I’ve been thinking about doing a series of posts about the people in my life I have learned, and continue to learn from. This is the first of however many posts I manage to get out before I run out of blogging steam again.
P is one of my closest friends, I’ve known him since I was eight years old. P and I were friends in primary and secondary school. P taught me to be true to my beliefs and not go along with the crowd.
Class and school prayer was common in both my primary and secondary schools. Each morning in my secondary school we would all gather in the assembly hall. The principal would stand at the front on a box made of MDF sheets nailed together and painted over and speak into a microphone. Mr. Moroney would stand on his box and announce some news, denounce some recent bad behaviour and then lead us in some group prayer; the “Our Father” if I remember correctly. We would say the prayer along with him and all bless ourselves together at the end.
I think we were about 15 when P and I both agreed we were atheists and that we didn’t believe in all of this religion. You can’t really blame us, all we were given was dry religious acts and an atmosphere that discouraged questioning. The hypocrisy didn’t help either. My school was an ugly place. I would physically wretch with nerves on the cold mornings as I walked to school from my sister’s house. The place was horrible, nothing beautiful could thrive there.
Everything had originally been set up nice, we had seen videos of the school after it first opened – the science lab was fully equipped, every desk with a gas supply for the Bunsen burners and a sink, the language room was set up so students could plug in headphones at their desks to help them learn, the metalwork and woodwork rooms with their large workbenches. By the time my generation got to the place it was broken to pieces, doors and desks vandalised. The gas and water supply was cut off from the desks in science lab, they were just desks with weird useless appendages now. The language room was now just more desks, painted with layer upon layer of an ugly maroon paint, with weird hollow metal boxes at the top where the school had removed the electronics. The worktops in the woodwork and metalwork rooms had been hacked at with chisels so much that there wasn’t a smooth surface left on them. The whole place seemed dirty and broken.
I was never seriously bullied but it seemed like attacks could come from anywhere – random abuse from people who didn’t even know my name. I was walking back to school after lunch one day when an older boy cycled in front of me, turned, spat in my face and laughed. He never even got off his bike, just kept cycling on up to the school. I didn’t know who he was, he didn’t know who I was but that was how things were. Many of the students just seemed to hate other students and they didn’t need a good reason for that. People would just throw things at strangers “for the laugh”.
Where was I? Hypocrisy, yes. Anyway, all us students would line up each morning – the bullied and the bullies, the vandals, the boy that spit in my face, P and I and we would all recite “Our Father, who art in heaven…”, like we were all brothers and sisters or something, like we were all following God. So P and I decided we’d had enough. And here is what P taught me: one morning I kept silent as usual during prayer, my own little rebellious protest, but at the end I went to bless myself like everyone else. P was behind me and he nudged me, “What are you blessing yourself for?” he said. I was blessing myself because it was easier to see someone refuse to bless themselves than it was to see that their lips weren’t moving. I was blessing myself to fit in.
P taught me to live out my beliefs and not simply go along with the crowd. It’s ironic, but this step into atheism helped to lead me to God. I rejected crowd-following dry religious acts and would not be satisfied with a mindless religion. I could not be satisfied by anything less than a living God. Who knows how things would have turned out if I had been happy to just go along with the crowd keeping my “real life” in one box and my little god in another? When I catch myself settling for dry heartless religion I think of P giving me a nudge in the back.
The last time I saw P he told me he was lost. He has so many questions and I only hope that I can help him somehow. I hope I can show him not to care what the crowd thinks and to seek God with all his heart.