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This is an autobiographical Word intended to make a particular point. I’ve warned you about these post-Whispers writings. They will not be guided by the wisdom of the past as Whispers were. Rather they will go sailing off in any direction that interests me, and one such direction in recent days is our cultures’ use of chemical comforts from opioids to vaping, the latter particularly, for I believe that if it were not for what follows, there would be a very good chance that I would be part of that culture, long ago dead or ruined by drugs of one sort or another.

To support my claim, I have to talk about myself for a while. Be encouraged; much will be left unsaid. You will be bored, but that has to be to make my point which is that in this life bad things can sometimes sneak up on you.

I grew up in an ordinary middle-class neighborhood and, for better or worse, did what ordinary middle-class kids did, mostly, but not entirely. Sometimes I went a different way. That saved me. I was kept away from some of my friends’ practices by a force stronger than the ordinary need to be accepted into a peer group. That force was a particular version of the Christian religion.

During my junior high and high school years, I (not my family) attended a little church in North Minneapolis. It was an ‘independent’ church, not affiliated with any denomination or order but quite like a fundamentalist Baptist church. It put forth a literal understanding of the Bible, a very exclusive notion of Christianity, and a rigorous code of social behavior. I doubt that very many readers have had much experience with that kind of church.

In the case of the Bible, we believed it to be theologically and historically free of any error. The early chapters of Genesis were historically accurate as were the Gospels which were much like newspapers in their coverage of events. The creation of the world we believed took place during a seven-day period about four thousand years before Jesus was born. (No time for evolution.) Noah and the Ark had been accurately depicted by Hollywood, the Exodus was a miraculous crossing of a divided Red Sea (again, Hollywood) and our future is set forth in the last book of the Bible, the book of the Revelation. There will be ‘last times’, a final Tribulation, and a Rapture. The Bible was a reliable guide for belief and behavior, for if something was in the Bible, God said it, and we believed it.

Christianity belonged to people like us, who were ‘born again’, who thought like us, behaved like us, and who had the same view of the Bible as we did. In contrast, most of those who claimed to be Christian: mainline protestants, Catholics, liberals, those who had weakened views of the Bible, the unsaved, and the disinterested were all outside the fold.

One clear sign of our status as Christian believers was our behavior, and here I get to the point. As Christians we did not smoke, drink, gamble, dance, swear, or go to movies. That last taboo, however, gave way to modern life. When television sets showed up in the home, movies seemed less harmful than  hey had been regarded previously, and soon, therefore, we went to movies . (Those old movies, however, came from a quite different world than the movies of today!). The other standards, however, remained strong. A Christian did not do certain things. End of story. Now all of this has shaped my life, and for that I am most grateful as you will see.

Much has changed since those long-ago days in North Minneapolis. The world has changed, my old neighborhood has changed, North Minneapolis has changed—a lot, and I have changed. I understand  Christianity quite differently now. My present view of Christendom is more inclusive. It is now a Mere Christianity  (C. S. Lewis) view. Yet today to a great degree, as I voyage over the turbulent ocean of life, I am still partially guided by that little North Minneapolis church (By the way, I don’t claim that I represent all the members of that church. Each one has their own story. But some things do remain for me.)

 I no longer live today in that old world of good people or bad people, where you are one or the other. My world is not so simple, and I hope that Whispers have reflected my present world. As Solzhenitsyn said, “it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the years.” Now I accept that that is the way we are, some of each. I do my best to do good and avoid evil, but I know I am not very successful either way.

But another takeaway is important in a very modern way, and that is why I am writing this. Growing up, I followed the crowd, and that didn’t always turn out very well. Thank goodness for those church guardrails. I speak not for my friends along the way; they have their stories. This is my story. I am not a strong person and I regret that I must admit that I have an addiction. It is not a dangerous addiction, but it is an addiction that has all the marks of addiction. I am addicted to chocolate. Do not laugh. If chocolate is in front of me, I will say—as I reach for some more, “No more. That’s it.”  The point is not that chocolate is all that bad, but rather that if I had joined in with my neighborhood, college and service friends and their interests and practices, and had not been restrained by the taboos of that little church, I probably would have followed the way of the world. I would have graduated to comforts more enticing than chocolate. I am pretty well convinced that long ago I might well have been an alcoholic dying of lung cancer in the middle of a casino. And to be up to date, I would have smoked marijuana and vaped as fast as anyone else, as fast as, I fear, do some young people of today, some of whom you might know and worry about: children, grandchildren, neighbors, colleagues.

All of us change as the years go by. I have; you have. But this note is meant, though it might appear to range afar, to be mainly and only about how and why I have escaped some of the snares and traps of our day. I hope some will find it useful.