Baptized in Fright (unfinished)

Mingled stories of a religious Deity spills on my jacket and stains my lapel like the grape juice I drank in Church. Abnormalities beg for forgiveness as they ask to be just like you and me. The conquered and the conqueror ask to switch places hoping for greener pastures on the other side. Only to find out that the tango takes two and there are no other partners and as they've practiced the same dance, life reflects no more than a mirror image of itself.

You see, as a kid, I didn't always quite understand why people egregiously showed up to Church. "To feel bad," I used to think. And partly, that's true. But what we fail to realize as kids is the business of being an adult. It carries with it, a weight unsensationalized by the mind of a child.

And yet for such a simple task as creating both faiths in a parent and in a God, a child might not quite get what it is they must dedicate to the latter. Yet, He is there; He is always there. Emblematic or otherwise, you're taught to pay homage to the life and times (including our own) of someone or some power so great that He can bring you death, just as quickly as He brought you life. That is. . .Fear.

In the small town of Rock Hill, South Carolina, I was baptized in fright. It sounds more negative than it is. But there is a burden to carrying God around in you. I would never let my Grandy-ma here me say that, but it is true. As a child, if you did something wrong, you learned, quickly, the extent of a parent's punishment; verbal, physical or otherwise. As I got older and my potential for wrong-doing became greater, it was expressed to me more and more just how much, God don’t like ugly. It was frightening to know and learn the lengths a merciful God would go through to teach you a lesson; so said my Grandy-ma, so said the Pastor, so said the Bible.

Consequently, if you did the right things, you had little to worry about; little to fear from God. 'Cept as a child, you also have little knowledge of what's right. And if a sea of adults came to Church to be forgiven for things they may have done wrong, then what hope had we as children to get it right? An eagle-eye opener, for sure, for any adolescent being contemplating the extent of his future existence amongst the adults, let alone, amongst the Heaven’s. . .or if you were me, amongst the Cosmos as my studies of Benjamin Bennaker took me to far off, little black boy places. I digress.

So I say that I was baptized in fright because this is what I came to understand about my life as I knew it. My childish existence was one spent attempting to always be right or righteous by adults who, for better or for worse, could accurately assess my behavior levels and praise or reprimand me as they saw fit. I saw no one reprimanding them, so I thought it was odd that they would go to church to have a Pastor do so, in the name of an invisible, dead Man. As I got older, my knowledge of what's right had grown significantly; concurrently, so had my knowledge of what I could do that was wrong. And frighteningly, ironic enough, it is 'what's wrong' that oft times has the greater appeal.

That is to say, being frightened of the spiritual unknown is even greater as an adult, which then begins to lend credence to my notion of why I feel many people attend church. My assumptions may be wrong, or they may be spot on, but whatever the case may be' they are opinions, things I feel and have come to understand inside of me. The lessons I learned as a child, to be frightened of consciously doing the wrong thing, remains with me today. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve seen many a God-fearing individuals fall on hard times and it is then that we say to ourselves “that person must have done something wrong!” or “where was God for that person?” The answers, let alone the questions, lend very little solace to the daily situations at hand that at any moment have the ability to consume any one of us or all of us simultaneously.

My point is simply that the fright remains with us, consciously or subconsciously. Even those who do bad things are cognizant of the oft spoken of spiritual, after-death consequences of living a bad life. . .whether they choose to believe it or not is the faith. I won’t speak on my belief that we all live our lives into fruition for fear that I may spark a heated debate with some folks. I have given some background behind my “statement of personal fact” and I will end this blog, where it began:

I was baptized in fright.