Religious experiences
I was walking home late one night after a concert, some time around 1am, and it was dark. I didn’t live in the worst area, but it was bad enough that I would take my earphones out for the ten minute walk from the bus stop. About a week earlier there was a stabbing at a nearby restaurant, Ara Hova—a jealous boyfriend ended up killing his ex-girlfriend after a fight, and it was all over the news.
About halfway home, parked next to the mailbox on the super short block between these parallel streets that started with F, I could see a car parked beneath a rare streetlight. There were five men in the car, and one sitting in the back right was turned around staring at me. I started getting very nervous, but for some ridiculous reason I didn’t even cross the street and just kept walking.
When I passed the car’s rear bumper, the driver’s side door opened and a very tall man stepped out. He was speaking to me in French, but I was still shaking off my former Nova Scotian lack thereof and only caught a few words: “knife,” “killed,” and “danger.” I out-of-mind frantically apologized in awful Franglais and asked him to repeat himself; if I was being threatened I figured it was important I knew the terms. “Oh you’re English,” he said. Then he gave me a pamphlet and started talking about God.
On the pamphlet’s cover I saw “Jehovah’s Witness.” My mind slowly started coming back and I heard the tall man talking about how the stabbing represents the lack of God in today’s society, and was telling me about their church just down one of the parallel streets. My panic immediately turned to ecstatic joy, I enthusiastically shook his hand, and told him that I would definitely see him on the weekend; anything I could do to leave immediately. I had to stop a block later because my legs were shaking.
The first Jehovah’s Witness I met was in elementary school. We were at the age where boys chased girls, but when we caught them we didn’t know what to do because we still thought they were “icky.” This new girl moved in next door to the girl with leukemia; the thing I remember most about her was a complete lack of punctuation. She would write an entire page of words without commas or periods. She also decided that I, specifically, needed to be chased—but when she caught me, she knew what to do. Unfortunately it wasn’t the kind of thing they make growing up movies about, but incredibly strong punches to my arm. For years I thought the main tenants of being a Jehovah’s Witness were violence and a lacking punctuation.
When the Christian element left our family for good, my Mom fully rediscovered her Judaism and started taking my brother and I to synagogue. We had the distinction of being Lower Sackville’s only Jewish family, and when my brother graduated to high school I was the only Jew at Cavalier Drive Elementary. They were legally obliged to put up Chanukah signs for my benefit alone.
Before that we used to celebrate Christmas and Easter—I liked Christmas. Unlike Chanukah, it was gifts sans prayer; but Easter always confounded me. A jolly fat man travelling the world giving presents made sense, but a giant bunny who left chocolate eggs in a basket filled with plastic tinsel never did. Then there was that one year that I had a dream the Easter Bunny left me a Mario tee-shirt and I was so excited then equally disappointed when I woke up and it wasn’t there. It took me a few months before I truly believed someone hadn’t put it there, then removed it before I woke up as some kind of evil prank.
In grade seven I did particularly well on the Pascal math competition and was ranked 7th amongst Nova Scotian students. First place was a girl who went to my synagogue. It was decided that I was going to have a Bar Mitzvah, and that meant learning at least basic Hebrew, so I went to a few classes with First Place. One day before class we were all hanging out and First Place was telling about the week earlier, how she made out with someone in the coat room at a funeral. For the rest of the night I couldn’t think of anything but “people actually make out in coat rooms?! At funerals?! And they’re better than me at math?!”
My first experience with religion was a family friend, Tina. She was a Christadelphian and taught Bible studies, so I learned about the Old Testament. It didn’t go so well for since I couldn’t get past the idea of Adam and Eve populating the world. I was old enough to know that incest was wrong and couldn’t understand how an entire world’s worth of people could be formed that way and still be healthy. “Once Able was killed, that left Adam, Eve, and Cain. Did Eve and Cain have a baby? Isn’t it wrong to have a baby with your son? After the flood, didn’t they have to start all over again? How is it possible that everyone isn’t a genetic abnormality?”
In University I took a course on The Bible as Literature, and it was one of my absolute favourites. I didn’t write a single paper afterwards that didn’t include The Bible in the Works CIted list, and all those allusions I never understood suddenly made sense. In class the professor would read a bit, and then we’d discuss its implication within the world of literature. One day we did the book of Job and it was time for discussion. I’d never read Job and was confused so I raised my hand:
Me: So God and the Devil were just hanging out one day and decided to make a bet?
Prof: Yes
Me:Then God tortures Job, kills his animals, destroys his home, and eventually his family?
Prof: Yes
Me: And by the end, because he never lost his faith, God gives him newer better everything?
Prof: Yes
Me: His original family is still dead?
Prof: Yes
Me: So the moral is have faith in God, and one day you might get rewarded with a better family?
One summer the family headed to Kingston for my cousin Natalie’s Bat Mitzvah. I hadn’t been to Synagogue for about seven years at that point, but while I wasn’t feeling the whole “religion” thing, I still automatically covered my head when I heard Hebrew. Natalie’s awesome and I was happy to be the proud cousin until I was informed it was an Orthodox synagogue—men and women weren’t allowed to be in the same room. The idea is that women menstruate so they’re dirty, and they distract men from their prayer. I wanted no part of that and spent most of the time looking after our dog, Shaina, outside.
At one point I got sick of it all and decided I wanted to see my cousin on stage. I went sneaking around until I found a room occupied only by a very Orthodox-looking man: curly hair, beard, and sideburns. He looked startled and slightly ashamed when he turned around, but I quickly explained that I was just trying to find a way to see my cousin. Turns out he was Natalie’s grandfather (we’d never met) and was also looking for a place to see her, so we took turns peering through a crack in the door while the other kept watch. I officially renounced Judaism the week later.
The day the Mormons came to town I was home alone with Shaina, waiting another hour or so for my friend to come pick me up. Shaina was yapping from the doorbell so I picked her up, opened the door, and was greeted by two of the most clean men I’ve seen in my life. They wanted to talk, and I was bored, so I said “sure.” We spent the next 45 minutes in my door frame talking about religion, the entire time I had Shaina in my arms.
I have a healthy respect and curiosity for all religions and, in between cheesy jokes about “how lucky we are that they had cameras back then!” I learned a lot. But I was bored and listening only goes so far, so I started asking a lot of questions. I developed a theory, based only on what they told me, that their text actually referred to three separate deities. One was adamant that I was wrong, but the other said “yeah…” and was very silent for a while. Later on I was questioning their reasoning behind their faith, and why they were Mormons. I was comparing similarities between other religions, mentioned a few inconsistencies of their’s, and spoke about parental pressures. Mr. Yeah from before stopped his silence and started asking me questions about my interpretations. He kept saying things like “that makes a lot of sense.”
At this point the other guy looked vaguely panicked and said they had to go. He wanted to give me a copy of their Bible, but I refused telling him that I’d never get around to looking at it and didn’t want to waste the paper. But, luckily, I had an extra copy of the Torah (this was a bluff, I had no copies) if he wanted to explore some of the themes we had been discussing. There was a fumbling of ties, and he eventually refused on the same grounds I gave him. A couple days later I was headed to school and saw them walking down the street towards out house. “Mom! Don’t bother answering the doorbell, it’s just the Mormons!” I found out later that night they skipped right by our house and never visited again.
In college I wrote for the school newspaper. My first column was a silly examination of the Ten Commandments and how their moralistic implications were largely irrelevant in today’s society. The fact that it made any kind of sense, let alone poignancy, was a complete fluke, but I suddenly had strangers asking if I was “that guy who wrote that article on the Ten Commandments” and saying it was the only thought-provoking thing in the entire paper. So I was offered a regular “thought-provoking” column and was promoted to co-editor. I ended up refusing to keep office hours, wrote puff pieces for the local tattoo/piercing parlour in exchange for free work, and used my credentials to interview a few of my favourite musicians and authors. Then I resigned.
Also in college, I met a friend named Dany. He was very Catholic and an amazing illustrator—we used to have long discussions about faith and art. Even though I didn’t believe a word he said—and he knew that—I was the only person who respected that his beliefs were real to him, and I was the only person he could talk to about it. I once wrote an article comparing Jesus (real) cool to Fonzie (tacky) cool and, as a present, Dany drew me a two-part comic strip involving me, Jesus, and Happy Days. It finishes with Jesus yelling “hurts doesn’t it, bitch?!” at the crucifixion (future Jesus and I were visiting on my time-travelling couch) and blaming it on me.
A couple years ago I was headed to a band practice and saw a largish man get on the bus. I knew, even though I had an acoustic guitar already crushing me into my seat, he was going to choose the seat right next to me. Sure enough I was soon engaged in conversation and was trying to describe the kind of music we played. Then he asked if I played any gospel music, so I tried steering the conversation elsewhere and asked what he did. Turns out he was studying Christianity and was working as a missionary, so we started talking about God.
I made a few jokes about the way he was describing things, and we had a surprisingly fun conversation—he had an excellent sense of humour which downplayed the whole “he’s trying to save me” angle. At one point I looked up and realized I’d missed my bus stop, so told him I had to go and “I totally blame you for making me miss my stop.” He laughed, shook my hand, and said “and God blames you!”
I still have no idea what that means, but of all the times people have tried to “save” me it was easily the most entertaining.
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