Loomis, Steven, IC3

As a young child, growing up with parents and 1950's values I attended our local Congregational Church Sunday School. Back then, Jesus had light brown hair and blue eyes. I know this because there was a picture of him hanging on the wall. I guess everybody knew that. I was great being a child in such a simple surrounding.

In 1958 my parents marriage collapsed. Infidelity and then a broken home and a divorce, I still spell that with a tune running through my head. Everything fell apart after that and I never forgave those involved.

Dad remarried and so my mother's vengeance surfaced as she put her three kids out with our belongings for my father to retrieve and take us on as his burden. His new wife was from an affluent family and as time passed I tagged along to her church, the Episcopalian, church of England.

With nothing better to do I became an altar boy, an acolyte. The church was so small that I soon became The Acolyte, at times serving both services on Sunday, funerals and weddings, although the funerals and weddings were few and far between.

Our minister, Father they called him, was very open, and eventually too open and it was my decision to get away from him, the church and those left behind. Now 16, I'd already taken on a job as busboy at the local hotel and willingly expanded that to Sunday morning short-order cook.

I never returned to that or any other church. At 18 I joined the Navy and when asked I originally told them I was a Protestant, specifically Episcopalian, and they gave me an Episcopalian Service Cross, which I still have. As a matter of fact, I still have several of those church pins, mostly Sunday School and as an Altar Boy.

But, as time went on I arrived in Viet-Nam. I found religion, although surrounded by followers, the furthest thing from the realities of the war. I not only broke my ties with the church but with religion all together. It actually came out to be the root of the problem, over and over again.

However, there were fond memories of my early childhood, the innocent part, the part before the puzzle pieces didn't fit and the picture became warped.

I'm old now, recent events are from the past several decades. And yet, there it is, religion... rearing its ugly head again and again. Lives lost and many more destroyed.

For many years I thought, or at lest I hoped, that religion was a conciseness, an awareness. I have been proven wrong. It, the concept of god, has become the enemy. It has become the justification, and that is wrong. Yet the most interesting thing of all is that it, god, doesn't even exist outside of man's head where it is used to control.