Blissful Ignorance 3

previous post

4. But my father did survive World War 2. My parents did meet. They had four daughters from 1948 to 1958 and thought they were done. Then they were surprised to have a boy in 1966, as of someone born out of season.

I grew up around "old people." My father was almost 42 when I was born. My mother was 40. I was born about a month premature. It was a dry birth as my mother's water broke about a week before I was delivered. There were medical students in the room to observe when I was finally born. They wouldn't do it that way today.

My sisters were pretty much out of the house when I was born, except for my youngest sister. But I have only the faintest memories of her living at home. All of my sisters did some or all high school at a Bible school of some sort. My oldest sisters went to the high school at Frankfort Pilgrim College, living with my grandmother off campus. My youngest sister did several years at Hobe Sound Bible College. These were all old school holiness places, buns and all.

5. They were all very "conservative." The meaning of the word conservative basically depends on what you're conserving. Conservative Quakers don't baptize. Conservative Catholics worship in Latin. Conservative holiness women used to wear skirts and put their hair up in buns, "Wesleyan wads" if you would.

I grew up already a generation in the past. The Wesleyan church of my youth was more the Pilgrim Holiness Church of the fifties or early sixties in some respects, not really the Wesleyan Church of the seventies. I grew up thinking that women who cut their hair had either "backed up on light" or simply didn't know any better.

I have always been a people-pleaser. I had not a rebellious bone in my body that I knew of. I think my mother at one point thought I was rebelling against my youth but I didn't experience it that way. My transition from the holiness world of my childhood to a more mainstream Wesleyan identity was very painful in some respects. It was driven, in my opinion, by a commitment to truth and some paradigm challenging experiences.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Until I was twenty, I was pretty much zealous for the traditions of my elders.

6. The first ten years of my life were pretty happy, as far as I can recall. My mother's philosophy of child-raising, at least with regard to me, was not to provoke her children to wrath. She did not force me to do things and mostly didn't need to. I was not resistant, for the most part. My wife would strongly suspect I was spoiled growing up.

The first four years of my life were spent in Indianapolis, in the church that would become Trinity Wesleyan Church. In my time, it was Northside, in what is now a much different part of Indy than it was then. Of course even then my family drove twenty minutes from Carmel to the church for every service. As so many churches did, it would move to the suburbs around 1980. We could ponder possible socio-economic and racial dimensions to this move but I won't.

I have few memories of Preston Drive in northern Indy. Four year old walks with my father to a fire hydrant on College Ave no doubt to talk about deep subjects. Almost getting run over by our car when I put it in neutral in our driveway. I'm told I used to shoot with my fingers at Pastor Art Davis while he preached. As foreshadowing, I'm told I used to preach up a storm on a mound in our backyard.

My father used to bounce me on his knee, "I rode my horsey and I went to town, and when I got there, my horsey broke down." On the "down," he would drop his knee. I did it with my kids too. He would also sing, "Kenny's my boy. He's the only boy I've got. All my other boys are girls. Kenny's my boy." I sang it to my son too, substituting "Tommy." Another thing he would do is the little piggies. "This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy ate roast beef, and this little piggy had none. And this little piggy went 'wee, wee, wee' all the way home." Of course I did that with my kids as well.

7. About a month before I turned five we moved to Florida. My dad worked for what would become GMAC, General Motor's Assurance Corporation. He was immensely responsible, a book-keeper by personality, like his mother. He had been the District Treasurer for the Indiana Central District of the Wesleyan Church. He would become the same for Florida and served for thirty years. In that time I saw him transition from a six-inch thick ledger to Quicken Books electronically.

I hope my Hoosier friends will forgive me, but even in the tribal days of my teens I was grateful to grow up in Florida. Even when I still quite a "holiness Wesleyan," it seemed to me that there was a certain narrow-mindedness to the Wesleyans of Indiana Central. Perhaps I will have further thoughts on that later. I felt that growing up in south Florida somehow gave me a bigger picture of the world.

Nevertheless, we did not lose contact with the world of my parents' past. Growing up, almost all of our vacations had to do with the church in some way. Every four years my father was a delegate to General Conference. That took us to places like Wichita, Kansas and Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. We went to Brooksville Winter Camp. We went to Hobe Sound Bible Camp. We went to district conference.

Two trips of great interest as a child were the trips to visit two of my older sisters at Brainerd Indian School around 1976 and the Philippines to visit my sister Juanita in 1978. The Wesleyan Church would later issue an apology to native American Wesleyans for the cultural insensitivity associated with our work at Brainerd. Many who had worked there did not see it and probably still don't to this day.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that the intentions of those who worked at Brainerd were good. They provided education, which was good. I believe most of the students there probably loved their teachers. The problem was not intention--at least I hope not. The problem was a lack of self-awareness.

Growing up in somewhat of an unreflective tributary of Christianity would later, in my opinion, give me a really good grasp of what I would call "pre-modern interpretation." It is an inability to see that you are reading the Bible as a mirror for what you already believe. The Bible is extensively a set of proof-texts that give a divine imprimatur for your group's traditions, beliefs, values, and practices. The Bible is proclaimed to be the authority, but it is really much more a sociological mechanism for giving divine sanction for your tribe's identity.

In my late 20s, I sometimes thought to myself that I might have been spared some of my faith crisis in those days if I had been born in a bit more of the mainstream. On the other hand, I'm not sure that we necessarily start out more self-aware in any tradition. Education with an open mind is what tends to make a person more self-aware, and such education almost always involves deconstruction of tradition. Nevertheless, it is still possible that I would have struggled less. I don't know.

8. The most significant trips of all were the yearly pilgrimages to Frankfort Camp. The college was closed in 1972, I believe, but the camp meeting continued. While camp meetings began to close, I grew up in this time machine into the holiness movement's past. Running the aisle's, shouting hallelujah--I caught the tail end of that phenomenon just as J. D. Abbott and others were moving the church toward doing everything "decently and in order." (I was actually named after his son.)