SUNDAY SCHOOL

MY SUNDAY SCHOOL I used to teach Sunday School as a boy at St. Matthew C.M. E. Church in Kirkwood, Missouri in the early 1960s, age 12. But one day I was moved from teaching children to studying with the adults up in the choir stand. I was soon remanded back to the catechism class, after I began to correct the adults’ reading errors and asking penetrating questions. That was how I began to sense the disconnect between my incipient curiosity and the orthodoxy of the religious experience in our church. Mine was exploratory, wondrous, alive, seeking. Our home church’s vantage point was traditional, fixed. There had to be a clash. It came in the Sunday school teaching report related above. But it continued through my reading BEFORE THE MAYFLOWER by Lerone Bennett, Jr., at age 16. I sought permission to teach black history to the youth of the church. Not only did that pastor say “no,” he actually preached against the black history proposal in a sermon in which he said that “Black was ugly! Stick your hand in a jar of axle grease. That is black and ugly.” I was hurt! Remorseful . For years I then stayed away from church, any church. But, having been “raised up right” , brought up, in the spiritual, African American, philosophically-penetrating base of perceptions, conceptions intuition, of Southern Christianity, that saw through false facades and masks to the hidden truth of Jesus Christ, I was also beholden to its brush-arbor sapience, Siren-song’s holy salvation. Rather landing on the rocks, as in Greek mythology , lured by fanciful lusts, the “stones” were rolled away from the catacombs of inquiry. I saw God in nature, in the stars , in myself, in Jesus Christ, in my fellowmen, in life and after-life! So, in capsule, I have explained me to my inner self and to whomever. My story, testimony may also help someone, who may have struggled.