Growing up, we as a family never went to church.  I don’t remember any conversations about Christianity, or any other religion, for that matter.  I don’t remember ever praying or saying grace, although the latter might have happened at Thanksgiving or something.  I suppose my spiritual blank screen could just be a case of my faulty memory, but I don’t think so.  It wasn’t that my parents had negative stuff to say about religion; they didn’t have anything at all to say about it in my formative years.

On military or school forms, my dad always had us fill in “Protestant” under religion.  That didn’t mean anything other than that we weren’t Catholic, according to my father’s logic.  You were either one or the other, unless you were Buddhist or something exotic like that.  We definitely weren’t exotic; actually we weren’t anything.  I knew my mom had been raised Catholic, but she wasn’t a practicing Catholic or necessarily a believer of Catholicism by the time she got married.

So my first real exposure to any “God stuff” came at the age of  5 or 6, or maybe 7.  (I’m going by where we were living at the time – Tampa, Florida – and my age range when we lived there.)  We got invited to go to church with our neighbors, Hap and Heloise Hutchinson.  Yup, those were their real names.  The invitation came about through our friendship with their boy, Jonny.  I don’t remember a lot about him, other than him having good toys to play with, different and somehow better than ours.  I’m guessing our whole family got invited, but I only remember me and my sister going with them.  Pretty sure the church was Baptist.  We would sit in the pew with them, not in the front but not all the way in the back, either, and sing songs out of the hymnal.  It seems like maybe we went to Sunday school, too, but I can’t say for sure.  Mr. Hap wore short sleeve dress shirts and slacks.  He was balding and had a comb-over and, in retrospect, reminded me of an insurance salesman.  Mrs. Heloise wore dresses and had a modified bouffant hairdo.  Jonny looked like a miniature Mr. Hap, wearing short sleeve button-down shirts tucked neatly into his pants.

It was there that the first seeds of Christianity were planted in me.  What did those seeds produce?  At that time, nothing more than a new game to play.  My sister and I would “play church”, which consisted of taking communion.  (Most likely this was just a ploy to get a snack.  How could our mom say “no” when we were practicing something so pious?)  We would take a handful of Rold Gold pretzel sticks and break them up into small pieces and put them in a Dixie cup.  In two other Dixie cups we each had KoolAid.  We’d sing a hymn, then bow our heads to pray.  At this point I would close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose.  This was how Mrs. Heloise prayed, so it had to be the right way.  When we were finished with the silent prayer, we’d solemnly take a piece of pretzel, eat it, and follow it with a sip of our drink.  We’d repeat this over and over until we got impatient.  Then we’d just divvy up the pretzels that were left, eat them lickety-split and wash the whole thing down with the remaining KoolAid. 

To be continued...