When I was a kid I belonged to our church's youth organization, Pathfinders. This was like a merging of Boy Scouts/Girls Scouts, with lots of religious instruction thrown in. I had a love/hate relationship with Pathfinders. On the one hand, going on the many camping trips and outings they provided was a great way to get out of the house, sometimes for an entire weekend, and away from my stepdad's greedy hands. The downside, though, was that as freakish as I felt every day at school, I felt even more like a misfit when in the company of my peers who all came from such normal families.
My friend, Suz, didn't come from a normal family either. Or not normal in the church's context of "we don't eat meat, spend money on Sabbath, wear jewelry, dance, play cards, wear make-up, or go to movies." Suz's family was composed of your ordinary, everyday sinner. No hypocrisy there, as there was in my home where the king of the mountain made us attend church every week while he hogged the couch in his undies, watching TV. I happened to know that watching TV on the Sabbath was a huge no-no, but apparently he didn't care. He was willing to risk extra time in hell for doing so, and who was I to try to talk him out of it?
As far as I could tell, Suz didn't suffer guilt because of coming from a family of pagans. She could spend money on the Sabbath without batting an eye, but I couldn't. I had the good grace to feel deep guilt, even on those ocassions when the king of the mountain experienced a bout of selective amnesia and gave permission for me to desecrate the holy day by spending money. Usually, this was due to the fact that he was out of the cigarettes he needed for his filthy, going-to-hell-for-habit, which was another no-no I refrained from pointing out. To do so would have caused me to forfeit the rare treat of a Sabbath outing to the store, and as guilty as these outings made me feel, I wasn't so holy I'd risk him changing his mind.
At Pathfinders, Suz and I went through bouts of rebellion. I think it was being shoved together with so many goody-two-shoes that was our undoing. Something about their homemade clothes and clunky shoes brought out the worst in us. At the beginning of each meeting our Pathfinder leader, Mr. X, blew his whistle for us to line up at attention. (I could use his real name, but what if he reads this and sues me? I know the church doesn't believe in lawsuits, but what if he's a relapsed Adventist and wants to get back at me for what I'm about to write?) Something about the formality of this little routine, coupled with Mr. X's obvious uptightness (evidenced by his sweaty brow and hair trigger temper), cracked us up every time. There we stood, Suz and I, shoulders back, flat chests out, in our forest green uniforms with their standard middle of the knee hem, and something inside of us (sin, probably) burst into bloom.
We couldn't risk turning our heads to exhange glances, so we'd learned to peek at each other out of the corner of our eyes, waiting for just the perfect moment to play with Mr. X's mind. When he was still halfway down the line, one of us began making a sound much like air slowly leaking from a tire, by barely pursing our lips together. We practiced all the time--at her house, at mine, on the bus--for riling Mr. X was truly the highlight of our week. We got so good at it that he could be standing just a few kids away, demanding in that high voice he got whenever his patience was being tried to knock it off, and not have a clue as to who was making that irritating sound. We never got caught, much to our immense pride and satisfaction.
Mr. X lived with Mrs. X and their many offspring on the other side of my family's property. Our backyards were neatly delienated by a chain link fence. From the vantage point of my fort, I observed him puttering around his yard on Sundays, putting things to rights, expressing the same tsk-tsking manner that so amused Suz at I at Pathfinder meetings. Sometimes, watching him through slitted eyes (I loved to do this sometimes, for it made everything slightly out of focus), I couldn't help but wonder what made him the way he was. Not just his fusiness, exactly, but why was he so involved in the church? Why, when my own stepdad, teetering as he did so close to the brink of hell, never darkened its doors?
I suspect what I was trying to puzzle out in my 10, 12, 13 year old mind was: how come men seemed to come in only two categories: monsters or geeks? My own biological father was neither, he belonged in a class all by himself. But I thought of him as seldom as possible, preferring to focus on the few men (a science teacher, my best friend's dad, Mr. X) in my narrow universe. What made someone like my stepdad so mean and hateful? Why did he treat everyone like something nasty he'd stepped in, and couldn't scrape off the bottom of his shoe? Why was Mr. X so ineffectual? No one seemed to take him seriously, not even his wife. I'd observed her smiling indulgently in an absent minded way when he got all wound up about nothing. That smile said plain as day he's just a child, really, so I'll just smile and nod.
I think part of my needling Mr. X at Pathfinders stemmed from the fact that I could, safely. He wasn't going to beat me up or do unthinkable things to me. Here was a man who was not a bully. I bet he believed in all the church rules from the top of his balding head to the soles of his nerdy shoes, believed heart and soul. And so did I. Beneath my amusement at his intensity was a grudging respect, for we had this in common: we both wanted to please God. But that didn't stop me from continuing my little rebellions during Pathfinders, or even during church services.
Maybe I was trying to find out if God was safe, too.
