As a child, I was strong and stubborn. My energy was a constant source of torment to my mother. I seemed to always be in trouble. Fear of God was used to control my lively spirit. I was told that God was always watching me and God wasn’t pleased. The angels assigned to me were keeping a big book on my misdeeds. The book started out with snowy white blank pages. Every time I did something bad, my angels would make an ugly black smudge in the book. My book was full of ugly black smudges or so I was told.
I put on a tough exterior to hide the fact that this was devastating news to my young soul. It was the stuff of nightmares and I had many of them due to the passing of this misinformation. This also fostered a deep sense of unworthiness especially in the imagined eyes of God. I could never be good enough to be worth of His love. I felt a profound shame at my failure.
For the first eight years of my life, we lived on my paternal grandparents farm. They’d moved into town. My parents moved to the farm and tended a milk cow and calf. My uncles often visited to use the machine shop or to farm some of the acreage. These 80 acres were a slice of heaven to me. When things got tense in the house, I would pack a snack of peanut-butter covered soda crackers, place them in a plastic bread bag and head across the pasture for the woods. There I would spend hours playing alone. Well, not exactly alone. I had a special imaginary friend.
This friend was the best playmate ever. Kind, wise beyond his years, my imaginary friend was the child, Jesus. As a child, this imaginary friend was as real to me as you are. I spent hours in his company. I told him my troubles and how I was always disappointing my mother. This child, Jesus never took sides and always encouraged my understanding and forgiveness of others “who did not really understand what they were doing.” We kept many little secrets.
Life in the woods with my imaginary playmate was not perfect. Often I was visited by evil. A tall dark and handsome man, wearing a Roman collar, often stood at a distance and watched us. This man made me very uncomfortable and I shared my fears with my playmate.
“This man who looks good is not,” he’d tell me. “Don’t pay attention to him but also never forget he is there.”
Years later, I have many questions about my imaginary playmate. I’m certain that I created him out of my own deep need to have a positive relationship with God. The fear of God was too much to bear. I was terrified. I had to cope with the fear and did so by creating an alternate reality. Good and evil were personified in the child and the man who lived in my woods.
Lest, you fault my parents, it needs to be said that my parents did the best they could. They grew up fearing a punitive God who’d been used to control their behavior as children. They passed on what they had been told. They did not know another way. My desire to spare my own children this fear of God, kept me from sharing with them a God of love as well. Their experience has been very different from mine. They know very little of the faith that has been in our family for centuries. I often feel like I’ve failed them. I may have suffered emotional abuse disguised as religious teaching but I also experienced something wonderful.
Even though my playmate was of my own making, I’ve often wondered if God really was there working inside me, using my imagination to show me something, He knew I needed. Later, when I began first grade in Catholic school, we memorized questions and answers from the old Baltimore Catechism. I was told by those in authority that if you weren’t Catholic you’d spend eternity in hell. Inside, I knew they had to be wrong. At six, I’d already learned to trust my own judgment and not blindly accept what I was told. I knew that God had created humans with minds and I believed that God wanted us to use them. He didn’t create us to be stupid sheep. This belief was one that would get me in lots of trouble in the convent. When I was six, I also had the good sense to keep quiet about what I really thought and believed. Later, in the convent, silence would have been wrong. I paid a high price for speaking out.
The memory of a loving God was the one thing that helped me survive the experience. When I gave up on myself, when the will to continue living was gone, the awareness that life, my life was a gift and that I didn’t have a right to extinguish that gift was the only thing that kept me alive. A God of love was the author of life. With life came responsibility. Through a responsible caring for this God-given gift, I would find Love. When I believed in nothing else, I still believed in Love, the kind of love shown me by a certain imaginary playmate.
While my relationship with the Church and organized religion has gone through many changes, my relationship with a loving God as I understand Him has been almost constant. By the time I was six, I no longer saw my imaginary friend, Jesus. I did continue to feel His presence. The man in black took much longer to disappear. He continued to surprise me. I would suddenly spot him on the edge of my vision. He never got too close and always watched from a distance. He continued to haunt me for years. Even now, once in a while, I still catch a fleeting glimpse of him as he slips out of my sight.
I’m well aware that my imaginary playmate and my personification of evil are creations of my own mind. I can even acknowledge that my belief in a loving God and my experience of him is a coping mechanism. I can grant that the agnostics may even have it right. There might not be a God. Despite this awareness, I still choose to believe in a loving God because my life needs this benevolent presence. I also choose to believe in a loving God because it feels right for me. There is no tangible proof that God exists. You can study the logic of Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence but without faith you’re left with only logic. Logic is not faith. Faith is belief in something without proof. It’s the position of the underdog. It’s what gives the underdog hope. It makes life worth living even when life seems not to be worth it. Faith is the banner that my team carries into the game. Sometimes it’s all we’ve got.
Over the years, I’ve met many good people and a few not so good. Some of the kindest humans I’ve known have not believed in God or practiced any sort of religious observance. Some of the worst people I’ve known have proclaimed their Christianity for all the world to see. Inside they carried hearts of darkness. A few of them have vowed to live the life of a religious. They taught me that appearances can be very, very deceiving. This knowledge was hard won. It is something that the convent gave me.
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