This is a post I've had kicking around in my head for years now. Every time I was out hiking, or on a walk, or doing anything that let my thoughts wander, I often found my thoughts returning to religion. (And small wonder. Religion the biggest philosophical subject there is. And how we respond to the religious question defines much of who we are.)
I had, as most people do, volumes of things I wanted to say on the subject, built up over a lifetime of listening, pondering, reacting, and my own life exerperience. I had long wanted to write something on the subject, but I it was hard to know how to organize my thoughts.
With every new hike I took, this unwritten post would get longer and longer.
And yet it still was not exhaustive of everything that needed to be said on the subject.
It is probably impossible to write a nice clean piece defending agnosticism. To argue for agnosticism, you have to argue against every single religion out there, and refute the arguments for each of them. And then once you've finished with the religious community, you then have to turn in the other direction and argue against atheism. It's pre-destined to become one big muddled mess of an argument.
So why then take a bite at the apple at all?
Many of my former Christian school classmates have turned into agnostics or atheists as they've grown up. And to the best of my knowledge, none of them have felt the need to write a huge blog post justifying it to everyone. Why should I?
I don't know. The urge to spout off my two-cents about everything. The intellectual challenge of engaging the biggest philosophical issue of all time. The need to get it off my chest once and for all. The desire to try and tackle this fully in one post instead of hinting at it in various other posts about religion.
This is probably as good as any place to say that nothing on this blog is a polished piece of writing. Every single post on this blog is a rough draft. What it's a rough draft for I don't know yet. Most likely nothing. But every post represents a few thoughts that could with some refinement someday become a better piece of writing. This post as well is a rough draft. I'll just try and put all my ideas down into writing. Some day I might pick up some of the same ideas and refine them a bit into a more coherent argument. But for now I'm just getting it out of my system.
As Kurt Vonnegut might say this post is destined to be a failure. It has to be. To argue against every single religion out there, and to engage against every single argument for faith, is destined to become a huge muddle of a post.
And yet, in another sense, the entire argument for agnosticism is simplicity itself.
Let me start with a statement that is uncontroversial.
The majority of religions are false.
No one can deny this. Even if we grant that there is one true religion out there, that means that every other single religion must, by definition, be false.
Which means that the vast majority of people on this earth, past and present, believe in a religion which is not true. Many of them believe it strongly. Some of them have dedicated their whole lives to it. But since all the religions can not simultaneously be true, this means that undeniably most people are believing in something false.
When you add up all the different religions out there (and the factions within those religions) the odds that the religion you happened to be born into is the one true religion are extremely poor. In order to justify that the one particular religion is true, and all the rest are false, there has to be some very convincing proof.
And does this kind of proof exist: the kind that convinces you beyond a shadow of a doubt that one religion is true and all others false?
Well, I guess everyone will have to answer that question for themselves. My guess is that almost no one will say that they know their religion is true beyond a shadow of a doubt. Some people might go so far as to say that they are mostly sure their religion is true, but even these people, when you talk with them, in my experience really fail to give you much of a convincing argument.
Often what you will hear is an appeal to faith or personal spiritual experiences. They believe that they feel God's presence in their heart somewhere, and so even though they can't logically prove that there's a God, they feel certain he exists.
The problem with this, however, is that all religions will say this. So if you grant it for one faith, you have to grant it for all. And they can't all be true.
The Mormon missionaries, who I used to come to my apartment in Japan, and who I used to debate weekly, relied heavily on this. I would point out to them all the reasons I thought Mormonism couldn't possibly be true. They wouldn't be able to give me an answer. But they would go home and pray about it, and they would come back more convinced than ever that they were right. It wasn't something they could logically prove to me, but they felt God was speaking to them.
And they weren't looking to convert me to Mormonism by logic either. They wanted me to read the book of Mormon, and then to just pray about it, and to ask God for myself whether it was true or not. And they felt confident that if I did this, God would move my heart and show me that it was true.
And the scary thing is that they might have been right.
Personally I think the evidence that Mormonism is a fabricated religion is just overwhelming. But from a psychological perspective, if you sit down over the book of Mormon and pray about it, what you're doing is consciously putting an idea into your head and telling your brain to focus on it. And then the next day it should be no surprise that you feel like you have a little voice in your head telling you that it's all true.
But if you still don't believe, here's the beauty of it, it means that you weren't praying hard enough. Or in the right way. Or that your heart wasn't open to recieve God. And then you have to pray again. And is it any surprise that if you do it enough times, eventually you start to believe it?
I don't buy it, but lots of other people do apparently. Otherwise the Mormon missionaries wouldn't be doing it. Otherwise no one would ever have converted into Mormonism in the first place.
It's the same way with the old Christian prayer, "God I believe. Help thou my unbelief."
You think that the element of unbelief is somehow a defect in you that needs to be cured. So you pray to God to help you. And if it doesn't work at first, then the problem must be with your praying or with your heart. And you pray harder. And you try and train your brain to focus on God and not to linger on all those doubts. And lone behold, the doubt eventually disappears and you feel God working in your heart.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Perhaps the best way to structure my argument is to start from my own personal experience, and work out from there.
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My Experience
My own religious experience is pretty boring and typical, but perhaps that's precisely the reason it deserves to be recounted--because it represents what so many other people feel.
I was born into a Christian family, attended Church regularly, and went to Christian schools as a child. I accepted uncritically everything I was told as a young child.
I remember once, I must have been 6 or 7, asking my mother how I could be sure that Christianity was the true religions with all the other religions out there. I wasn't asking this to challenge her. I just assumed she had the answer, and she would give it to me. And she remarked on what a good question it was, and what a thoughtful child I was, but I never did get an answer to that question.
But I put it aside and didn't think about it anymore. All the adults around me were Christians. I didn't even know anyone who wasn't a Christian. I assumed that any doubts I had must be some sort of defect in me, and that once I was old enough and mature enough, like all my teachers and parents and Sunday school leaders, I would somehow know everything that they did, and understand all the reasons for Christianity that they were so sure about, but never could really articulate.
A bit later, in second grade, I decided to set up various tests for God, as kids do. "God if you're really out there, make this sandwich turn into chocolate." Or something like that. Of course none of them really worked.
It sounds stupid and I guess it was. But if you're brought up on Bible stories of God doing miraculous things all the time to prove his existence to the Israelites, as a kid it makes a certain degree of sense to try and test it out yourself, and I would wager that just about everyone who came from a religious background has similar stories in their childhood.
After the first few failures I decided (as most kids do) that I was asking too much, and that it wasn't reasonable to expect God to perform huge miracles on my behalf just to prove his existence to a 2nd grade kid. So I lowered the bar and tried to ask God to do things that wouldn't put him out too much. I started to ask him to do stuff that had about a 50/50 chance of succeeding anyway, like "When I go downstairs, have the first sentence that my parents say to me be a question." And sure enough, God did a lot better on these types of tests, and eventually I convinced myself that he must exist after all.
Later that year, in Bible class, I remember my 2nd grade teacher telling us the story of doubting Thomas. And Jesus said to Thomas, "Thomas, you have believe because you have seen. Blessed are those who haven't seen, and still believe." And then she said to the class, "That means us. We are blessed because we believe in Jesus even though we haven't seen him." And I felt incredibly guilty at this point, because I had only believed in God after I had tested him first, and thus excluded myself from this blessed group. From that point on, I thought that believing in Jesus in the face of contrary evidence was somehow a sort of virtue to be aspired to. And if you allowed logic to somehow make you doubt faith, then that was a fault in your character.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Comic Books and Me
Originally supposed to be a series in 4 parts, I didn't even finish the first post. At the time I started doing this I was on a comic book kick, but soon after I started writing this I decided I had better things to do.
(A series in four parts. For no particular reason other than I felt like it. Which is always a good enough reason for blogging).
As a child I was always in love with comics. Most children are. I guess it's not hard to understand the appeal. It's halfway between reading a book and watching a cartoon, both of which are things most kids like doing. There's no need to over-analyze the appeal.
There was a time when I might have added something about the connection between the Y chromosome and the appeal of comic books, but my time in Japan and exposure to Shojo comics culture has taught me otherwise. Girls can like comic books just as much as boys, they just need comic books that are target to them. (Comic book companies in the US are missing out on a huge demographic here. They could really take a lesson from Japan. But that's a different subject for a different post).
When I was a kid I would read anything and everything if it was in a comic format. Even educational or Public service announcement anti-drug comics I devoured. (Yet another thing the US could learn from Japan, where educational comic books are very popular, and kids actually are more than happy enough to read them. I'm not saying we don't have them in the US, but they're not mass printed like in Japan. US educators have missed the boat on that one).
Access to comic books was another issue altogether. The Sunday paper comics was one of the highlights of my week. I loved reading the weekly PIX (Picture Bible) from Sunday School.
For a long time the only proper "comic book" I was able to get my hands on was "The Peanuts Treasury" in our school library, which I checked out of the library numerous times and read to the point of memorization...All without really ever thinking "The Peanuts" were all that funny. I just loved reading comics.
Super hero comics were out of the question for me, even though this is a hobby most of my peers got started on at a young age. My parents disapproved of the violent content and were not going to buy me any. I had little money to buy comics on my own. (My allowance for most of elementary school was 50 cents a week, which even back in the late 80s would have meant saving up for a couple weeks to buy just one comic). And I didn't have transportation to any places where I knew comic books were being sold.
(A series in four parts. For no particular reason other than I felt like it. Which is always a good enough reason for blogging).
As a child I was always in love with comics. Most children are. I guess it's not hard to understand the appeal. It's halfway between reading a book and watching a cartoon, both of which are things most kids like doing. There's no need to over-analyze the appeal.
There was a time when I might have added something about the connection between the Y chromosome and the appeal of comic books, but my time in Japan and exposure to Shojo comics culture has taught me otherwise. Girls can like comic books just as much as boys, they just need comic books that are target to them. (Comic book companies in the US are missing out on a huge demographic here. They could really take a lesson from Japan. But that's a different subject for a different post).
When I was a kid I would read anything and everything if it was in a comic format. Even educational or Public service announcement anti-drug comics I devoured. (Yet another thing the US could learn from Japan, where educational comic books are very popular, and kids actually are more than happy enough to read them. I'm not saying we don't have them in the US, but they're not mass printed like in Japan. US educators have missed the boat on that one).
Access to comic books was another issue altogether. The Sunday paper comics was one of the highlights of my week. I loved reading the weekly PIX (Picture Bible) from Sunday School.
For a long time the only proper "comic book" I was able to get my hands on was "The Peanuts Treasury" in our school library, which I checked out of the library numerous times and read to the point of memorization...All without really ever thinking "The Peanuts" were all that funny. I just loved reading comics.
Super hero comics were out of the question for me, even though this is a hobby most of my peers got started on at a young age. My parents disapproved of the violent content and were not going to buy me any. I had little money to buy comics on my own. (My allowance for most of elementary school was 50 cents a week, which even back in the late 80s would have meant saving up for a couple weeks to buy just one comic). And I didn't have transportation to any places where I knew comic books were being sold.
My Friends
Some people go through life with lots of friends, and it’s hard to keep track of them all. People like me have only a handful of close friends at any one time, and I can write it down as a narrative.
I was painfully shy in pre-school and kindergarten, to the point of not being able to talk to any of the other children at school. I had no friends these first few years.
Then, in first grade, TJ befriended me. Every time I was on the playground by myself, he would always call out to me, “Hey, Joel, over here. Come play with us.”
I had no idea what I had done to deserve this kindness, and was overjoyed simply to have a friend. He once mentioned that our friendship all started when I joined him in some sort of make believe fishing game, but I never remembered this, and the event had obviously not made a big enough impression on me to stick into my memory.
Although TJ was the same age as me, I treated him like a big brother. I would follow him around and do what he did. When our class played any sort of sport, I always called out, “I’m on TJ’s team.” I embarrassed him occasionally this way, but he didn’t seem to mind too much.
The next year, David joined our group. David had been TJ’s friend from Kindergarten, but they didn’t hang out in first grade because they were in separate homeroom classes. In second grade the three of us were all in the same homeroom, and the three of us hung out together all the time.
But the following year, TJ was in a different homeroom class. This doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but at the time it was the beginning of the end of our friendship. We never had a big fight or anything dramatic like that. We just gradually drifted apart. We only saw each other at recess, and then he was always playing games with the kids from his homeroom class, and I felt more comfortable with the kids from my homeroom.
I tried to make an effort to spend time with TJ during recess, and hang out with the other homeroom class, but I felt more and more on the outside. David, on the other hand, made new friends with Matt and Josh. And I was soon sucked into this new circle as well.
Matt was someone I had always liked, and wanted to get to know better. He was neat, organized, and was a good student without being a nerd about it. And he was really funny. He had a way of making us all roll on the floor with laughter with his sharp one-liners or monologues.
This new group of friends was completely centered around Matt. The rest of us didn’t care so much for each other, but enjoyed being around Matt. David and I had been friends before of course, but we didn’t get along well with Josh. Josh had been Matt’s friend from the previous year, and I think he saw the rest of us as impinging on that friendship. He treated us with a certain coldness and distance.
Josh was very loud, opinionated, and had a sometimes abrasive personality. Matt picked up on this, and loved to egg Josh on about one thing or another, just to see Josh’s reaction. Josh tolerated it from Matt, but would get absolutely infuriated when the rest of us would start in. More than once I remember him stomping away from us on the playground, too furious to speak.
One example of this: In 4th or 5th grade Josh had a special kind of retainer that involved rubber bands going from one part of his jaw to another. He could only open his mouth a certain distance. If he opened up too wide, the rubber bands would snap, and he would have to spend five minutes in front of the mirror getting everything back in place.
Unfortunately for Josh, quietness was not his strength. Matt immediately picked up on this, and would egg Josh on about something until Josh would shout, the bands would snap, and Josh would have to go the bathroom mirror to fix everything.
I thought this was the funniest thing in the world and continued this game long after the Matt had gotten sick of it. For years afterwards, I think Josh held a bit of a grudge about that.
But in 5th grade, the unthinkable happened. Matt’s parents decided they could no longer afford private school, and Matt told us he wouldn’t at our school next year. We were all devastated.
Matt himself knew that the other 3 of us were only held together by him. “What really sucks,” he remarked to me one day, “is that after I’m gone, the group will be over. You and David will still be friends, but you and Josh won’t still hang around.”
I thought the same thing would happen. But instead the opposite did. Once Matt was gone, Josh became my best friend. Matt had always dominated things, so I never really got a chance to get to know Josh. But once Matt was gone, Josh and I began to hit it off very well. He was loud, and he loved talking, and many people thought of him as annoying, but since I was quiet, shy, and incredibly introverted, we seemed like a perfect fit. He had the courage to walk up and talk to anyone in a way I never could, be it the most popular girl or the strictest teacher.
In those days we were a lot more religious and a somewhat given to the middle-school habit of hyperbole, and once Josh commented to me, “You know, I believe God sent Matt to another school so that the two of us could become better friends.” And I said that I had often thought the same thing.
Throughout middle school, David, Josh and I were always together. Many of the rest of our classmates thought we were geeks, but I didn’t care. If you have friends, who cares if you’re popular or not?
It wasn’t until high school that I really felt on the outside. Our school, Ada Christian, had been the same small group of people from kindergarten all the way through 8th grade. But in 9th grade, we started at “Christian High.” Suddenly the world I had known since first grade was shattered, and we were now in a big school, with classmates from all of the area middle schools.
I assumed the 3 of us would go through high school just like we did in middle school; maybe not popular, but strong friends. Josh, however, wanted to make a break for it and try for popularity.
The first day of school he inserted himself into a group of jocks from Ada Christian, and tried to make himself part of the conversation. David and I were somewhat confused by this, but nevertheless followed him into the new circle. Josh was less than pleased. “What are you guys doing?” he asked. “Quit following me everywhere I go. This is high school now. We need to go out and make new friends.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re talking to a group of people from Ada Christian.”
“People from Ada Christian that I wasn’t friends with yet,” he answered.
I wanted to tell him that he had the past nine years to make friends with other kids from Ada, and if he hadn’t done it yet, there was no use starting now. Also those kids had spent the past 9 years making fun of him, so why did he want to try and break into their circle?
But I kept my mouth shut. He was right. The three of us couldn’t spend the next four years only hanging out with each other. We had to expand our circle.
Making friends in high school is difficult, especially if you’re by yourself. Most people spent most of freshman year still in their middle school groups, and only gradually expanded their circle. The cliques were grouped still grouped by the old schools. It’s rough to try and force your way into another clique of kids that have know each other since elementary school.
But I wasn’t by myself. I was with David, which was worse than being by myself. As shy and socially awkward as I was, David was even worse. The two of us were lost without Josh, and David would have been completely lost without me. He followed behind me silently as I tried to integrate myself into one clique after another. It was bad enough trying to force myself in. I couldn’t do it with David next to me.
All I really wanted was just a place to stand. I wasn’t much of a talker, and I didn’t really care if I was involved in the conversation or not. I just wanted to be able to stand in a group and feel like I was part of it. I would walk up to a group and try and take my place in the circle. David would follow behind me, and sometimes stand in the circle with me, sometimes just stand behind me the whole time. I hoped to just slip in un-noticed, but I felt like David was a huge weight I was dragging around. And 9th grade students are very unforgiving. Sometimes we were blatantly told to get lost. Other times someone would ask me coldly, “Yes, may I help you?” or gesturing to David, “Who’s your friend?”
I guess I should have just had a talk with David the way Josh had talked to the two of us on the first day. But I liked to avoid these kind of direct conversations, and so I tried to settle the problem by just ignoring him, and hoping he would get the hint. I would speak to him as little as possible, and try and let him know I didn’t want him following me around. I could see the hurt in his eyes, but he never said anything about it, and eventually stopped trailing me around.
The three of us still kept in touch, and every now and again would get together on the weekend but it was maybe three times in a year. None of us really found any new groups of friends that we were comfortable in, but we roamed around from different groups on our own.
By about Senior year, an eternity later, I seemed on the verge of breaking in and gaining acceptance. I didn’t know why then and I don’t know why now. I was by no means the big man on campus, or a ladies man, but I started hanging out with the popular crowds, and they seemed to tolerate my presence. I started to get invitations to parties and social outings. I was on the homecoming court, voted the friendliest person in the class, and asked to give a speech at senior chapel.
Josh by contrast had entered senior year bitterer than ever. He had tried so hard for three years to force his way into the popular circles, and the harder he tried, the more they abused him and made fun of him.
Since he was the one who had broken up the three of us, he was well aware of the irony of our fates four years later, and I think on some level believed that it was Karma or divine retribution. He repeatedly apologized to me for the way he had treated me freshman year.
I was still friends with him, and valued him as one of the only friends I could be myself around, but at the same time did not hesitate to run him down in front of my new friends when it seemed necessary. Once I was at a party and a popular girl was complaining about a phone call she received from Josh. “Who does he think he is calling me?”
“I don’t know,” someone else said to her. “Hey, you’re pretty good friends with Josh, aren’t you Swags?”
I threw my hands back to indicate refusal. “Whoa, let’s not start throwing around accusations. Who can really fathom the Josh mind when it comes down to it.” This got a good laugh, and the issue was dropped at that.
I was painfully shy in pre-school and kindergarten, to the point of not being able to talk to any of the other children at school. I had no friends these first few years.
Then, in first grade, TJ befriended me. Every time I was on the playground by myself, he would always call out to me, “Hey, Joel, over here. Come play with us.”
I had no idea what I had done to deserve this kindness, and was overjoyed simply to have a friend. He once mentioned that our friendship all started when I joined him in some sort of make believe fishing game, but I never remembered this, and the event had obviously not made a big enough impression on me to stick into my memory.
Although TJ was the same age as me, I treated him like a big brother. I would follow him around and do what he did. When our class played any sort of sport, I always called out, “I’m on TJ’s team.” I embarrassed him occasionally this way, but he didn’t seem to mind too much.
The next year, David joined our group. David had been TJ’s friend from Kindergarten, but they didn’t hang out in first grade because they were in separate homeroom classes. In second grade the three of us were all in the same homeroom, and the three of us hung out together all the time.
But the following year, TJ was in a different homeroom class. This doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but at the time it was the beginning of the end of our friendship. We never had a big fight or anything dramatic like that. We just gradually drifted apart. We only saw each other at recess, and then he was always playing games with the kids from his homeroom class, and I felt more comfortable with the kids from my homeroom.
I tried to make an effort to spend time with TJ during recess, and hang out with the other homeroom class, but I felt more and more on the outside. David, on the other hand, made new friends with Matt and Josh. And I was soon sucked into this new circle as well.
Matt was someone I had always liked, and wanted to get to know better. He was neat, organized, and was a good student without being a nerd about it. And he was really funny. He had a way of making us all roll on the floor with laughter with his sharp one-liners or monologues.
This new group of friends was completely centered around Matt. The rest of us didn’t care so much for each other, but enjoyed being around Matt. David and I had been friends before of course, but we didn’t get along well with Josh. Josh had been Matt’s friend from the previous year, and I think he saw the rest of us as impinging on that friendship. He treated us with a certain coldness and distance.
Josh was very loud, opinionated, and had a sometimes abrasive personality. Matt picked up on this, and loved to egg Josh on about one thing or another, just to see Josh’s reaction. Josh tolerated it from Matt, but would get absolutely infuriated when the rest of us would start in. More than once I remember him stomping away from us on the playground, too furious to speak.
One example of this: In 4th or 5th grade Josh had a special kind of retainer that involved rubber bands going from one part of his jaw to another. He could only open his mouth a certain distance. If he opened up too wide, the rubber bands would snap, and he would have to spend five minutes in front of the mirror getting everything back in place.
Unfortunately for Josh, quietness was not his strength. Matt immediately picked up on this, and would egg Josh on about something until Josh would shout, the bands would snap, and Josh would have to go the bathroom mirror to fix everything.
I thought this was the funniest thing in the world and continued this game long after the Matt had gotten sick of it. For years afterwards, I think Josh held a bit of a grudge about that.
But in 5th grade, the unthinkable happened. Matt’s parents decided they could no longer afford private school, and Matt told us he wouldn’t at our school next year. We were all devastated.
Matt himself knew that the other 3 of us were only held together by him. “What really sucks,” he remarked to me one day, “is that after I’m gone, the group will be over. You and David will still be friends, but you and Josh won’t still hang around.”
I thought the same thing would happen. But instead the opposite did. Once Matt was gone, Josh became my best friend. Matt had always dominated things, so I never really got a chance to get to know Josh. But once Matt was gone, Josh and I began to hit it off very well. He was loud, and he loved talking, and many people thought of him as annoying, but since I was quiet, shy, and incredibly introverted, we seemed like a perfect fit. He had the courage to walk up and talk to anyone in a way I never could, be it the most popular girl or the strictest teacher.
In those days we were a lot more religious and a somewhat given to the middle-school habit of hyperbole, and once Josh commented to me, “You know, I believe God sent Matt to another school so that the two of us could become better friends.” And I said that I had often thought the same thing.
Throughout middle school, David, Josh and I were always together. Many of the rest of our classmates thought we were geeks, but I didn’t care. If you have friends, who cares if you’re popular or not?
It wasn’t until high school that I really felt on the outside. Our school, Ada Christian, had been the same small group of people from kindergarten all the way through 8th grade. But in 9th grade, we started at “Christian High.” Suddenly the world I had known since first grade was shattered, and we were now in a big school, with classmates from all of the area middle schools.
I assumed the 3 of us would go through high school just like we did in middle school; maybe not popular, but strong friends. Josh, however, wanted to make a break for it and try for popularity.
The first day of school he inserted himself into a group of jocks from Ada Christian, and tried to make himself part of the conversation. David and I were somewhat confused by this, but nevertheless followed him into the new circle. Josh was less than pleased. “What are you guys doing?” he asked. “Quit following me everywhere I go. This is high school now. We need to go out and make new friends.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re talking to a group of people from Ada Christian.”
“People from Ada Christian that I wasn’t friends with yet,” he answered.
I wanted to tell him that he had the past nine years to make friends with other kids from Ada, and if he hadn’t done it yet, there was no use starting now. Also those kids had spent the past 9 years making fun of him, so why did he want to try and break into their circle?
But I kept my mouth shut. He was right. The three of us couldn’t spend the next four years only hanging out with each other. We had to expand our circle.
Making friends in high school is difficult, especially if you’re by yourself. Most people spent most of freshman year still in their middle school groups, and only gradually expanded their circle. The cliques were grouped still grouped by the old schools. It’s rough to try and force your way into another clique of kids that have know each other since elementary school.
But I wasn’t by myself. I was with David, which was worse than being by myself. As shy and socially awkward as I was, David was even worse. The two of us were lost without Josh, and David would have been completely lost without me. He followed behind me silently as I tried to integrate myself into one clique after another. It was bad enough trying to force myself in. I couldn’t do it with David next to me.
All I really wanted was just a place to stand. I wasn’t much of a talker, and I didn’t really care if I was involved in the conversation or not. I just wanted to be able to stand in a group and feel like I was part of it. I would walk up to a group and try and take my place in the circle. David would follow behind me, and sometimes stand in the circle with me, sometimes just stand behind me the whole time. I hoped to just slip in un-noticed, but I felt like David was a huge weight I was dragging around. And 9th grade students are very unforgiving. Sometimes we were blatantly told to get lost. Other times someone would ask me coldly, “Yes, may I help you?” or gesturing to David, “Who’s your friend?”
I guess I should have just had a talk with David the way Josh had talked to the two of us on the first day. But I liked to avoid these kind of direct conversations, and so I tried to settle the problem by just ignoring him, and hoping he would get the hint. I would speak to him as little as possible, and try and let him know I didn’t want him following me around. I could see the hurt in his eyes, but he never said anything about it, and eventually stopped trailing me around.
The three of us still kept in touch, and every now and again would get together on the weekend but it was maybe three times in a year. None of us really found any new groups of friends that we were comfortable in, but we roamed around from different groups on our own.
By about Senior year, an eternity later, I seemed on the verge of breaking in and gaining acceptance. I didn’t know why then and I don’t know why now. I was by no means the big man on campus, or a ladies man, but I started hanging out with the popular crowds, and they seemed to tolerate my presence. I started to get invitations to parties and social outings. I was on the homecoming court, voted the friendliest person in the class, and asked to give a speech at senior chapel.
Josh by contrast had entered senior year bitterer than ever. He had tried so hard for three years to force his way into the popular circles, and the harder he tried, the more they abused him and made fun of him.
Since he was the one who had broken up the three of us, he was well aware of the irony of our fates four years later, and I think on some level believed that it was Karma or divine retribution. He repeatedly apologized to me for the way he had treated me freshman year.
I was still friends with him, and valued him as one of the only friends I could be myself around, but at the same time did not hesitate to run him down in front of my new friends when it seemed necessary. Once I was at a party and a popular girl was complaining about a phone call she received from Josh. “Who does he think he is calling me?”
“I don’t know,” someone else said to her. “Hey, you’re pretty good friends with Josh, aren’t you Swags?”
I threw my hands back to indicate refusal. “Whoa, let’s not start throwing around accusations. Who can really fathom the Josh mind when it comes down to it.” This got a good laugh, and the issue was dropped at that.
Conservative Upbringing
I think every single human being pushes against their upbringing in someway. That’s part of growing up. No one says, “My teachers and parents were exactly right about everything, and I wouldn’t criticize a thing.” If they did, they would still have a child’s mentality.
Those of us who are raised conservative, and turn out liberal, tend to develop a certain smugness about it sometimes. “Sure, it’s easy to be open minded and progressive if you grew up in California or New York, but I was brought up in Grand Rapids, Michigan surrounded by reactionary Bible thumpers. Were it not for my superior intellect, I would probably be burning science text books at this very minute.”
And yet thousands, millions of people, were brought up conservative and turned out liberal or radical. Memoirs of this kind have even developed into their own sort of genre.
There’s a famous Michael Moore clip (I think it’s from “The Big One”) when he talks about his conservative Catholic upbringing. I’m quoting from memory, but it goes something like this: “The nuns told me that impure thoughts under 7 seconds were only a small sin, but over 7 seconds became a damnable sin. So I spent my entire adolescence timing my sexual fantasies. ‘One two three four five six…okay let that thought go.’”
Although my teachers and youth group leaders never attempted to numerically quantify the exact amount of seconds that made the difference, I remember being repeatedly told a similar thing: “If a lustful thought happens to pop into your brain, the devil put it there to tempt you, and it’s not a sin. If you linger on the thought, it becomes sinful.”
And I emphasize “repeatedly”. Throughout my middle and high school days I heard that refrain over and over again from teachers and youth group leaders. The emphasis on “sex” as the ultimate sin is ridiculous enough in itself, but that this extends to trying to stamp out even sexual thoughts is something that strikes me now, at 28, as the height of idiocy. At the time though, I went along with it, just like I went along with most of the crap I was taught.
I could probably right a book about all the ridiculous stuff I was taught growing up (I’m sure many of you could as well), but just for the hell of it I thought I would list a few brief examples. I’m not sure if these are the most outrageous examples or not, but they’re just the moments that happen to stick out in my memory.
* In eighth grade, one of my classmates was reprimanded by the art teacher for painting, “Party On,” on her art project. “This is a Christian school. We don’t say Party On.”
* In eighth grade, when we had to pick names for our intramural teams. Most people just copied names from college or professional sports. One team selected “The Rebels”, but this was vetoed by the teachers, who said, “It’s wrong to rebel.
* I was in seventh grade playing an intramural Soccer game. Someone accidentally kicks the ball too high in the air, and one of the eighth grade students yells out, “holy cow.”
The teacher yellow carded him. “God is holy. Cows aren’t.”
* On an eighth grade field trip about 8 of us boys were in a van driven by a parent volunteer. We were a bit rambunctious. After we arrived at the school, the mother marched into the principle’s office and told him she was never driving a group of eighth grade students again. The principle had a long talk with us, and then our homeroom teacher had a long discussion with the whole class.
The primary issues were that we were wrestling in the backseat, and that some of the boys were singing a limerick, “My name is Chuck. I like to…” humorous pause “…Sing!”
Look, lady, you don’t take a group of 8th grade boys in a van and expect them to act like angels. I don’t care what Christian school they’re from. If they get a little rambunctious, you just yell at them to settle down. What you don’t do is just keep driving quietly the whole time, and then give the principal an earful after everything is over.
Okay, okay, so you’re not a professional educator, and not accustomed to discipline. I can dig that. But the song? Come on, if that’s one of the worst things we were doing, I’d say you had a pretty easy ride. You need to get out of Grand Rapids.
* When I was in first and second grade, in my old neighborhood before my family moved to the house we have now, there was a Chinese Buddhist family on my block, and a Jewish family.
Since all my friends were either from church or my Christian school, I was in awe when I discovered they weren’t Christians.
Non-believers! I thought these were people you only read about in books. I didn’t think I would actually meet any of them.
Naturally I set to work on the task of converting them. I invited “Han Chen” to attend Church with my family several times. When he didn’t immediately convert, I took to shouting, “Love Jesus!” or “Love God” whenever he went by. In a similar way I shouted “Jesus!” at the Jewish boy when he rode by on his bike. My mother eventually put a stop to this.
When I was slightly older, in 5th grade, I tried to continue my missionary work by converting some of the younger kids at my bus stop. I figured they were young enough that I could mold their minds easily. I told them the gospel stories, but most of them didn’t look like they understood.
For years afterwards I used to be mortified when I thought back on this. Then one day in high school I was at a Cross Country team bible study, and everyone began telling stories about their youthful attempts at evangelicalism. As we went around the circle, I realized everyone had these kind of stories. “I wouldn’t give any cookies to my friend until she converted” or “I locked my friend out of the house and wouldn’t give her the key back until she accepted Jesus.”
When I think back on the heavy indoctrination we got in Sunday school, it is inevitable that this kind of thing happens. I remember in second grade my Sunday School teaching telling us how important it was that we share Jesus with our friends, because otherwise our friends would be doomed to a life of damnation.
The church even had a skit about it that I remember seeing. Two friends are on the bus together. One asks the other, “why are you always busy on Sunday,” the other one says, “I’ll tell you later.”
Later in the week, the bus is in a traffic accident, and all the kids are killed. One is allowed into heaven, but the other one runs off stage crying because her name isn’t in the book of life.
Is that laying it on thick or what? Convert your friends now, or they’ll die next week and be doomed for all eternity.
I also remember once being shown a video on “how to convert your friends to Christ” in Sunday school.
So with all this indoctrination going on, what is your average 1st or 2nd grader going to do? Are they going to carefully and tactfully share the gospel of Christ, well at the same time respecting the different religion and cultures of their friends? Of course not. How much tact does your favorite 2nd grade student have?
As I’ve grown up, I longer believe that God would damn people to all eternity because of their intellectual beliefs. But I hesitate to speak with certainty about the mind of God. Who knows? Maybe when I’m dead, I’ll find out that those people in my church were right after all.
But it is a bad, bad, bad idea to put so much pressure on elementary students to convert their friends. They just don’t have the social skills to do it. If anyone reading this is teaching Sunday School, please, please stop it. You’re not helping anything, and you’re just creating bad memories for the children when they get older.
Those of us who are raised conservative, and turn out liberal, tend to develop a certain smugness about it sometimes. “Sure, it’s easy to be open minded and progressive if you grew up in California or New York, but I was brought up in Grand Rapids, Michigan surrounded by reactionary Bible thumpers. Were it not for my superior intellect, I would probably be burning science text books at this very minute.”
And yet thousands, millions of people, were brought up conservative and turned out liberal or radical. Memoirs of this kind have even developed into their own sort of genre.
There’s a famous Michael Moore clip (I think it’s from “The Big One”) when he talks about his conservative Catholic upbringing. I’m quoting from memory, but it goes something like this: “The nuns told me that impure thoughts under 7 seconds were only a small sin, but over 7 seconds became a damnable sin. So I spent my entire adolescence timing my sexual fantasies. ‘One two three four five six…okay let that thought go.’”
Although my teachers and youth group leaders never attempted to numerically quantify the exact amount of seconds that made the difference, I remember being repeatedly told a similar thing: “If a lustful thought happens to pop into your brain, the devil put it there to tempt you, and it’s not a sin. If you linger on the thought, it becomes sinful.”
And I emphasize “repeatedly”. Throughout my middle and high school days I heard that refrain over and over again from teachers and youth group leaders. The emphasis on “sex” as the ultimate sin is ridiculous enough in itself, but that this extends to trying to stamp out even sexual thoughts is something that strikes me now, at 28, as the height of idiocy. At the time though, I went along with it, just like I went along with most of the crap I was taught.
I could probably right a book about all the ridiculous stuff I was taught growing up (I’m sure many of you could as well), but just for the hell of it I thought I would list a few brief examples. I’m not sure if these are the most outrageous examples or not, but they’re just the moments that happen to stick out in my memory.
* In eighth grade, one of my classmates was reprimanded by the art teacher for painting, “Party On,” on her art project. “This is a Christian school. We don’t say Party On.”
* In eighth grade, when we had to pick names for our intramural teams. Most people just copied names from college or professional sports. One team selected “The Rebels”, but this was vetoed by the teachers, who said, “It’s wrong to rebel.
* I was in seventh grade playing an intramural Soccer game. Someone accidentally kicks the ball too high in the air, and one of the eighth grade students yells out, “holy cow.”
The teacher yellow carded him. “God is holy. Cows aren’t.”
* On an eighth grade field trip about 8 of us boys were in a van driven by a parent volunteer. We were a bit rambunctious. After we arrived at the school, the mother marched into the principle’s office and told him she was never driving a group of eighth grade students again. The principle had a long talk with us, and then our homeroom teacher had a long discussion with the whole class.
The primary issues were that we were wrestling in the backseat, and that some of the boys were singing a limerick, “My name is Chuck. I like to…” humorous pause “…Sing!”
Look, lady, you don’t take a group of 8th grade boys in a van and expect them to act like angels. I don’t care what Christian school they’re from. If they get a little rambunctious, you just yell at them to settle down. What you don’t do is just keep driving quietly the whole time, and then give the principal an earful after everything is over.
Okay, okay, so you’re not a professional educator, and not accustomed to discipline. I can dig that. But the song? Come on, if that’s one of the worst things we were doing, I’d say you had a pretty easy ride. You need to get out of Grand Rapids.
* When I was in first and second grade, in my old neighborhood before my family moved to the house we have now, there was a Chinese Buddhist family on my block, and a Jewish family.
Since all my friends were either from church or my Christian school, I was in awe when I discovered they weren’t Christians.
Non-believers! I thought these were people you only read about in books. I didn’t think I would actually meet any of them.
Naturally I set to work on the task of converting them. I invited “Han Chen” to attend Church with my family several times. When he didn’t immediately convert, I took to shouting, “Love Jesus!” or “Love God” whenever he went by. In a similar way I shouted “Jesus!” at the Jewish boy when he rode by on his bike. My mother eventually put a stop to this.
When I was slightly older, in 5th grade, I tried to continue my missionary work by converting some of the younger kids at my bus stop. I figured they were young enough that I could mold their minds easily. I told them the gospel stories, but most of them didn’t look like they understood.
For years afterwards I used to be mortified when I thought back on this. Then one day in high school I was at a Cross Country team bible study, and everyone began telling stories about their youthful attempts at evangelicalism. As we went around the circle, I realized everyone had these kind of stories. “I wouldn’t give any cookies to my friend until she converted” or “I locked my friend out of the house and wouldn’t give her the key back until she accepted Jesus.”
When I think back on the heavy indoctrination we got in Sunday school, it is inevitable that this kind of thing happens. I remember in second grade my Sunday School teaching telling us how important it was that we share Jesus with our friends, because otherwise our friends would be doomed to a life of damnation.
The church even had a skit about it that I remember seeing. Two friends are on the bus together. One asks the other, “why are you always busy on Sunday,” the other one says, “I’ll tell you later.”
Later in the week, the bus is in a traffic accident, and all the kids are killed. One is allowed into heaven, but the other one runs off stage crying because her name isn’t in the book of life.
Is that laying it on thick or what? Convert your friends now, or they’ll die next week and be doomed for all eternity.
I also remember once being shown a video on “how to convert your friends to Christ” in Sunday school.
So with all this indoctrination going on, what is your average 1st or 2nd grader going to do? Are they going to carefully and tactfully share the gospel of Christ, well at the same time respecting the different religion and cultures of their friends? Of course not. How much tact does your favorite 2nd grade student have?
As I’ve grown up, I longer believe that God would damn people to all eternity because of their intellectual beliefs. But I hesitate to speak with certainty about the mind of God. Who knows? Maybe when I’m dead, I’ll find out that those people in my church were right after all.
But it is a bad, bad, bad idea to put so much pressure on elementary students to convert their friends. They just don’t have the social skills to do it. If anyone reading this is teaching Sunday School, please, please stop it. You’re not helping anything, and you’re just creating bad memories for the children when they get older.
My 12th Grade Senior Chapel Speech
(I’ll try not to get into too many wandering digressions on this one, but it’s hard to be succinct about high school. Apologies in advance.)
During noon break I was hanging out in the commons areas talking to my friends when a female classmate came up to me. “Joel, can I talk to you a minute?”
“Sure,” I said, immediately wondering what in the world this could be about. Girls never wanted to talk to me.
“I’m on the chapel committee, and we were discussing who we wanted to speak at the end of the year senior chapel, and we all agreed that you would be perfect. Would you be willing to speak at the chapel?”
Yes. Sure. Of course. It would be an honor, I quickly answered.
She thanked me and went away. As soon as she had left, my friend said, “Boy, she really suckered you into that.” He launched into an imitation of the girl’s sing song voice, and the way she had been flirtatiously touching my arm during the conversation, and concluded that I could get suckered into anything if a girl asked me sweetly enough.
Which is true of course. I wanted to speak at the senior chapel because I felt it was a huge honor, but at the same time I intensely did not want to speak at senior chapel. I hate public speaking.
High school everyone is always wondering, “What do others think about me?” [LINK] and I was just as confused about this as anyone else.
I was the dictionary definition of a nerd. All through middle school I had classic thick oversized square glasses. I parted my hair on the side and plastered it down with gel to keep it in place, like a nerd out of a 1950s comic book.
By high school I had traded my glasses for contact lenses, and by Junior year I had eased off on the gel. But I was still obsessed with Star Trek [Link], comic books [Link], and ancient Roman history [Link]. I had trouble finding someone to talk to during noon break. I hung out with a group of boys, who I knew tolerated me only to make fun of me, simply because no one else welcomed me into their circle. Eventually I began taking refuge in the library and reading books during noon break.
I had absolutely no social life. And when I say that I mean absolutely none. Outside of the Church youth group, and the sports teams I was on, I had no social interaction outside of school.
This never bothered me at the time because I didn’t have any idea that life was supposed to be any different. I went home, read comic books, watched Star Trek, or worked on my story [Link], and thought it was like that for everyone. It wasn’t until my senior year, when I began to expand socially and go out more, that I realized for most people all four years of high school had been social. They talked all the time of memories from Freshman year, or the big drinking party Sophomore year. It was at this point that I began to feel regret for not being more social during my high school years.
(Some of you may remember at Calvin that I was obsessed with time management, and refused to do things like watch TV, or even attend school plays or sporting events, because I considered them anti-social. I know I drove a lot of you crazy with this, and I apologize, but I was trying to make up for loss time from high school. In retrospect, I wish that I had spent high school being more social. And during college, instead of being obsessed with socializing, I wish I had been more concerned about preparing my future. But I seem to never have a clear perspective on a stage of life until it is already passed).
And yet, all that being said, throughout my high school life, I also had the sense that many people approved of me, and enjoyed having me around. In fact, given that I fully knew I had no social skills or interesting conversation, it seemed people were often unduly nice to me. I often got the sense (and I know this sounds pretentious, but its how I really felt at the time) that people could see something in me that I couldn’t see myself. It was the only way I could make sense of all the unwarranted kindness that was shown to me.
As I advanced through high school, I began to feel like I was making inroads towards popularity and acceptance. Halfway through Junior year I started trying to hang out with the popular crowd during noon break (in part because I felt I had no where else to go) and they seemed to tolerate me. My senior year I was elected to the “Home Coming Court”. I was voted “The friendliest Person” in my class. And, out of all the graduating seniors, the chapel committee chose me to be one of 3 people to represent the senior class. And all this when I couldn’t find anyone to hang out with on Friday night. I couldn’t figure it out.
And ten years later, I still don’t really understand it. I think people must have seen me as sort of a mascot type figure. I wasn’t the kind of guy you would want to invite out on the weekend, but I was considered likeable and friendly enough that people liked to cheer for me when I was on the “Home Coming Court”. That’s the only way I can make sense of it. And even then, when I was so quiet and shy that no one in high school really knew me, I have trouble realizing how people saw any positive qualities in me at all. What was there to separate me from all the other quiet introverts who passed through high school in obscurity?
But I’ll have to leave my high school angst at that, and get back to the topic at hand.
As a sort of “mascot of the senior class”, I was one of the seniors chosen to give the final chapel. The only problem was that I had nothing to say. I spent the whole weekend in my bedroom trying to write a speech, constantly throwing my draft away and starting over, and thinking about killing myself rather than go through with it.
The idea of speaking in front of the entire high school student body terrified me to begin with, but it wouldn’t have been so bad if I at least felt like I had something intelligent to say. I was absolutely horrified of the idea of getting up in front of my whole school with nothing to say. I was beginning to understand what my friend meant when he said I got suckered into this. It was a lot of work, and even more stress.
Eventually I wrote something. I wasn’t completely happy with it, but it was the best I could come up with.
I think the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life is when I gave my oral report in 10th grade. But this was a close second. As my sister later observed, my hands were visibly shaking when I was up at the podium.
And yet, it went over incredibly well. People laughed at all my jokes. In fact they laughed generously and heartily at all my jokes. Even two or three years later, I would meet Christian High graduates at Calvin who would say, “You’re the guy who gave that senior chapel, right? That was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”
The actual text of the speech is clearly not that funny. I can only think that the good reception it got was due to a combination of the jokes with the mascot like persona that people projected onto me. In other words, I don’t think people would have thought this was as funny if someone else delivered it. But that’s just my guess. I’m as much at a loss to explain this as I am to explain Homecoming Court.
Anyway, here is the text of the speech.
The Speech
When I was asked to speak here today, I had a hard time coming up with something to say. I decided to look in my Freshman yearbook, at what people had wrote in it, to see if I could try to find some inspiration, or some sense of unity for these four years. Well, I couldn't read most of the signatures. I had given all my friends a pencil to sign the yearbook with. So my advice to Freshman is when you get your yearbook this Friday, give your friends a pen to sign it with.
That failing, I thought about other senior chapels I had attended in the past, and what was said there. A popular thing to do was to give advice to the underclassman, so I made a list of all the things I had learned over the four years I've been here, so that underclassman could benefit from my vast wisdom and experience. I put down things like: get involved in a lot of activities, be as nice as you can to everyone, don't wait till the last minute on those English papers because they always take twice as long as you think they will, work hard in whatever you do, follow your interests, think for yourself, and so on.
I looked at the list, and it was all commonsense. It was stuff everybody knew, and when I thought about it, I knew most of these things back in Middle school. Yet I sure didn't do a lot of these things as a Freshman. I guess during my time in high school I didn't learn very many new things, as much as I learned how to apply what I already knew. All those things I knew I was supposed to do, but I didn't do them. Then, as time passed, I began doing them, and practiced on them. Right now I still don't do most of these things all the time, but I'm a lot better than I was.
I remember one of the first times I entered this school. I didn't have any older brothers or sisters, so one of the first times I set foot in the building was to buy my books Freshman year. The whole place seemed unbelievably huge to me. my mom was with me. I was a little embarrassed to be seen with her, but I really didn't have another ride, and I needed someone to pay for the books. After I got my schedule, my mom suggested to me that I find out where all my class rooms were in order to make the first day a little easier. I thought the idea was pointless. Even if I did locate all my classrooms, the building was so big I'd never remember where they were.
The first day of school came, and I was greatly relieved to find out that all the rooms were numbered in order, so I could find everything easily. Gradually, the building didn't seem so large anymore. I remember I was always late to my fifth hour classroom. No matter how fast I went, I just could not get from my fourth hour, to my locker, to fifth hour. Then, about halfway through the semester, I discovered a hallway I didn't even know about. Using it, I was able to cut my trip by a quarter, and was never late since.
The time I've been here has really gone quickly. Looking back, it seems like I've spent a lot of the time confused. I was confused about what was expected of me, I was confused about math assignments, I was confused about what other people thought of me, I was confused about where to go to college, I was confused about school policies. I was confused about a lot of things, and about a lot of things I still am, but as I moved through the years, it seemed like a lot of things got clearer.
This year, I've heard a lot of things said about Christian High students from fellow students. I've heard that most people at Christian High only want to be your friend if there is something they can gain from it. If they aren't your friend, they don't really care about you, and wouldn't help you out unless there was something in it for them. I've heard that most of them don't really care about what's right or wrong, but only care about themselves. I don't know everything these people have been through, but it certainly hasn't been my experience.
There are a lot of things I'm thankful for here. I'm thankful for people who gave me rides in their cars when I needed one. I'm thankful for people who shared their lunch with me when I forgot mine. I'm thankful for people who took time to explain my homework to me when I didn't get it. I'm thankful for people who loaned me money when I needed it. I'm thankful for people who took the time to talk to me when I was feeling down. I'm thankful for people who gave me advice when I needed it, and I'm thankful for people who were just good friends. I'm going to miss a lot of you next year.
Commentary on the Speech: I think everyone is embarrassed when they look back on High School work, because they have intellectual progressed since that time. Old papers and speeches are like a snapshot into an old, now outgrown, way of thinking.
Almost all of my childhood, I was always trying to be the “teacher’s pet”. I wasn’t perfect, but that was my goal. In elementary school, I was always the kid who told on the others. In middle school, although I was too afraid to say anything, I always got mad when other kids talked bad about the teacher. The teacher was like a god to me, and their approval was the most important thing.
During the last couple years of high school, my view began to shift. Why was I always siding with the teacher, when they were so old and boring? Young people were so much more good looking, exciting and fun to be around. And besides I was one of them. I would never be accepted as an equal by the teachers. All these years I had been siding with the wrong people. I should be on the side of my classmates against the teachers, the parents, the pastors, and the other dark forces of adulthood.
And so, the last couple years of high school, I started adopting the “generational conflict” view of life. Everything young is good. Everything old is bad.
Obviously this view creates a great amount of intellectual dissonance. I was greatly attracted to generational polemics on the value of youth from the 1960s, while trying to ignore the fact that all the people who wrote these essays had now grown old themselves.
As I got to know many of my classmates better, I discovered many of them were extremely conservative, or even racist, but I did my best to ignore this as well.
The key to overcoming any intellectual dissonance is just ignore ignore ignore. Just ask any Republican (sorry, couldn’t resist that jibe).
Part of what I wanted to say during this speech was, “Hey, don’t listen to what those adults are saying. You’re all great.” I felt teachers were always berating our class for being too exclusive and too cliquey. And many of my fellow classmates had joined in this refrain. I was committed to defending my class against any accusations, so I had been debating some of my classmates on this point throughout the year. That’s why I made a point of defending this point in the speech.
This was an easy position for me to take, because I felt like I was on the verge of becoming accepted myself. In retrospect though, it was stupid, stupid, stupid. I grimace every time I think of this part of the speech. I, of all people, should have realized the pain of exclusion. Young people are not good by default. Children and high school students can be the cruelest people in the world.
During noon break I was hanging out in the commons areas talking to my friends when a female classmate came up to me. “Joel, can I talk to you a minute?”
“Sure,” I said, immediately wondering what in the world this could be about. Girls never wanted to talk to me.
“I’m on the chapel committee, and we were discussing who we wanted to speak at the end of the year senior chapel, and we all agreed that you would be perfect. Would you be willing to speak at the chapel?”
Yes. Sure. Of course. It would be an honor, I quickly answered.
She thanked me and went away. As soon as she had left, my friend said, “Boy, she really suckered you into that.” He launched into an imitation of the girl’s sing song voice, and the way she had been flirtatiously touching my arm during the conversation, and concluded that I could get suckered into anything if a girl asked me sweetly enough.
Which is true of course. I wanted to speak at the senior chapel because I felt it was a huge honor, but at the same time I intensely did not want to speak at senior chapel. I hate public speaking.
High school everyone is always wondering, “What do others think about me?” [LINK] and I was just as confused about this as anyone else.
I was the dictionary definition of a nerd. All through middle school I had classic thick oversized square glasses. I parted my hair on the side and plastered it down with gel to keep it in place, like a nerd out of a 1950s comic book.
By high school I had traded my glasses for contact lenses, and by Junior year I had eased off on the gel. But I was still obsessed with Star Trek [Link], comic books [Link], and ancient Roman history [Link]. I had trouble finding someone to talk to during noon break. I hung out with a group of boys, who I knew tolerated me only to make fun of me, simply because no one else welcomed me into their circle. Eventually I began taking refuge in the library and reading books during noon break.
I had absolutely no social life. And when I say that I mean absolutely none. Outside of the Church youth group, and the sports teams I was on, I had no social interaction outside of school.
This never bothered me at the time because I didn’t have any idea that life was supposed to be any different. I went home, read comic books, watched Star Trek, or worked on my story [Link], and thought it was like that for everyone. It wasn’t until my senior year, when I began to expand socially and go out more, that I realized for most people all four years of high school had been social. They talked all the time of memories from Freshman year, or the big drinking party Sophomore year. It was at this point that I began to feel regret for not being more social during my high school years.
(Some of you may remember at Calvin that I was obsessed with time management, and refused to do things like watch TV, or even attend school plays or sporting events, because I considered them anti-social. I know I drove a lot of you crazy with this, and I apologize, but I was trying to make up for loss time from high school. In retrospect, I wish that I had spent high school being more social. And during college, instead of being obsessed with socializing, I wish I had been more concerned about preparing my future. But I seem to never have a clear perspective on a stage of life until it is already passed).
And yet, all that being said, throughout my high school life, I also had the sense that many people approved of me, and enjoyed having me around. In fact, given that I fully knew I had no social skills or interesting conversation, it seemed people were often unduly nice to me. I often got the sense (and I know this sounds pretentious, but its how I really felt at the time) that people could see something in me that I couldn’t see myself. It was the only way I could make sense of all the unwarranted kindness that was shown to me.
As I advanced through high school, I began to feel like I was making inroads towards popularity and acceptance. Halfway through Junior year I started trying to hang out with the popular crowd during noon break (in part because I felt I had no where else to go) and they seemed to tolerate me. My senior year I was elected to the “Home Coming Court”. I was voted “The friendliest Person” in my class. And, out of all the graduating seniors, the chapel committee chose me to be one of 3 people to represent the senior class. And all this when I couldn’t find anyone to hang out with on Friday night. I couldn’t figure it out.
And ten years later, I still don’t really understand it. I think people must have seen me as sort of a mascot type figure. I wasn’t the kind of guy you would want to invite out on the weekend, but I was considered likeable and friendly enough that people liked to cheer for me when I was on the “Home Coming Court”. That’s the only way I can make sense of it. And even then, when I was so quiet and shy that no one in high school really knew me, I have trouble realizing how people saw any positive qualities in me at all. What was there to separate me from all the other quiet introverts who passed through high school in obscurity?
But I’ll have to leave my high school angst at that, and get back to the topic at hand.
As a sort of “mascot of the senior class”, I was one of the seniors chosen to give the final chapel. The only problem was that I had nothing to say. I spent the whole weekend in my bedroom trying to write a speech, constantly throwing my draft away and starting over, and thinking about killing myself rather than go through with it.
The idea of speaking in front of the entire high school student body terrified me to begin with, but it wouldn’t have been so bad if I at least felt like I had something intelligent to say. I was absolutely horrified of the idea of getting up in front of my whole school with nothing to say. I was beginning to understand what my friend meant when he said I got suckered into this. It was a lot of work, and even more stress.
Eventually I wrote something. I wasn’t completely happy with it, but it was the best I could come up with.
I think the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life is when I gave my oral report in 10th grade. But this was a close second. As my sister later observed, my hands were visibly shaking when I was up at the podium.
And yet, it went over incredibly well. People laughed at all my jokes. In fact they laughed generously and heartily at all my jokes. Even two or three years later, I would meet Christian High graduates at Calvin who would say, “You’re the guy who gave that senior chapel, right? That was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”
The actual text of the speech is clearly not that funny. I can only think that the good reception it got was due to a combination of the jokes with the mascot like persona that people projected onto me. In other words, I don’t think people would have thought this was as funny if someone else delivered it. But that’s just my guess. I’m as much at a loss to explain this as I am to explain Homecoming Court.
Anyway, here is the text of the speech.
The Speech
When I was asked to speak here today, I had a hard time coming up with something to say. I decided to look in my Freshman yearbook, at what people had wrote in it, to see if I could try to find some inspiration, or some sense of unity for these four years. Well, I couldn't read most of the signatures. I had given all my friends a pencil to sign the yearbook with. So my advice to Freshman is when you get your yearbook this Friday, give your friends a pen to sign it with.
That failing, I thought about other senior chapels I had attended in the past, and what was said there. A popular thing to do was to give advice to the underclassman, so I made a list of all the things I had learned over the four years I've been here, so that underclassman could benefit from my vast wisdom and experience. I put down things like: get involved in a lot of activities, be as nice as you can to everyone, don't wait till the last minute on those English papers because they always take twice as long as you think they will, work hard in whatever you do, follow your interests, think for yourself, and so on.
I looked at the list, and it was all commonsense. It was stuff everybody knew, and when I thought about it, I knew most of these things back in Middle school. Yet I sure didn't do a lot of these things as a Freshman. I guess during my time in high school I didn't learn very many new things, as much as I learned how to apply what I already knew. All those things I knew I was supposed to do, but I didn't do them. Then, as time passed, I began doing them, and practiced on them. Right now I still don't do most of these things all the time, but I'm a lot better than I was.
I remember one of the first times I entered this school. I didn't have any older brothers or sisters, so one of the first times I set foot in the building was to buy my books Freshman year. The whole place seemed unbelievably huge to me. my mom was with me. I was a little embarrassed to be seen with her, but I really didn't have another ride, and I needed someone to pay for the books. After I got my schedule, my mom suggested to me that I find out where all my class rooms were in order to make the first day a little easier. I thought the idea was pointless. Even if I did locate all my classrooms, the building was so big I'd never remember where they were.
The first day of school came, and I was greatly relieved to find out that all the rooms were numbered in order, so I could find everything easily. Gradually, the building didn't seem so large anymore. I remember I was always late to my fifth hour classroom. No matter how fast I went, I just could not get from my fourth hour, to my locker, to fifth hour. Then, about halfway through the semester, I discovered a hallway I didn't even know about. Using it, I was able to cut my trip by a quarter, and was never late since.
The time I've been here has really gone quickly. Looking back, it seems like I've spent a lot of the time confused. I was confused about what was expected of me, I was confused about math assignments, I was confused about what other people thought of me, I was confused about where to go to college, I was confused about school policies. I was confused about a lot of things, and about a lot of things I still am, but as I moved through the years, it seemed like a lot of things got clearer.
This year, I've heard a lot of things said about Christian High students from fellow students. I've heard that most people at Christian High only want to be your friend if there is something they can gain from it. If they aren't your friend, they don't really care about you, and wouldn't help you out unless there was something in it for them. I've heard that most of them don't really care about what's right or wrong, but only care about themselves. I don't know everything these people have been through, but it certainly hasn't been my experience.
There are a lot of things I'm thankful for here. I'm thankful for people who gave me rides in their cars when I needed one. I'm thankful for people who shared their lunch with me when I forgot mine. I'm thankful for people who took time to explain my homework to me when I didn't get it. I'm thankful for people who loaned me money when I needed it. I'm thankful for people who took the time to talk to me when I was feeling down. I'm thankful for people who gave me advice when I needed it, and I'm thankful for people who were just good friends. I'm going to miss a lot of you next year.
Commentary on the Speech: I think everyone is embarrassed when they look back on High School work, because they have intellectual progressed since that time. Old papers and speeches are like a snapshot into an old, now outgrown, way of thinking.
Almost all of my childhood, I was always trying to be the “teacher’s pet”. I wasn’t perfect, but that was my goal. In elementary school, I was always the kid who told on the others. In middle school, although I was too afraid to say anything, I always got mad when other kids talked bad about the teacher. The teacher was like a god to me, and their approval was the most important thing.
During the last couple years of high school, my view began to shift. Why was I always siding with the teacher, when they were so old and boring? Young people were so much more good looking, exciting and fun to be around. And besides I was one of them. I would never be accepted as an equal by the teachers. All these years I had been siding with the wrong people. I should be on the side of my classmates against the teachers, the parents, the pastors, and the other dark forces of adulthood.
And so, the last couple years of high school, I started adopting the “generational conflict” view of life. Everything young is good. Everything old is bad.
Obviously this view creates a great amount of intellectual dissonance. I was greatly attracted to generational polemics on the value of youth from the 1960s, while trying to ignore the fact that all the people who wrote these essays had now grown old themselves.
As I got to know many of my classmates better, I discovered many of them were extremely conservative, or even racist, but I did my best to ignore this as well.
The key to overcoming any intellectual dissonance is just ignore ignore ignore. Just ask any Republican (sorry, couldn’t resist that jibe).
Part of what I wanted to say during this speech was, “Hey, don’t listen to what those adults are saying. You’re all great.” I felt teachers were always berating our class for being too exclusive and too cliquey. And many of my fellow classmates had joined in this refrain. I was committed to defending my class against any accusations, so I had been debating some of my classmates on this point throughout the year. That’s why I made a point of defending this point in the speech.
This was an easy position for me to take, because I felt like I was on the verge of becoming accepted myself. In retrospect though, it was stupid, stupid, stupid. I grimace every time I think of this part of the speech. I, of all people, should have realized the pain of exclusion. Young people are not good by default. Children and high school students can be the cruelest people in the world.
Insights Into My Insanity
I suppose the best way to introduce this piece would be simply to recount the thought process that lead me to it.
I was doing one of my long drives, and my thoughts were wandering, and I began to think about the ways in which I’ve tried to deal with different aspects of life, and the various systems I’ve set up, and the various problems I’ve encountered. As someone who admittedly has the “blogging bug”, I thought that this might be something that would make a good blog entry, or perhaps a short series. As with my series recalling the back stories of my Chimes articles, it would be a short break from the usual update to a reflection on events during high school and college.
In the sense that blogging is primarily a release, the main benefit of this would be to me, but perhaps someone else might be able to find some inspiration off of it, or more likely learn from my mistakes and save themselves the trouble of repeating it. I thought I would do a short little series on some of my half-baked philosophies, and entitle it “Experiments with Truth.” The title is stolen from Gandhi’s autobiography, but I’ve always liked it. It would imply that I haven’t found the truth, but here are the results of some of my experiments in my attempts to find it.
But as I began to think more about it, it began to occur to me that what I would be describing could more accurately be described as insights into mental illness or neurosis. And I thought that this might be as good a time as any to come out and acknowledge straight on what I perhaps have always been dancing around ever since I started this blog: I’m not normal, and I realize that.
I’m well aware that everyone else knows it, so I just thought I might as well just admit it rather than trying to pretend.
I’ve always been a little bit different. I remember in kindergarten being too shy to talk to any of the other children around me, but I don’t remember this bothering me at the time. I guess at that age maybe you don’t have a sense of self developed, so maybe you can’t really feel like there’s anything wrong with you.
It was during middle school that I remembered feeling really upset about it. I wanted to be popular and I wanted to be liked by the girls, but I just didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it. I couldn’t carry on a normal conversation, I didn’t know how to talk to girls, I had no idea of what was cool or what wasn’t, or how to become popular, and all of these things seemed to be things that my classmates just intuitively knew. I wondered why it was that everyone else seemed to know these things, and I didn’t. It was as if I had been absent the one day of school when all of these things were explained, and I felt like I was playing a game in which everyone else around me seemed to know the rules, but I didn’t.
Of course middle school is a rough time for a lot of people. High School was a bit better, or at least it became better by the end (the first couple years were a rough start).
I began to discover that I had an unintentional sense of humor, and that people often found me hilarious when I was trying to be serious. People liked having me around because they found humor in my oddities, and I learned to capitalize to this to a certain extent and tried to play up the aspects of my personality which they found humorous. I began to realize that many of the more popular kids were always happy to have me hanging around, and I began to shift my social circles.
In high school I achieved what I suppose might be regarded as some degree of popularity. I was voted on the home coming court, voted the friendliest person in my graduating class, and selected by the chapel committee as one of the seniors to speak at the “senior chapel” at the end of the year.
There were perhaps two aspects to this. One was a desire for acceptance at all costs, which occasionally disguised itself as kindness or friendliness. At times my desire to be liked was a pleasant aspect of my personality, at other times I became someone without principles or backbone. I remember sitting silently when racists comments were made, not having the courage to speak up because I desperately wanted the approval of the person making the comments.
But the second reason I was popular was because my personality quirks were an object of interest.
I remember one of my classmates saying to me once, “Whenever I talk to you I feel like I’m tripping. For someone who has been walking the straight and narrow for a as long as you have, you sure have a whacked out perspective on things.”
Despite the fact that the first couple years were pretty rough, I always had the feeling that Christian High had been pretty good to me. I had absolutely no social skills, but had achieved a degree of popularity anyway. I thought if I had been at any other school I probably just would have been completely ignored. One of the reasons I choose Calvin is because I thought the social environment would be similar to Christian High.
There was a time when I wanted very much to be normal and act like a normal person, but I’ve made my peace with that. I’ve concluded that there is no such thing as normal. Everyone has their quirks if you look closely.
I am well aware that my brain often doesn’t seem to be on the same frequency as everyone else. I know I’m perhaps a couple clicks away from rational thought some of the time. I know that I have the social skills of a twelve year old. I realize that if I lived in another time period I would have starved to death long ago.
I also have would perhaps boarders on an obsessive compulsive need to make systems and sets of rules to run my life.
When my friend Brett came to visit me in Japan, he did a great deal of complaining about how dirty my apartment was. But at one point he said, “Alright, when you do clean, what’s your system? Because I know you’ve got some system for how you clean.” I tried to deny this at first, but Brett insisted. “I know you too well. What’s your system.”
I then admitted that I had several rules for how cleaning should go. The first was that any kind of food matter or organic garbage had to be picked up off the floor first. Then next I had to wash any dishes in the sink. Thirdly I had to remove clothes from the floor and do a load of wash. Only then could I move on and clean trouble spots as I saw fit. When the load of wash was done, I had to immediately remove it from the washing machine and hang it out to dry. Unless of course I was gone by the time the washing finished. If I was putting on my shoes, it counted as being gone, but if I was just walking towards the door, I had to come back and hang up the wash.
Cleaning had to be done everyday. The only exceptions were if I left the apartment for social reasons or for exercise. If I got back late, I still had to clean, but I didn’t have to stay awake past whatever time I needed to go to sleep to get 8 hours. But I couldn’t ditch out of cleaning for any more than 8 hours sleep. Unless I was sleep deprived from the night before. Then I could take a nap in the afternoon, which would get added onto the sleep total from the previous night.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I had so many rules I made for myself. But I felt like I needed these rules. If I just told myself, “I’ll clean whenever I feel like it,” it would never get done. And in order to keep food from rotting in the sink, or clothes from molding in the machine, I felt like I had to make rules about this as well.
In the next few days I’ll try and post my experiments concerning my relationship with material possessions, time, and food. If anyone can get any benefit out of reading these, or learn anything, so much the better.
Otherwise if these strike you as just neurotic or crazy, maybe you can get a laugh out of them.
Insights into my Insanity 2: Wealth and Material Possessions
Whether excessive materialism is a uniquely American phenomenon, or whether it is something that all human beings struggle with, I will leave for others to debate.
I think it is safe to say, however, that as Americans we are all immersed in a materialistic culture, and that even as children we begin the craving for material things. Or maybe I should say especially as children. I think we’ve all seen a child throw a temper-tantrum in the toy store because he didn’t get the toy he wanted (or been that child). Or we all remember as children ourselves being obsessed with the toys we would receive on Christmas day, and no amount of preaching from Sunday School teachers could turn our attention to other aspects of Christmas.
But somewhere along the line I began to get the impression that I was even more materialistic than most of my classmates. During middle school was when I first started to notice it. I was obsessed with getting things. What exactly I wanted was always shifting. At one point obsessed with getting certain action figures, at another point comic books, at another point trading cards, at another point certain books. But whatever it was, the anticipation of owning it was always occupying much of my free thoughts.
I went through the standard stages. At first I told myself I wasn’t materialistic; I was a collector. Lots of people have collections as hobbies.
Then I began to justify it by focusing on the small value of everything I was accumulating. But of course that was only relative to my small income, and my interests.
Next I went through a period where I felt guilty about things. And finally I decided to take action.
The first thing I did in Middle School was to attempt to divide up my income. I didn’t have a lot of money in those days of course. Just my monthly allowance and in the summer extra money from cleaning the pool. Of course in those days, I didn’t have any expenses either. I didn’t have much of a social life, so thing I needed money for was to buy things I wanted.
Whatever money I got I would divide into little jars. 50% of the money would go to the poor. 10% would be tithed to my local church. 10% in saving for the future. And the remaining 30% I could use for buying things.
The problem with this was that it didn’t decrease my desire for material goods any less. All it did was increase the amount of time it took for me to save up for them. I began to notice that a majority of my thoughts were still focused on material objects I wanted.
The next stop was to attempt forbid myself from spending any money on material goods I didn’t need. The problem with this was my weak will power. I would see something I wanted, buy it, and then tell myself that it would be the last time. Soon it became almost a joke. I was spending all of my money on material things again, while promising myself sometime soon I would stop doing it.
Near the end of my Sophomore year at Calvin, I decided I would just get rid of everything once and for all. This would prove to myself that I wasn’t fooling around. I wouldn’t be able to buy anything on impulse any more, because even if I did temporarily break my own rules, I would still know that in the end I would have to just get rid of it again.
This was also a result of the growing awareness that materialism is not just the desire to acquire new things, but also being overly attached to the things you already have. I thought that if I could just get rid of all these material possessions that were distracting me, I could focus on the things that were important in life.
This philosophy had a lot of problems, and I’ll get to those in a minute. However on the whole, I do still believe that this was a step in the right direction. After all, did not Jesus command us to sell all that we have and give the money to the poor? Can we truly be a follower of Christ without attempting to follow this commandment?
In my view, the church has chosen to selectively interpret which sections of the bible are to be taken literally. For instance the gospels and the book of Acts command over and over again to share all that we have with the poor. But the church tells us we are not supposed to take these literally. However condemnations of homosexuality and fornication, which in the New Testament appear only in the epistles of Paul, and only appear briefly when he is listing off numerous sins, are where the modern church has chosen to focus its political energies.
But interpretations of scripture are a broad subject for anther post.
It was my belief that material possessions, beyond what are needed, do not bring any happiness. I, like most college students, was very into collecting CDs at that age. But does having a CD increase my happiness? There was once a time when I had never even heard of “Radio Head”. Was my life in someway deficient before their CD came out? Did people who live in previous generations have an unfulfilled life because they didn’t have the CDs that we did? What about people who lived before recorded music was possible?
Thoughts on the Post-Calvin World
(This started out with a very simply question: has anyone else besides me noticed a big difference between our Calvin circles and the post-Calvin world. But then it got too egocentric and too self-centered.)
This is probably a bit random, but my thoughts just happened to lingering on the difference between my life now and the Calvin bubble, and I thought I’d write up some thoughts and throw it on the blog to see if anyone had any similar experiences.
Now my experience might be especially unique, in the sense that even for a Calvin graduate I was more sheltered than most. I went to Christian schools all my life. In my old neighborhood I knew the kids on my block, but we moved when I was in third grade to a much bigger house with a much bigger yard in a neighborhood where the houses were far enough apart that neighbors didn’t really interact. Growing up all of my friends were either from my Christian school or church youth group. I spent two summers working at a grocery store, but then after that worked for the Calvin dorm cleaning crew, and further isolated myself into the Calvin bubble. Forget non-Christian friends, I would have been hard-pressed to even name any non-Christian acquaintances.
Now granted even at Calvin there are two different worlds you can fall into. There was the world of underage drinking, smokers pits, Friday night house parties, and even the occasional casual marijuana, made up primarily of other Christian school grads who, like me, ended up at Calvin out of tradition instead of conviction.
And then there were was the other half of Calvin, made up of late night dormitory devotionals, Monday night bible studies, and daily morning chapels.
Because of my introverted nerdy nature, the fact that I was more comfortable studying in the library and getting to bed at a decent hour than I was partying all night, I ended up in the second group, even though my views were probably more at home in the first.
Of course having written that I realize it is a gross oversimplification that doesn’t do justice to the real people I knew, but the point being I realize I can’t complain too much about being the odd man out, because it was by my own decision. I chose to hang out in the circles I did. And no complaints, you were a great group, all of you. But it wasn’t without its tensions.
The political debates were always great. I complained sometimes about always being outnumbered, or always expected to defend the liberal position whether I was in the mood or not. But for the most part I love a good political discussion as much as the next guy. I usually enjoyed rolling up my sleeves and getting right into the argument.
The political discussions were abstract enough that they never got to personal. The only times I can recall the discussions getting a little heated was on the issues of abortion, or homosexuality. (Although I’m sure he’ll hate me for bringing it up 9 years later, I remember a roommate of mine once saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to room with me if I didn’t believe homosexuality was a sin.)
Things got a little more tense when it concerned my personal life. For instance I don’t know how many hours I spent defending my decision not to go to Church on Sundays. I do know it sabotaged things with some girls I was interested in, but then again I have no one but myself to blame for choosing social circles where I knew I would be the odd man out.
(I primarily objected to church because of its passive nature. My own idea for a more active Church, “Open Church”, never really took off to well, but I always liked it. The strength of an idea, after all, should never be judged on its popularity.)
Although I was never a huge drinker, my belief that there was nothing morally wrong with under-age drinking (old enough to go to war, old enough to have a beer I say), and my insistence on putting this into practice on a couple of occasions, also caused some tensions. I’m reminded of one instance in particular when some Bennick girls, on the pretext of inviting me out to watch tennis with them, ambushed me into a lecture about my drinking habits. I tried to laugh it off, but they were dead serious about it, and it proved to be a very awkward tennis game.
And then of course there were the conflicts over my views on pre-marital sex. Even years later, I’m reluctant to write too much about that debate because of the emotions and strong views involved.
But perhaps most
I was doing one of my long drives, and my thoughts were wandering, and I began to think about the ways in which I’ve tried to deal with different aspects of life, and the various systems I’ve set up, and the various problems I’ve encountered. As someone who admittedly has the “blogging bug”, I thought that this might be something that would make a good blog entry, or perhaps a short series. As with my series recalling the back stories of my Chimes articles, it would be a short break from the usual update to a reflection on events during high school and college.
In the sense that blogging is primarily a release, the main benefit of this would be to me, but perhaps someone else might be able to find some inspiration off of it, or more likely learn from my mistakes and save themselves the trouble of repeating it. I thought I would do a short little series on some of my half-baked philosophies, and entitle it “Experiments with Truth.” The title is stolen from Gandhi’s autobiography, but I’ve always liked it. It would imply that I haven’t found the truth, but here are the results of some of my experiments in my attempts to find it.
But as I began to think more about it, it began to occur to me that what I would be describing could more accurately be described as insights into mental illness or neurosis. And I thought that this might be as good a time as any to come out and acknowledge straight on what I perhaps have always been dancing around ever since I started this blog: I’m not normal, and I realize that.
I’m well aware that everyone else knows it, so I just thought I might as well just admit it rather than trying to pretend.
I’ve always been a little bit different. I remember in kindergarten being too shy to talk to any of the other children around me, but I don’t remember this bothering me at the time. I guess at that age maybe you don’t have a sense of self developed, so maybe you can’t really feel like there’s anything wrong with you.
It was during middle school that I remembered feeling really upset about it. I wanted to be popular and I wanted to be liked by the girls, but I just didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it. I couldn’t carry on a normal conversation, I didn’t know how to talk to girls, I had no idea of what was cool or what wasn’t, or how to become popular, and all of these things seemed to be things that my classmates just intuitively knew. I wondered why it was that everyone else seemed to know these things, and I didn’t. It was as if I had been absent the one day of school when all of these things were explained, and I felt like I was playing a game in which everyone else around me seemed to know the rules, but I didn’t.
Of course middle school is a rough time for a lot of people. High School was a bit better, or at least it became better by the end (the first couple years were a rough start).
I began to discover that I had an unintentional sense of humor, and that people often found me hilarious when I was trying to be serious. People liked having me around because they found humor in my oddities, and I learned to capitalize to this to a certain extent and tried to play up the aspects of my personality which they found humorous. I began to realize that many of the more popular kids were always happy to have me hanging around, and I began to shift my social circles.
In high school I achieved what I suppose might be regarded as some degree of popularity. I was voted on the home coming court, voted the friendliest person in my graduating class, and selected by the chapel committee as one of the seniors to speak at the “senior chapel” at the end of the year.
There were perhaps two aspects to this. One was a desire for acceptance at all costs, which occasionally disguised itself as kindness or friendliness. At times my desire to be liked was a pleasant aspect of my personality, at other times I became someone without principles or backbone. I remember sitting silently when racists comments were made, not having the courage to speak up because I desperately wanted the approval of the person making the comments.
But the second reason I was popular was because my personality quirks were an object of interest.
I remember one of my classmates saying to me once, “Whenever I talk to you I feel like I’m tripping. For someone who has been walking the straight and narrow for a as long as you have, you sure have a whacked out perspective on things.”
Despite the fact that the first couple years were pretty rough, I always had the feeling that Christian High had been pretty good to me. I had absolutely no social skills, but had achieved a degree of popularity anyway. I thought if I had been at any other school I probably just would have been completely ignored. One of the reasons I choose Calvin is because I thought the social environment would be similar to Christian High.
There was a time when I wanted very much to be normal and act like a normal person, but I’ve made my peace with that. I’ve concluded that there is no such thing as normal. Everyone has their quirks if you look closely.
I am well aware that my brain often doesn’t seem to be on the same frequency as everyone else. I know I’m perhaps a couple clicks away from rational thought some of the time. I know that I have the social skills of a twelve year old. I realize that if I lived in another time period I would have starved to death long ago.
I also have would perhaps boarders on an obsessive compulsive need to make systems and sets of rules to run my life.
When my friend Brett came to visit me in Japan, he did a great deal of complaining about how dirty my apartment was. But at one point he said, “Alright, when you do clean, what’s your system? Because I know you’ve got some system for how you clean.” I tried to deny this at first, but Brett insisted. “I know you too well. What’s your system.”
I then admitted that I had several rules for how cleaning should go. The first was that any kind of food matter or organic garbage had to be picked up off the floor first. Then next I had to wash any dishes in the sink. Thirdly I had to remove clothes from the floor and do a load of wash. Only then could I move on and clean trouble spots as I saw fit. When the load of wash was done, I had to immediately remove it from the washing machine and hang it out to dry. Unless of course I was gone by the time the washing finished. If I was putting on my shoes, it counted as being gone, but if I was just walking towards the door, I had to come back and hang up the wash.
Cleaning had to be done everyday. The only exceptions were if I left the apartment for social reasons or for exercise. If I got back late, I still had to clean, but I didn’t have to stay awake past whatever time I needed to go to sleep to get 8 hours. But I couldn’t ditch out of cleaning for any more than 8 hours sleep. Unless I was sleep deprived from the night before. Then I could take a nap in the afternoon, which would get added onto the sleep total from the previous night.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I had so many rules I made for myself. But I felt like I needed these rules. If I just told myself, “I’ll clean whenever I feel like it,” it would never get done. And in order to keep food from rotting in the sink, or clothes from molding in the machine, I felt like I had to make rules about this as well.
In the next few days I’ll try and post my experiments concerning my relationship with material possessions, time, and food. If anyone can get any benefit out of reading these, or learn anything, so much the better.
Otherwise if these strike you as just neurotic or crazy, maybe you can get a laugh out of them.
Insights into my Insanity 2: Wealth and Material Possessions
Whether excessive materialism is a uniquely American phenomenon, or whether it is something that all human beings struggle with, I will leave for others to debate.
I think it is safe to say, however, that as Americans we are all immersed in a materialistic culture, and that even as children we begin the craving for material things. Or maybe I should say especially as children. I think we’ve all seen a child throw a temper-tantrum in the toy store because he didn’t get the toy he wanted (or been that child). Or we all remember as children ourselves being obsessed with the toys we would receive on Christmas day, and no amount of preaching from Sunday School teachers could turn our attention to other aspects of Christmas.
But somewhere along the line I began to get the impression that I was even more materialistic than most of my classmates. During middle school was when I first started to notice it. I was obsessed with getting things. What exactly I wanted was always shifting. At one point obsessed with getting certain action figures, at another point comic books, at another point trading cards, at another point certain books. But whatever it was, the anticipation of owning it was always occupying much of my free thoughts.
I went through the standard stages. At first I told myself I wasn’t materialistic; I was a collector. Lots of people have collections as hobbies.
Then I began to justify it by focusing on the small value of everything I was accumulating. But of course that was only relative to my small income, and my interests.
Next I went through a period where I felt guilty about things. And finally I decided to take action.
The first thing I did in Middle School was to attempt to divide up my income. I didn’t have a lot of money in those days of course. Just my monthly allowance and in the summer extra money from cleaning the pool. Of course in those days, I didn’t have any expenses either. I didn’t have much of a social life, so thing I needed money for was to buy things I wanted.
Whatever money I got I would divide into little jars. 50% of the money would go to the poor. 10% would be tithed to my local church. 10% in saving for the future. And the remaining 30% I could use for buying things.
The problem with this was that it didn’t decrease my desire for material goods any less. All it did was increase the amount of time it took for me to save up for them. I began to notice that a majority of my thoughts were still focused on material objects I wanted.
The next stop was to attempt forbid myself from spending any money on material goods I didn’t need. The problem with this was my weak will power. I would see something I wanted, buy it, and then tell myself that it would be the last time. Soon it became almost a joke. I was spending all of my money on material things again, while promising myself sometime soon I would stop doing it.
Near the end of my Sophomore year at Calvin, I decided I would just get rid of everything once and for all. This would prove to myself that I wasn’t fooling around. I wouldn’t be able to buy anything on impulse any more, because even if I did temporarily break my own rules, I would still know that in the end I would have to just get rid of it again.
This was also a result of the growing awareness that materialism is not just the desire to acquire new things, but also being overly attached to the things you already have. I thought that if I could just get rid of all these material possessions that were distracting me, I could focus on the things that were important in life.
This philosophy had a lot of problems, and I’ll get to those in a minute. However on the whole, I do still believe that this was a step in the right direction. After all, did not Jesus command us to sell all that we have and give the money to the poor? Can we truly be a follower of Christ without attempting to follow this commandment?
In my view, the church has chosen to selectively interpret which sections of the bible are to be taken literally. For instance the gospels and the book of Acts command over and over again to share all that we have with the poor. But the church tells us we are not supposed to take these literally. However condemnations of homosexuality and fornication, which in the New Testament appear only in the epistles of Paul, and only appear briefly when he is listing off numerous sins, are where the modern church has chosen to focus its political energies.
But interpretations of scripture are a broad subject for anther post.
It was my belief that material possessions, beyond what are needed, do not bring any happiness. I, like most college students, was very into collecting CDs at that age. But does having a CD increase my happiness? There was once a time when I had never even heard of “Radio Head”. Was my life in someway deficient before their CD came out? Did people who live in previous generations have an unfulfilled life because they didn’t have the CDs that we did? What about people who lived before recorded music was possible?
Thoughts on the Post-Calvin World
(This started out with a very simply question: has anyone else besides me noticed a big difference between our Calvin circles and the post-Calvin world. But then it got too egocentric and too self-centered.)
This is probably a bit random, but my thoughts just happened to lingering on the difference between my life now and the Calvin bubble, and I thought I’d write up some thoughts and throw it on the blog to see if anyone had any similar experiences.
Now my experience might be especially unique, in the sense that even for a Calvin graduate I was more sheltered than most. I went to Christian schools all my life. In my old neighborhood I knew the kids on my block, but we moved when I was in third grade to a much bigger house with a much bigger yard in a neighborhood where the houses were far enough apart that neighbors didn’t really interact. Growing up all of my friends were either from my Christian school or church youth group. I spent two summers working at a grocery store, but then after that worked for the Calvin dorm cleaning crew, and further isolated myself into the Calvin bubble. Forget non-Christian friends, I would have been hard-pressed to even name any non-Christian acquaintances.
Now granted even at Calvin there are two different worlds you can fall into. There was the world of underage drinking, smokers pits, Friday night house parties, and even the occasional casual marijuana, made up primarily of other Christian school grads who, like me, ended up at Calvin out of tradition instead of conviction.
And then there were was the other half of Calvin, made up of late night dormitory devotionals, Monday night bible studies, and daily morning chapels.
Because of my introverted nerdy nature, the fact that I was more comfortable studying in the library and getting to bed at a decent hour than I was partying all night, I ended up in the second group, even though my views were probably more at home in the first.
Of course having written that I realize it is a gross oversimplification that doesn’t do justice to the real people I knew, but the point being I realize I can’t complain too much about being the odd man out, because it was by my own decision. I chose to hang out in the circles I did. And no complaints, you were a great group, all of you. But it wasn’t without its tensions.
The political debates were always great. I complained sometimes about always being outnumbered, or always expected to defend the liberal position whether I was in the mood or not. But for the most part I love a good political discussion as much as the next guy. I usually enjoyed rolling up my sleeves and getting right into the argument.
The political discussions were abstract enough that they never got to personal. The only times I can recall the discussions getting a little heated was on the issues of abortion, or homosexuality. (Although I’m sure he’ll hate me for bringing it up 9 years later, I remember a roommate of mine once saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to room with me if I didn’t believe homosexuality was a sin.)
Things got a little more tense when it concerned my personal life. For instance I don’t know how many hours I spent defending my decision not to go to Church on Sundays. I do know it sabotaged things with some girls I was interested in, but then again I have no one but myself to blame for choosing social circles where I knew I would be the odd man out.
(I primarily objected to church because of its passive nature. My own idea for a more active Church, “Open Church”, never really took off to well, but I always liked it. The strength of an idea, after all, should never be judged on its popularity.)
Although I was never a huge drinker, my belief that there was nothing morally wrong with under-age drinking (old enough to go to war, old enough to have a beer I say), and my insistence on putting this into practice on a couple of occasions, also caused some tensions. I’m reminded of one instance in particular when some Bennick girls, on the pretext of inviting me out to watch tennis with them, ambushed me into a lecture about my drinking habits. I tried to laugh it off, but they were dead serious about it, and it proved to be a very awkward tennis game.
And then of course there were the conflicts over my views on pre-marital sex. Even years later, I’m reluctant to write too much about that debate because of the emotions and strong views involved.
But perhaps most
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