Dealing With Abandonment and Dominance

BY THE TIME I was five years old, I had learned that people either controlled you (mother), abandoned you (father), or dominated you (older sister). C.A.D.. All three perceptions contributed to the same effect: a person compelled toward nonconformity. By the time I was ten I knew I would never be a Christian, that I would reveal to myself my unique concept of God. My role models would be those whose determination was to change the world, my athletic heroes would be black, and I would love the hated New York Yankees. In 1950s white middle class America, none of this flew very high, exactly as I intended. lack of acceptance motivates further rebellion. when I was thirteen Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King was killed, and again I had been abandoned. A good way to express contempt for social convention when one reaches the age of teenage rebellion is to dress inappropriately and wear hair strangely, and this was easy to do in the nineteen seventies. I briefly considered a return to conformity in 1972 by supporting Nixon; I thought he had had a good first term, but soon i regained my senses, and returned to my liberal democratic socialist impulses, were I remain to this day. Today, for the first time in years, I attended church, Presbyterian. My friends at the senior center told me their grand daughter would be conducting the service, because the minister was ill. Maybe this was another way for me to surprise, and maybe the target was myself. I thoroughly enjoyed the service, and the social hour that followed. the congregation was pitifully small in a building which must be at least eighty years old, and all the attendees were far older than I. In my small town, there are many churches, a fragmented protestant faith, and I assume all the other churches are also sparsely attended. You would think they'd all get together, and pool their resources. I think I can see the decline of teh christian religion right before my very eyes. the faith is growing in numbers only in Latin America, and is declining in Europe and North America. Its tempting to go back, and I very well might. I have been invited to every church in town, and am considering accepting all invitations. But it can't last long, not for me. At length I shall return to my lifelong habit of guarding intensely my status as an outsider, an observer, a person who resists with all his might the temptation to be controlled, abandoned, and dominated.