when I was in fifth grade
at the Baptist school
our teacher passed out
what looked like newspapers
describing people
simply
vanishing
in the middle of work
cooking dinner
shoe shopping
& for a moment
I felt certainly damned
having skipped past rapture
but the classroom was full
& the teacher still there
so I knew
it was a lure for sinners
that I bit
but for that minute
barely past 10
my throat would not
release breath, or open
& for that second
I felt forgotten,
abandoned
or rejected
by God
missed
by that cosmic net
I turned my hand over
to look at my palm
still unmarked
& wondering
what that mark
would look like
*** I say this as a person of faith, but this really happened to me in fifth grade, and I wonder how the adults justified passing out the fake newspapers to us. Now I wonder how people cuddled in a smugness they call faith can justify frightening children into stumbling up the aisle and kneeling there. To me, that is less an act of faith and more a desperate lunge toward a life preserver tossed out over that threatened lake of fire, or a get out of hell free card. Makes me unpopular with a lot of evangelicals, but I cannot embrace a doctrine cooked up in the last 200 years or so. Amillenialists, premillenialists, postmillenialists–makes my head ache to think about. Guess we can just argue about it in eternity when we get there.
Susan Daniels Poetry 
Well written. But very different from the other poems.>KB
Thanks, KB. Maybe because it is a little more honest, personal, and angrier…
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
~Oscar Wilde
Oh–I LOVE O. W.!!!! You just made my evening.
🙂 I told you. 🙂
Couldn’t even see through it, eh? Bummer. After my experiences with the CC, small wonder I embrace spirituality as a singularly personal exercise.
Good way to do it–lol, nope
could not, not in fifth grade 😉
Matthew 18: 3-4! ;-)! Lovely poem,
Susan.
My experience meeting “Rapture” for the first time through the voice of an energetic sweat drenched dramatist of a fundamentalist preacher in an African village setting left me half dazed, drenched in sweat & almost drowning in doubt – His spin on “Rapture” nearly causing the seams of the fragile sheltering cover of my religious-emotional universe to rupture!
Oh–yes. Matthew 18:3-4. Being like
children is one thing–scaring children another 😉
I can just imagine what that experience was like for you (shuddering in sympathy). Think I have an inkling from what you shared. I was trying to go for tongue-in-cheek here (hope it worked), but I think I am still a little upset with my teacher for using that tool for the day’s instruction all these years later. Yes, the school definitely gave me excellent spelling and grammar (because the alternative stung!), but this was one lesson in religious instruction I will never forget.
The things people do
in the name of faith or of their God (as is evidenced everyday by world headlines) Thank goodness my parents were poor or I would have been stuck in a Christian School as a child. I was lucky, I guess, I only had to contend with church on Sunday unless I could lie my way out of it…I was a sickly child whose symptoms always manifested themselves most severely on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings. Sorry for running on….I really am glad that people find solice in their faith, I respect them and I do not belittle them for their faith…just dont try to force it on others. See the trouble you cause, Susan, just mentioning the word Baptist! You’re an instigator…you need to be interriogated.
Oh, laughing too hard to say anything but thanks!!!!! Think of it, if we were kids now, both our sets of parents would have saved money and HOME SCHOOLED us, and I would have had a whole new set of issues to work through with them, instead of the healthy set I had on my own already 😉
It’s amazing how people use religion to mess with kids minds. I grew up Mennonite and we had some of the same experiences.
I believe it–I think the Baptists & the Mennonites have those shared roots in the Anabaptists. Hope I did not give you too many flashbacks.
Yep – same Anabaptist tradition. Now that I have three-fingers of scotch – I’m fine. 🙂
LOL, YES!!! I blame that background for my inability to dance really well. I have a piece on here called “Cracking Heads with the Mennonites,” about my grandparents visiting a Mennonite church once–she never could pass by one without rubbing her forehead and laughing after that…
I’ll have to check it out.
It was really just a prose piece for a little giggle, but you are welcome to. There was a sweetness to that story I loved.
Suffer the little children to come unto me for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven. Jesus loves kids and embraces them without their being raptured
EXACTLY!