Jesus Comics
The beautiful, timeless monotony of my early childhood came to an end one day. My mother, to my utter amazement, enrolled me in bible school.
I never knew why she did this; there was no history of religious training in our family. We had never gone to church. The only church I had been in was when my grandfather was doing some carpentry on his church. I had accompanied him there.
Enrolling me in bible school was the result of some spontaneous religious duty. This was my suspicion. More likely, it was the desire to get me out from under foot for a few hours.
One Sunday morning there I was sitting at a little table in the basement of a little church. There were several other children at the table, all 6 or 7 year olds.
Things looked pretty promising. The teacher began handing out comic books and coloring books to each of us. I loved comic books. We called then “funny books” in those days. They were funny.
As it turned out, the illustrated comic books were bible stories of Jesus. The coloring books were scenes from the story of Jesus.
I became indignant and offended and I spoke up about it. I made a bit of a fuss, in fact.
The teacher had a perplexed look on her face. My problem was that it seemed to me that Jesus should not be in a comic book! And, how could it be right to actually color a picture of Jesus with crayons?!
Though I didn’t know the word “sacrilege” I knew it when I saw it. And I raised quite a ruckus in my contempt for these materials.
Where my indignant attitude came from, given my lack of exposure to Christianity, is a mystery. We didn’t attend church. Jesus, or God for that matter, was never discussed in our home.
It seems obvious that I picked up a general sense of Jesus from the world at large. Jesus was sort of floating in the air in those days. Being a child I sensed a holy goodness about Jesus. Or, at least, I picked up that attitude somewhere. So coloring Jesus instinctively seemed sacrosanct to me. And there was nothing funny about that!
My mother didn’t send me to bible school again. In fact, we stopped attending church altogether. My mother was eclectic in her beliefs.
She became very “spiritual”, not religious, in her old age and often spoke of the “Lord”.
One time I asked her, “When you use the word “Lord”, do you mean Jesus?”
“No.”
