, "the Yale of Japan", accredited to the Waseda Hoshien Christian Student Center. He taught (through a translator) the same sorts of lecture classes he'd been doing at the Free University, as well as giving lectures on the American Civil Rights Movement, and also taught English Conversation to junior executives of Sumitomo Corporation. We lived in the Koishikawa district of Tokyo's Bunkyō-ku borough in a mostly-Western-style house (it had one tatami room) that we rented from an East German Protestant mission. We kids attended a grade school less than a block from home; I was put back into sixth grade, and during the year I graduated and became a first-year middle-school student, which among other things meant I got to take beginning English as a foreign language, which is probably the experience that predisposed me a few years later to glom onto Esperanto ;-). We attended Sunday School and at least sometimes the regular services at the mission church, Tomizaka Kyōkai. We also participated in the local Buddhist and Shintō festivals, riding around in sedan chairs banging drums and whatnot. Great fun, this indifferentism! Or syncretism? Or whatever... The vast majority of my classmates, too, participated in the Shintō and Buddhist festivals and attended Sunday School regularly. Their parents were mostly employees of Fuji Bank, which had several high-rise apartments in the neighborhood, and these putative capitalists routinely sent a Communist to the Diet [» Parliament; are Japan and Finland the only countries whose legislatures are called Diets? Why?]...
We came back to Seattle the long way round, via the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Brezhnev's Russia [soon I'll post my three anecdotes from that trip, about (1) ice cream in paradise, (2) the Zionist who shot Bobby Kennedy, and (3) why Lenin is the Beast of Revelation], Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Hamburg, the Low Countries, Paris and Versailles, southern England, and a passenger ship back to New York. We bought a VW CamperBus in Stockholm and brought it back with us. Three weeks after our arrival back home in Seattle, on our way home from a week at Baptist Summer Camp in the Cascades, a drug-affected 16-year-old who had taken his grandmother's car without permission decided to hang a U-turn right in front of us at about 80 mph (combined speed of impact over 110) and my parents were history. My mother was killed instantly (the refrigerator having crushed her against the table); my father died in surgery, 52 pints of blood later, the next morning (the steering wheel having severed his aorta). My brothers (ages 11 and 10) and sister (age 8) all had broken bones of various sorts and severities. And I (age 14) was the only one "uninjured". Yet I was, I think, by far the most seriously injured [[nota bene: it's this life experience that makes me take offense every time Vince or Jonathan mentions a "victim mentality"]] — considerably more seriously injured than either I or anyone else had an inkling for years, and I received no counseling or therapy until it was much too late.
That evening, as I was helping the hospital with details "Son, do you know what your father's blood type is?" "Do you know who your parents' next of kin are? Who would they want us to call in an emergency like this?" a man from the King County Coroner's Office took me aside into a little conference room and said, "Son, sit down." He gave me a little dixie cup of ice cream cum sherbet and a flat piece of wood impersonating a spoon, and continued, "Son, your mother's dead." I don't remember exactly everything he said after that — if I hadn't already been in shock I was now — but the gist of it was that I (a 14-year-old boy, remember) was going to have to drop out of school and "be a mother to your brothers and sister because your father isn't going to be able to handle the whole load." He assured me that it would hard but I would do okay, and he knew, because he had lost his father when he was 17 and had to drop out of school and look how well he had turned out ... And when I woke up the next morning and my father was dead, too, I managed to completely block this conversation from my consciousness for about 10 years, though the "script" it installed in my subconscious had devastating effects on my behavior and my thinking.
Further contributing to my victimization was my dad's chronic cruel/capricious streak. When I was a kid, if any one of us did something meriting corporal punishment (which was not often dished out), if Daddy was there — my recollection is that this particular injustice was less likely to be meted out when he was spanking hours later to Mommy's order [i.e. pursuant to a writ of You Wait Till Your Father Gets Home] — he would often say "X, you're going to get a licking. And the rest of you, you're gonna get one too, on general principles." Once, I stood up to him. One of my siblings did something of spanking gravity and Daddy said "You all get in here" and I said (and there's mythopoeia in here someplace), "Daddy, there's no such crime as 'General Principles'." And he thought for a minute, then admitted I was right, and never again did he try to enforce it. A further insalubrious trait of his was his inconsistent (or at least unpredictable) application of the "licking". When one of us was going to get swatted, we would have to bend over his knee, and he would raise a yardstick in one hand, and place the other hand palm-outward against our butt, and say, in his best imitation of Calvin's sovereign Creator, "Now, this is going to hurt me worse than it hurts you!", and bring the yardstick down, and we never knew till it was too late, sovereignty being caprice, if he was going to leave his hand there and take the punishment himself or move it and leave us with a stinging rear end. The parallel between Daddy's behavior and Calvin's Deity's shouldn't be too hard to discern.
Pretty mild stuff as child abuse goes, but child abuse nonetheless, and it's visited on generation after generation if not stopped.Nota bene: my father was not a Calvinist, i.e. in terms of his intellectual, systematic theology. However, he was raised by a rather religiously rigid mother who loved but was alienated from his largely absent, often intoxicated father.
Anyhow, my siblings and I all went to live with my aunt and uncle in Kirkland, who had four girls of their own, the youngest then (I think) 12 and the oldest already in college. They did a yeoman job of subbing for my parents, but in light of the coroner's injunction to "be a mother to [my] brothers and sister" I spent my high-school years, when I should have been doing the adolescent rebellion thing and dating and getting a driver's license and whatnot, instead fighting tooth-and-nail over how my aunt and uncle were misraising my siblings [subconsciously, "my kids", the ones I should have been mothering]. My displeasure, even horror, was not assuaged by the fact that my aunt and uncle were fairly conservative suburban Presbyterians, and I now had to go to a church where most of the people called themselves Christians but planned to vote for Nixon (a contradiction in terms from my upbringing's vantage point) and where those who were not into a combination of Calvinism and Birchism were into a combination of prosperity theology [e.g. double tithing based on some proof text in Deuteronomy that promised God would multiply it back in your face] and theological absurdities like proving Catholicism was wrong because "the Catholics claim that the Pope is a direct descendant of Peter, but Peter was a Jew and the Pope is Italian"
(delivered with a straight face and, I think, an innocent heart!). My 9-year-old sister's children's choir regaled the congregation with a eucharistic offering that went Sons of God, hear his holy Word,
Gather round the table of the Lord,
Eat his body, drink his blood,
And we'll sing a song of love!
Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelu-u-jah!
and I began to think Rose Hill Presbyterian was some sort of cannibalistic cult. (They were even pro-War, a lot of them. My dad had been a cofounder of Seattle's branch of CALCAV [Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam] and I took it as more or less given and obvious that you couldn't be for Jesus and for the War at the same time.)
Or, it began to occur to me, maybe Jesus was on their side. I can see now, looking back, that two magical-thinking scenarios were vying for supremacy in my heart. One was that I was somehow (I knew not how, but somehow) responsible for my parents' death. I knew I hadn't done anything to cause it, but perhaps I had believed the wrong things and thus caused God to cause it. The other was that somehow I could bargain with God and make him undo it.God, why can't you take one of my legs and give me one of my parents back?
Consciously I knew this would not work, but it didn't keep me from thinking it and praying it and trying to make it happen. I thank God I didn't take the opportunity to get into certain overtly suicidal kinds of bargaining.
But the notion that I was believing the wrong things took hold, and the first thing I thought might be a mistake was Jesus. Maybe Jesus was my problem. So for several years I tried to prepare myself (or at least told myself I was trying to prepare myself) to convert to Judaism. I liked Judaism, too, because it came with several extra languages appended, and by this time I was a raging glottophile. I had decided to devote myself primarily to Albanian — my life goal (to achieve which I had worked out a detailed plan) was to become the United States' leading authority on the Albanian language and literature and the chair of the University of Chicago Linguistics Department when Eric Hamp retired; I even toyed with applying to a college in Kosovo. But I saw no reason not to learn a bunch of Hebrew and Yiddish and Aramaic and Dzhudezmo ["Ladino"] while I was at it.
This brings us to about the year 1971, my junior year in high school.
The tale will be continued in another post after I rest my fingers (I tell you, autobiography is liable to give you carpal tunnel syndrome)!