First off, I love Sarah Vowell. I wish I could write half as brilliantly as she does. (So full of wit, humor, and intelligence!).
Anyway--I have always been a fan, but I recently bought her book Take the Cannoli, and I am reading it for the first time.
The third chapter really REALLY hit close to home, and she echoes pretty much everything I have ever felt, or questioned about growing up in a Millenial church. I won't post the whole chapter, but here is a snipet to wet your appetites. (I am sure I won't be the only one who can relate.)
I really hope you all get a chance to check her out, especially this essay because she's great!! (The bold stuff is my own).
"The End is Near, Nearer, Nearest"
When the plane is going down, you sudeenly feel the urge to hug that smelly snoring person in the seat next to you. Because nothing brings people together like doom. And I should know. I've been to more potlucks, picnics, and get-togethers organized around the idea that we're all going to die than I care to count. Not that I'm trivializing the Apocalypse; I'm sure the actual end of the world will involve a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. But in my experience, talking about the end of the world is a proven way to make friends.
I've had a recurring dream since I was six years old: My mother's gone. She is not running-errands gone, not at-a-friend's-house gone. She's gone for good, vanished. My sister's still here. My dad's around. In fact, all the kids and dads in town are present and accounted for but all the mothers have vanished overnight. That's how I figure out the rapture's happened. Only the women are worthy enough of God's grace to get whisked off to heaven. The wicked men and the wicked children are left to tough out Armageddon on our own.
That means my sister and I will have to suffer through the lake of fire, the rivers of blood, and our father's cooking. Once I get sick of puking up his specaialties-spaghetti sandwiches and a greasy tinfoil concoction he liked to call Boy Scout potatoes-I go to the supermarket, Gibson's in Muskogee. I fill a cart with food. At the checkout counter, I line up vegetables on the conveyor belt by the cash register. The clerk informs me that in order to pay for the food I must take the mark of the beast. She stands ready to attach a "666" price tag on my forehead. I refuse. Soldiers with machine guns appear. They gun me down, my blood spattering all over the salad fixins. Then, poof. I'm in heaven, dead, harp in hand.
I still have that dream sometimes. And thinking about it now, as an atheistic adult, I realize how many things are going on in it, that is a microcosm of my childhood world. At my Oklahoma church, Braggs Pentecostal Holiness, the sermons were about the book of Revelation when I was in first grade-the year I learned to read. So Revelation was the first book of the Bible I ever read myself. The loophole about not taking the mark of the beast as a viable way for rapture missers comes from scripture, as does the grocery store setting. According to Revelation 13:17: "And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." And that number, of course, revealed in verse 18 is, "six hundred threescore and six": 666. The other reason I refuse the mark in the grocery store is tied up in the fundamentalist uproar over bar codes in the 1970's; bar codes were thought by many to be the mark of the beast.
I was a believer. But there was something stronger than my belief in God. The thing the preacher said that I believed more than anything else I heard at church was that I was a sinner. When I sang "Amazing Grace," the key phrase wasn't the title's promise of redemption but this: wretch like me. Even as a six-year-old I knew I'd never be good enough to get into heaven. Thus I seized on the escape clause I dreamed about, the idea that I could refuse the mark of the beast at a grocery store and everything would be all right. I knew I was evil, I knew I couldn't get through a lifetime adhering to daily virtue, but I was pretty sure I had the guts to withstand two or three seconds of machine-gun pain when the time came. This comforted me. It kept me from panicking about the eternal consequences of every childish trespass.
Still Armageddon is kind of a a lot to lay on a six-year-old. The Book of Revelation includes verse after verse of dragons and demons and the blood of the lamb. A typical passage reads, "And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire." Frankly, I could have down with fewer seven seals and more seven dwarves.
There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocense before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too soon about sex and death. Well like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocense the old-time-religion way, by reading the nursery rhyme of fornication that is the Old Testament and the fairy tale bloodbath that is the New. Job taught me, Hey! Life's not fair! Lot's wife taught me that I'm probably going to come across a few weird sleazy things I won't be able to resist looking into. And the book of Revelation taught me to live in the moment, if only because the future's so grim.
If it wasn't for the easy access the sorid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god, who from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time.
God wasn't exactly a children's rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you're supposed to honnor your mother and father but they're not necessarily required to reciprocate. This was a god who told Abraham to knife his boy Isaac and then at the last minute, when the dagger's poised above Isaac's heart, God tells Abraham that He's just kidding. This was a god who let a child lose his birthright because of some screwball mix-up involving fake fur hands and a bowl of soup. This was a god who saw to it that his own son had his hands and feet nailed onto pieces of wood.
God for me, was not in the details. I still set store by the big Judeo-Christian messages. Who can argue with the Ten Commandments? Don't kill anybody: don't mess around with other people's spouses: be nice to your mom and dad. Fine advice. It was the minutiae that nagged me.
It was made clear to me that I wasn't supposed to trouble the moody Creator with any pesky questions about the eccentricities of His cosmic system. So when I asked about stuff that confused me, like "How come we're praying for the bar to be shut down when Jesus himself turned water into wine?", I was shushed and told to have faith. Thus my idea of heaven was that I got to spend eternity sitting at the feet of God grilling Him. "Let's get this straight, " I'd say by way of introduction. "It's your position that every person ever born has to suffer because Eve couldn't resist a healthy between meals snack?" Once I got the meaphysical queries out of the way I could satisfy my curiousity about how He came up with stuff I was learning about in school, like photosynthesis.
Until the mark-of-the-beast police machine-gunned me to the Great Q & A in the Sky, I soon figured out that I should keep my qualms to myself. Christianity is no different from any other cult-it isn't about faith. It's about agreement, about like-minded people sitting together in the same room at the same time believing the same thing. That unity is its appeal. Once someone, even a little six-year-old someone wearing patent leather Mary Janes starts asking questions that can't be answered, the whole congregations's fun is spoiled. (Though my mouth was the least of my mother's worries at church. My sister's constant childish fidgeting was a more pressing concern. During one Sunday sermon, as Mom was dragging the little hellion out to the parking lot for a spanking, Amy kicked at the pews screaming to the congregation, "Pray for me!")
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We gathered together to reassure one another that no matter what horrible thing just happened...God had a plan. A cruel, kooky, murderous horror movie of a plan for sure, but a plan nonetheless.
That's what even the gloomiest sermons were about-the future. And that's why in the gospel hymns we sang, "will" was the most popular verb-"I will meet you in the morning" "There will be peace in the valley someday," and my favorite, "I'll fly away." Even now, a quarter of a centurty after I learned those songs they're still stuck in my head. I miss singing them. I miss the harmony. Some Sunday mornings, in the middle of secular supersitious rituals like reading The New York Times Magazine or watching that berserk Sam Donaldson on TV, I'll hum "I'll fly away" as I make coffee, remembering what it was like to have a Sunday morning purpose, remembering what it was like to have someplace to go, even if it was just hell.
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Relgion became an increasingly less urgent part of my life. This did not mean that the end of the world faded from the forefront of my psyche. I merely replaced one apocalypse for another. In the early 80's president Regan made so many mortifying announcements about the "evil empire" and his Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, and "we begin bombing in five minutes" jokes that I was utterly convinced I was not going to grow up. By 1983, he'd made the whole country so nervous that there was a prime-time TV movie about nuclear winter called The Day After. I have never seen the movie, however, because my mother decided our family wouldn't be watching it as that would be "too disturbing." I guess talking to six-year-olds about the reign of the Antichrist is fine, but letting teenagers watch Jason Robards stumble through rubble for a couple of hours on TV is un-thinkable.
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While I am hardly the most optimistic American, I did not share the Y2K group's wholly cynical picture of current events. Heaven, such as it is, is right here on earth. Behold: my revelation: I stand at the door in the morning, and lo, there is a newspaper, in sight like unto an emerald. And holy, holy, holy is the cofee, which was and is, and is to come. And hark, I hear the voice of an angel round about the radio saying, "Since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell." And lo, after this I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number, of shoes. And after these things I will hasten unto a taxicab and to a theater, where a ticket will be given unto me, and lo, it will be a matinee, and a film that doeth great wonders. And when it is finished, the heavens will open, and out will cometh a rain fragrant as myrrh, and yea, I have an umbrella.
I just loved this chapter. (I edited out a lot, I just highlighted the stuff I found completly apropos to the experience of being a JW kid and thinking you were never good enough, the end of the world was 'nigh, and that you'd never make it to your next birthday.
I also found her comments on Christianity and a whimsical fury ridden God to be SPOT ON, but I am an athiestic adult now myself, so I am biased on such things.
So whoever says, "Non-jw's just don't get it" I think Sarah Vowell as a pretty good idea.
(I REALLY hope you guys check out this essay--or at least give the book a spot on your "need to read" list. She is so wonderful to read, and you will be laughing out loud as you read!)