This could also be titled "Jack Chick Made Me a Pagan!" Well, no, not exactly. But therein lies the tale…
I found a copy of this poisonous thing the other day, and it sparked some memories. Not good ones, either. Like so many pagans, I'm an ex-Catholic. Well, according to the Church I'm a "lapsed" Catholic, because they think that baptism has put an indelible watermark on my soul or something. That reminds me- I have to officially return my confirmation name to the Vatican. I don't need it any more. But I digress…
Puberty was rough on me- bad enough that I was already struggling with my faith, then we add hormones to the mix. I was troubled enough that church didn't seem to mean the same thing to me that it did to other people, that it was boring and empty, that my mind wandered and it was generally a trial to sit through Mass. I was sure it was something wrong with me, you see.
I'd recently started getting interested in the occult, and that certainly didn't help… especially since there were the least little hints that there was something there that Catholicism couldn't offer me. And we learned in CCD that thoughts could be sinful, and I was having sinful thoughts all the time. Then we add in sex; not just thoughts, but jacking off. I knew it was sinful, but it's not like it stopped me or anything. Confessional was no help- I never could bring myself to talk about everything that bothered me, or the fact that it was bothering me, and the absolution never felt real anyway.
So we have this (mostly subconscious) ferment going on inside my poor little adolescent head. One fine summer night at Rehoboth Beach, I was walking with the rest of my family along the Boardwalk, when I happened to look down and see that tract lying on the sand by the pilings. Intrigued, I jumped down and retrieved it. I'd never seen anything like it before- if I'd had any idea what lay inside the covers, I probably would have set it on fire then urinated on the ashes.
If it had only been one of Jack Chick's other little packets of hate and bile- one of his more pointed awful rants about the Jews or the Masons or something- it probably wouldn't have hit me the way it did. But this one was about some basic, average schmuck, full of the normal range of human foibles, the same kind of lust and selfishness that lurks inside most of us. Not that he ever did anything much about it… And, just to make it worse, he seemed to have the same sort of boredom in church that I did. Oh, yeah, he goes to Hell in the end- surprise! Because, of course, he died before he could be "saved"… from being a human being with all those nasty urges and stuff.
Well, that just gave a humongous wallop to the hornet's nest of religious angst inside me, and all H… well, it got bad. I was convinced I was in the handbasket for good, because I didn't really believe in Jesus so I couldn't be saved by him. Yep, adolescent hormones were corroding my brains, all right. This quandary led to a lot of really entertaining occurrences in my life- insomnia, nightmares, bad behavior, worse grades. At one point, my parents even convinced our family pediatrician to do some after-hours counseling with me (I'm pretty sure they couldn't afford a therapist). Nothing really helped. I suppose I was having my very own little nervous breakdown.
Then, one night while I was wrestling with my demons instead of sleeping, I started applying reason to the situation. If I didn't believe in Jesus, why did I believe in Hell? Maybe my thoughts were natural, and I didn't need to be saved from them. Maybe Catholicism (and Christianity in general) felt so empty for me because it was wrong for me. Sure, I didn't know what was right for me yet… but maybe that was OK, too.
I like to think that at that point I heaved a huge sigh, muttered "oh, good," and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. Could be… my memories are vague (not to mention influenced by my internal propagandist). I don't think it was that dramatic, but it still marks the beginning of my climb out of the pit. Thanks to Jack Chick, I can say, with tongue in cheek. But I like to think that Someone- my Co-Walker, Trickster, it doesn't matter- arranged that synchronicity, to get me out of the trap I was in. Certainly, it was a horrible thing to go through- but sometimes the way down is the way out. I still had to wrestle with demons for a long while… some of them aren't really gone even yet. It was quite some time before I got more focused on my spirituality, and became something other than a relaxed agnostic. And I've mostly gotten beyond my rabidly anti-Catholic phase.
So that's how my feet were set on the road. That's how I became an infidel.
Comments