Belief System

I was never confirmed. My older brother was. I did earn a bible. It was a great big beast of a thing. I received the word of God for completing the requisite number of worksheets about verses found in  the Good Book. I studied. I read the whole thing. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out  that I was also the kid who read the entirety of Leslie Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion. I read a lot. For a kid, anyway.
I don't know if my older brother read the whole bible, but I know he studied too. Which was part of the whole confirmation thing. It's the way you get into that particular club. As I have mentioned here on a number of occasions, my father led an exodus of our family from not just the Methodist church, but from organized religion as a whole. My younger brother grew up a godless heathen.
Well, that's not entirely true. Frequent replays of Jesus Christ Superstar on our eight track tape kept the story of our savior on the top ten. That and my mother's bible study. She was the one who kept us in the game, spiritually. Not in an overbearing, god-fearing way but more of a get-to-know-you-god kind of way. We didn't feel shame or worry about being struck down because in my mom's version of the gospel there wasn't a lot of vengeance or guilt. My mother's church had a lot of reassurance in it. I used to enjoy quizzing her about the events and relationships that occurred both BC and AD. I knew then and appreciate even more now that her vision of these stories was reinforced by the technicolor epics that she watched in her youth. The same technicolor epics we watched with her whenever they showed up on television. Many of them seemed to involve Charlton Heston and his struggles with heaven and its politics.
It was home schooling. And I figured I came through more or less unscathed, so why would I worry when it came time to indoctrinate my son? The simple answer: telephone. Not so much the instrument but the game in which a phrase is whispered from one ear and passed along to the next. Tracking the change in the message from the beginning of the chain to the end is the amusing part, but what if that message happens to get mixed in with all the silliness and satire that takes place in our household? This along with all the chatter about Star Wars and the Flying Spaghetti Monster and The Life of Brian, one might wonder what flavors are contained in my son's spirituality.
A rainbow, no doubt. I wouldn't imagine it any other way.