So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part III

At age six, my parents moved us from the Astoria neighborhood to Rosedale,, on the Queens-Nassau border. We lived in a semi-detached, two family home, with my four siblings and me on the first floor, my six cousins and aunt and uncle on the second floor, and two other families on the other side. It was Christmas 1977 and I was upstairs at a holiday party in my cousins' home. My Aunt Peggy showed me a Christmas card that my cousin Kathy had received from a co-worker. Underneath the holiday cliches were the words "I love you and God does too". Kathy's co-worker Tom was running a Bible Study in his duplex apartment in the neighborhood with his roommate Joe. Aunt Peggy asked that I accompany my cousin to one of these Bible Studies. As Catholics, we were suspicious of any other religions, and Aunt Peggy (wrongly as it turned out) thought that I would be able to sniff out any trouble. They seemed harmless enough. When I first attended one of their meetings, the small living room was packed with people, mostly high school or college aged, with a few adults our parents' age. There was some songs, some prayers and a teaching from the bible. There was also speaking in tongues. I'll get in detail about speaking in tongues in later installments, but it really intrigued me. But what intrigued me more was the absolute confidence that these people had in what they were teaching. I was a bit skeptical, but I found it interesting that these people claimed to have answers, were giving out that it was possible to be able to make sense out of the Bible and that there was proof that it was true!

I soon became a regular attendee of these fellowships, as they called them. I was by no means a Bible scholar, but I was aware of the basics of Christian doctrine that any church-goer knew. As the weeks went by I realized that there were some subtle and not-so-subtle differences between what my church (and the Protestant churches that I attended) taught and what this little Bible study was teaching. One of the main things was that they believed that Jesus was not, as most Christians believed, God. There were many others, but the details are not really that important. What was relevant to me was that it was different than the way I was brought up to believe, but at the same time they claimed to have evidence to back up their confidence. Pretty soon I started hearing about a class that was being offered. All the regulars at the Bible Study had taken this class; Tom and Joe insisted that all of my questions would be answered in this class and that it would logically lay out everything that I needed to be able to read and understand the Bible for myself. I was interested, but also somewhat apprehensive.

Disturbed as I was by the long list of differences between what this Bible Study was teaching and what my church was teaching, I made an appointment to talk with my parish priest. I asked him if he could reconcile these differences. His response was that the Catholic Church had 2000 years of tradition behind it. That's it. No appeal to logic, or Church teaching, or even an attempt to open the Bible. Tradition? Blind, mindless tradition was what I saw as the problem. Believing something  just because "that's the way it's always been" was why I started searching for answers in the first place. I walked out of the parish rectory that night upset that I received no real answer from my priest and had made up my mind that I would at least give this class a chance. I found Joe, paid my $100 and signed up for a month of Bible classes.

I'm a big fan of alternate history fiction. That genre is based on how things would be different if one variable changed. How different would my life had been if that priest had even made an attempt to convince me that the Catholic Church was built on a solid foundation and not just tradition. If he had taken seriously my longing for truth and my search for answers. Instead he was dismissive. Much of who I am today was molded by what came next, the influences from this Bible Study and this class, my reactions to the disapproval of my family and my own change in outlook.

At this point there was no indication that I was joining anything, let alone a cult. All that I was doing at this point was committing $100 and around 33 hours of class time over a one month period. I didn't imagine that anything other than my level of knowledge was going to change. But I was wrong.

Part IV

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-iv.html

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html