Even at four years of age I never understood it. The whole story around Jesus and all. My eye rolling reaction to Christian mythology aggravated the physically uncomfortable act of attending church.That’s aside from its being dreadfully boring.
My mother would take us to church when we were little kids. She’d dress us in woollen shorts, shirt, tie and jacket. I hated wool. It made my skin crawl. She’d cinch the neck tie so tight I’d feel like my head would pop any second.
She’d guide us into a hard, cold pew. I’d squirm in my seat the whole time. I never knew which book to pick up. Was it the red one or the blue? Then I’d fumble with the onion skin pages laden with tiny print, struggle to find the right text. By the time I got there, the singing or the reading would be half over. Much to my benefit, because even today I deeply fear singing in public.
Nor did I have any interest in the stories they told. I can only recall images of sheep. It seemed utterly impossible, some of the nonsense they recounted. The only piece I thought was cool was the one about Moses parting the red sea. That was visual. I imagined being able to step up to a churning wall of water and pick off a fish. Like visiting the aquarium, but better.
Mercifully, we’d only be forced to sit still for half the service, after which we kids were herded into the church basement to get the child’s version of Christianity. The place smelled like stale soup and the games and crafts held utterly zero interest for me. I’d have much rather been at home watching cartoons on our old black and white television. Even the lamest of lame shows that aired on Sunday mornings would have been better than church and Sunday school.
To make matters worse, most if not all of the kids in the neighbourhood also had to suffer through this kind of abuse. So even if you could somehow slip out of going to church, there was nobody around for a game of road hockey, not until after they returned home, later in the morning.
The damned thing was, my mother described herself as a humanist. I guess she might have been vaguely hopeful that the preposterous nonsense underpinning deity cultism might just be true. Later, she would explain that she thought we should be exposed to religion early so that we would not find ourselves attracted to some kind of cult later on. We were always given a broad education. We were given the opportunity to think for ourselves.
She stopped pushing us to attend after only a few years, which is how I happened to learn how bad Sunday morning cartoons were. Still, far better than going to church.