The view from 13


Now and then

My nephew Daniel starts high school next week. He's been wondering about what career he should pursue.

At a surprisingly early age he announced that he wanted to be a chef and has been taking cooking lessons ever since. One day he could very well own his own restaurant.

It is not that simple though. He's also talented at math, getting the highest score ever at a tri-county competition this year. His buddies call him Mathman. The idea of being a teacher has entered into the equation. I've suggested he combine both aspirations and consider bio-chemistry, which is to his generation what computer science was to mine.

Who knows? He might end up a soccer star. He was absolutely heroic in goal in a hard fought but losing battle in last year's league final.

During a discussion of these possibilities he asked what I wanted to be when I was his age. I had to tell him that at 13 I didn't think I had a future.

It was around my last year of elementary school that I was baptized as a Jehovah's Witness. I did this mostly to please my mother, who had converted to that peculiar faith a few years after I was born. As a young kid I absorbed their beliefs and as I grew older I realized Armageddon would probably disrupt any career plans I might have.

The Witnesses themselves were optimistic that my education could be put to good use after the end of the old world, rebuilding paradise. But I knew I was damned at the very moment of baptism. In the pre-dunking ceremony the overseer asked us to silently offer up a prayer to God, dedicating our lives to do His will. I couldn't do it.

Never in my life have I ever made a prayer. As soon as I could grasp the concept it seemed foolish. If Jehovah and Satan could read our thoughts why was this one way conversation necessary?

But it wasn't just a question of process. The substance of the deal bothered me more. Sometime soon I expected that all of my non believing friends and my non believing father were going to be blasted into dust by Jesus and his army of angels. The idea that only Witnesses would survive the end times, regardless of how good and kind hearted some heathens might be, seemed fundamentally unfair. I believed in God and thought He was an asshole.

At that age I didn't have the courage to not go through with the baptism. I faked it and in despair was reborn a hypocrite.

Life went on. Mom got sick and I stopped going to the Kingdom Hall. High school became my new community. Those were radical times and I became a 60s activist, eventually a socialist. If I exchanged one apocalyptic vision for another, at least I could say that most everyone deserved a better world, not just the chosen few.

I gave Daniel a very edited and I hope humourous version of this story. My point was simply there was no parallel between his situation and mine.

My brothers never got the indoctrination their older siblings did and both married into Catholicism. Their kids don't seem to have suffered from going through a religious based school system. At Dan's grade eight graduation his family, including Mom and I, were proud to see him given an award for Christian fellowship.

Mom left the Witnesses during her struggle with schizophrenia and now has her own private religion. She looks with joy at all her children, grand children and great grand children, regardless of our varied spiritual, agnostic and atheistic perspectives.

I hope Daniel finds satisfaction in his life's work, whatever he might cook up.



Posted: Sun - August 28, 2005 at 04:51 PM          

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