07.30.07
Stage 3 - at age seven
May, 2007 - by Marie Jones
I’m 56 years old now and many of my memories of the early years in my life have faded. But there is one early period I remember with some clarity. Amazingly, my parents let me believe in Santa Clause until I was 7 years old. They might have let me believe even longer had I not gotten into an argument with a child in our neighborhood who tried to convince me Santa was imaginary. I stormed into the house after the argument and told my mother what had happened. I think I must have been very trusting until that day but when my mother explained to me that the child was right, that she (my mother) had been “telling me a story”, and that Santa wasn’t real, something strange happened to me. There grew in me a great anger at having been deceived. And there grew a determination that it would never happen again. Here is how the actual events of the period immediately following that day played out.
I went into my bedroom and stayed there as much as I possibly could. I came out to go to school or when my mother insisted, but otherwise I kept to my seclusion. I cried continuously, both at home and at school, for maybe a week. I just sat quietly with tears running down my cheeks. I remember that my teacher called to see what was going on, but I don’t know what my mother told her. I remember feeling that I had to rethink everything I’d ever been told and everything that I thought I knew. During a trip to the shoe store I was asked by the salesman whether or not a certain pair of shoes felt good and I said I didn’t know. I truly didn’t know, but my mother thought I was being obstinate and I got a good spanking. I remember that at some point toward the end of that time I left my room, walked into the living room and made the following announcement to my mother: “I hate you and I hate God.” At that point, obviously, God was quite real to me since I felt able to hate him. But over the years between that point and my late teens the concept of God became as big a joke to me as Santa Clause.
My mother was literally a God-fearing woman. I don’t remember whether or not we attended church, but I’m guessing that we did. We moved so often due to my father being in the military that we could never have attended the same church for very long. My religious training didn’t come from any church—it came from my mother. She told me Bible stories every night, had me memorize verses, and provided me with plenty of religious books to read. I couldn’t talk to her about my doubts because she would tell me that for even having such thoughts I was dooming myself to burn in hell. Her God was a mind-reading, vengeful being. It made no sense to me that something called a God could be mean, but I kept my thoughts to myself. I did grow a bit braver about expressing my ideas as time passed. In high school I wrote a paper summarizing some proofs of the non-existence of God and that made my mother extremely unhappy. She blamed my English teacher, whom she referred to as “the atheist” with great derision, for my demise.
Strangely, although I couldn’t believe that God was real, I still felt that the possibility existed that I would burn in hell. When it came time to go to college, I chose a religious school and decided to major in “missions”. I remember thinking that it was possible that by acting right, I could convince God (whom I didn’t believe in) not to throw me into that raging fire called hell. My decision made my freshman year of college completely miserable and completely wonderful at the same time. I had never been a trouble-maker in school. I had made very high grades, graduated 7th in a class of 357, been a favorite of many of the teachers in my high school. But I got into so much trouble at that religious college it was amazing.
I got demerits during surprise room inspections for not having followed all the housekeeping rules. Sometimes a drawer wasn’t fully closed, and sometimes the bathroom wasn’t completely shining when it was my turn to scrub it. I got demerits for wearing my skirts too short. My dorm mother would measure the distance of my hem above my knee while I was standing in line at meal time and send me back to my room to change clothes. I got demerits for coming in after the 10:30 curfew. There were so many couples making out in the lobby late in the evenings that I would wait to go in until they left. I got demerits for wearing my gym shorts across campus and not wearing a rain coat over the top of them as I was supposed to. Many weekends I spent confined to my room except for meals in the cafeteria because I had chalked up 5 or more demerits that week. Late in the second semester an event occurred that caused the Dean of Women to tell me I couldn’t come back the next year. She also mentioned that I had accrued more demerits that year than any girl in the history of the school. By that time I had already decided to transfer to a different school, so it was no punishment that I couldn’t go back to the religious one.
The event that I mentioned happened when a friend who lived in the same dorm decided one night to commit suicide. We were studying in her room when she decided this. She got a razor blade and said she was going to cut her wrists if I didn’t provide her with a good enough reason not to. I talked and fought with her for several hours, and finally she agreed to put the blade away if I would just lie down with her and hold her while she fell asleep. I was exhausted from all the hours of arguing and that sounded great to me, too. Soon after we collapsed onto her small bed, her roommate came in. That roommate was one of the God Squad, as we called them, and she reported us to the Dean of Women for having a lesbian love affair. I’m not sure how many demerits I got for that one.
When I say that my freshman year was completely miserable and completely wonderful, I mean that it was difficult to put up with the restrictions placed on me and it was difficult to endure all the confinements related to my many demerits, but at the same time it was so completely freeing! It finished the work of freeing me from my fear of hell. All the people at that school who saw me as such a bad person perceived themselves to be quite righteous. It was easy for me to throw out all the old fears and see all of them in a completely new way. Although I allowed the possibility in my mind that some better God than theirs might exist, I completely discarded the old God of my mother.
Since those early years I have slowly come to believe that no concept of God makes any sense. And I have become much more dismayed at the predominance of the God Squad in our world. When I thought they were all still confined to religious institutions I felt fairly safe from them, but they are now everywhere. I am a college professor and many of my colleagues are in the Squad. They believe that the Christian Bible is the literal truth, they teach their children at home to avoid exposing them to the concept of evolution, and they think the Earth is 6,000 years old. These are people who hold doctorates in science and teach at a state school. I wish I could transfer to a different school and be freed from them again, but I fear I would have to transfer to a different planet.
MPJ said,
July 30, 2007 at 7:45 pm
This is someone who suffered some confusion by having her magical beliefs torn from her very early. Nonetheless, it was a brave move for that little girl to place such a high value on the truth. She chose to reject God and even her relationship with her family if it meant being lied to. That is what is meant by saying stage 3’s are principled. They place a higher value on principles than other concepts like salvation, comfort, etc. This may not be the best example of growth, which we picture happening gradually and gracefully, but it is surely an excellent example of how these people tend to have the strength to hold to principle even when it causes them a lot of pain.