Childhood

childhood. When I was little(4 to 8)years old I can remember not knowing quite what to do with Jesus. Many of my schoolmates brought their religions to school then and everyone, almost but me went off part of the day to their Catholic time or their Methodist time, or their Baptist time or their Epicopal time or whatever. It was just a normal part of every school day in public school in Los angeles County, California. I sort of felt left out because my religion that my parents were in was too small to be represented like this and so I got left out.

I went with friends sometimes to visit their churches and was fairly frightened by Jesus, nailed to a cross and blood coming out of him. Then most protestant churches just had crosses with no one nailed to them and no Mary so they seemed kind of dead and stale to me whereas the Catholic church was scary because blood was coming out of Jesus all over the place. So I sort of got the idea that all people in religions were kind of crazy including my own parents.

I sort of put people in two categories nuts and normal. What I found strange as a child was that there were normal people who went to church and normal people who didn't. These normal people that I sensed weren't crazy and might be safe to be around I tried to make friends with because the world was a pretty scary place to a little child.

I couldn't make any sense at all out of what kids told me about their religions. I knew they didn't know what they were talking about because they were just parroting what other people told them in trying to scare them into believing in God. I thought life was scary enough without crazy people trying to scare poor children into believing in God. Oh, I was good at saying what people wanted me to say. That was how you didn't get beaten and still had some freedom and got candy and bicycles. But I was never stupid enough to believe most of what adults told me. I was always intuitive enough to sense whether they actually believed what they were saying or whether their parents had just scared them into saying the right things too.

So, I began to classify adults into grown up children and people who actually knew what they were talking about. This I found was very important to my ongoing survival.
I was surprised how many grown up children there were and just how few adults knew what they were talking about. I think this realization scared me more than anything.
Because as a child I was the potential victim of any adult in the 1950s.

However, back then I was expected in many ways to be as responsible as an adult by age 6. By age 8 I was supposed to be safe with a rifle around other children with rifles (.22 rifles) and sometimes I was if there was another adult supervising.(I got shot by a BB gun in the leg by a friend and it turned purple through my jeans the size of a quarter but it didn't draw blood but I never saw any person get shot by a .22 caliber rifle. I saw many lizards and rabbits and birds die but luckily never a person. This was the way it had been for hundreds of years and only changed during and after the Viet Nam War when I was in my twenties.

Jesus only made sense to me when I watched movies like "The Robe" and the one that Jeffrey Hunter made on the life of Jesus. Then Jesus made some sense. But otherwise I just saw a lot of people fighting over which Jesus to believe in. I guess in some ways this is how I still see most Christian religions today. I believe in the Jesus I talk to since he appeared to me and healed me when I was 5. That is the Jesus I believe in still and that is a personal experience of Jesus and I don't think he has anything to do with any organized religion. He just comes to people one by one.