From Zeus to Atheism
The Shape of My Early Years
Over the past few weeks I’ve been picking up new subscribers to this new venture of mine. Because, perhaps for the first time since my Patheos days, I haven’t had much of a readership outside of those who know or have met me, I thought I’d take some time to share a little about myself.
I was born in Jacksonville, Illinois. Usually, when I tell people this the first question is, “Is that close to Chicago?” As a mid-state Illinoisan, you have no idea how annoying (and for many insulting that question is). Jacksonville is a small town of about 17000 people (it was a little over 15K when I was growing up). Growing up there was rather wonderful. Those flat prairie lands really helped shape my imagination. Forests and what few hills we had were always so far away that on our drives anywhere, if the farmland was interrupted by anything, my imagination would go wild, populating those areas with all manner of beasts both real and mythological.
My imagination, I think, had been given that room to grow in part also because I am adopted. I was around a year old when my biological mother was preparing to give me up for adoption. Once my paternal-grandparents found out they took the opportunity and adopted me. Because neither of my birth parents were much involved in my childhood (my birth-father became my legal brother due to my adoption but for most of my childhood he lived out of state and so I saw him only rarely). So I spent much of my time alone imagining what they must have been like. While the truth ended up much more complicated, my adopted parents only ever told me the good things as a kid; so in my imagination they were a ballerina and a cowboy.
Also, being adopted meant I went from being the youngest of 4 half-sibling to the youngest of 5, none of whom were at home. There were few other children in my neighborhood, especially in the early years, so if I was at home and no friend was visiting, I was usually alone. My mother would be working in the kitchen or cleaning some part of the house and my father spent many hours away at work, working to provide for an unexpected son instead of his twilight years. That time alone meant I spent most of my time talking to people who weren’t there. No lone imaginary friend joined me on my exploits, it was a host of people, always there, always listening.It is little wonder, then, that by the fourth grade, I declared myself a Greek pagan.
My home growing up was not an explicitly religious one. So by fourth grade I had determined that I believed in the Greek gods. I can still remember being made of by a class mate and dissolving into angry tears. During my childhood I also encountered the works of Lewis and Tolkien. Tolkien has always been known to me. My mother would read The Hobbit to me when I was in the cradle, a tradition I kept up with my sons. Lewis, however, came to me around fifth grade. A classmate had recommended the Chronicles of Narnia to me and from that point on I was hooked.
Currently, I am reading (again) those books to my children. We’re on The Silver Chair. I can still remember my first encounter with that book. Lying on my parents’ bed, I devoured the book from beginning to end in one sitting. Pauline Baynes’ illustration of Puddleglum shaped how I saw the scene of this long-limbed frog-man stamping his foot into the fire. This was a world. This was something solid, something worth fighting for. The world around me seemed so bland without my populating it with something more.
Once, when I was very small, I was going somewhere with my pre-school group. As we walked down the sidewalk, I turned behind and saw something with a shock of red disappear down a drain pipe. To this day I do not know what I saw. The red was too …red to be anything familiar. I still remember thinking of the muppet Beaker when I saw it. What it was, I do not know, but to my mind then, it was nothing more nor less than some kind of elf or leprechaun.
This was the kind of childhood I had. One that was often solitary since, as I got older, I got bigger and became the subject of ridicule. This is not to say that I did not have friends, I did. Some of them I still look back on as having been good friends since they introduced me to chess or Star Wars. But most of my time was spent alone either with a book, with a notebook, or with video games and television. For you should not think of me as some Victorian child, I watched more than my fair share of television and can still nearly quote the entirety of both Hook and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the key is this, I tried to give my world shape by latching onto whatever spoke to my young soul. Ninjas (mutant or otherwise) with their centuries of tradition, Link solving puzzles to save the princess, Aslan and the Pevensies, Zeus and Athena and Hercules, Batman, hobbits and elves all served to help me give voice to what I wanted. I wanted a world with deeper meaning, with hidden realities, and with battles of good vs. evil.
By early Junior High, however, I had come to reject the notion of God, at least as believed by Christians. How I came to this conclusion, I’m not sure. I was awfully full of myself, and since I was fairly intelligent that pride came rather easily. Whatever the case, I entered the seventh grade a committed atheist. But I left the eighth grade a committed Christian. That story, however, will have to wait until next week.