Tucker Unlearning

My Turbulent Journey with Western Institutional Church
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-620-48477-0
Verlag: Sean Tucker
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 297 Seiten

I learned very quickly how to be an impressive Western Christian, but then I got caught up in a journey of Unlearning. I didn't ask for it, and I wasn't looking for it, but it grabbed me by the scruff, and took me for a ride which undid everything: my simple views of myself, God, life, and this messy community we call 'Church'. This is what happened.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tucker, Sean

Leseproben

SHROPSHIRE

ENGLAND

FIRST CONTACT

Green.

Forests of huge oak trees.

Knee-high expanses of fern.

Carpets of thick, lush, green grass.

And in the middle of all this was a stately 19th century English manor house.  It was a dusty red colour with steel grey roofs and all its windows and door frames outlined in white.  It came complete with rolling lawns and statued fountains all covered in weeds and lilies.  The place made me feel very small indeed, but maybe it had more to do with the particular day.

I remember the crunch of the gravel under my feet as we made our way to the front door.  I stumbled along on my 9 year-old, clumsy stick legs, wanting to put my hand in my Mom’s as she walked beside me, but feeling too conscious of the opinions of those through the doors ahead.  We walked into the room and I was immediately hit by the deep musty smell of a building with history.  The floors were a dark wood; heavily varnished.  There was a grand fireplace to my right with a huge gold framed mirror above it.  A grand piano to my left.  The ceilings were a brilliant, hospital white with ornate swirls and flowery patterns breaking the monotony of the flat surface, as if a very vigorous garden was being grown on the first floor, threatening to burst the plaster and make its way into the foyer.  The room was filled with the hubbub of chatter.  Each set of parents were adorned with their own scared child, but I was sure none of theirs was as scared as the one my Mom boasted.  After a time a man came down the big staircase at the other end of the hall and everyone rounded at the sound of the booming thump of his heavy shoes on the hollow wood.  They all turned and the chatter died down, except for one young girl, too slow to realize what was happening to stop her protests about being there.  The kind of awkward moment you would expect followed.  As the sound of her whining echoed off the walls, the man on the stairs looked their way and smiled kindly, cracking some joke that only the adults in the room seemed to find funny.  “Welcome to our school”, he began.

The speech felt long, but in my mind it could have gone on forever because I knew that after it was done my Mom would have to leave and the next time I would see her would be three months from then.  The following day she would get on a plane and fly back to Africa and I would have to summon the courage to make it through this on my own.

The school building was a proper old Victorian residence.  It had four floors, including the cellar.  The top floor consisted of the boys dorms which were spacious enough to have 10 or 12 of us in each. Outside the windows there were very wide gutters which ran the outer edge of the roof, and even though the teachers told us many times not to go out there, they were wasting their breath.  The Matrons used to patrol the halls after we went to bed, so sneaking out the window and crawling along the outside of the building, three stories up, to knock on your mates’ window a few dorms down was too tempting to resist.  How there wasn’t a headline in the local paper about some child falling thirty feet to their death I don’t know.

The girls weren’t so lucky.  Their dormitories were a set of converted stables down the end of a dirt track away from the main building.  The jokes are too obvious to make now, but they weren’t when I was that age.

The floor below was one we saw little of.  Apart from the Headmaster’s residence it was taken up by the staff room and a couple of offices.  The place was basically out of bounds unless you were in trouble, or had to ask some uncomfortable question.  Any child entering that floor seemed to do so with an odd slinking walk and drooped head.

The ground floor was taken up by the dining rooms, the foyer where we did our homework in the evenings, the library, the kitchens, the chapel, and a couple of common rooms.   All of them had the same wooden floors, high ceilings and massive windows which looked out onto the grounds. I’m sure if I went back there today it would seem very small, but my child-sized mind saw a very grand set of rooms which made me feel dwarfed and nervous.  In some places it seemed to be just a confusion of corridors as if the building had grown as a series of architectural afterthoughts.  It made for great fun when chasing each other through the halls, which was of course strictly forbidden.

Down below were the cellars.  You would descend a narrow stone staircase next to the kitchens into the dark bowels of the school.  They had become the boys changing rooms and showers.  I hated it down there because, let’s face it, most boys are scared of change rooms at that age.  Save the few irritatingly confident jock-types, the rest of us are left struggling to use our towels as shields for our privacy whilst trying to change and not show our ‘bits’ to the world for the ridicule we were sure would come. The only cool thing about the place was that you would exit on the other side through a set of those big wooden double swing doors which lay almost parallel to the ground, like the kind you would see people rushing through to hide from the Nazi’s in those old World War 2 movies.  I couldn’t seem to walk up those steps, I had to take them at a run for some reason, and after the awkwardness of the dark interior you would emerge into the sunlight, enjoying the sense of lightness freedom brings.  Of course for this to work, I had to put out of my mind that I would be back there in a couple of hours for shower time, which would be even worse.

Most excitingly, the school was surrounded by stunning woodland which we were allowed to go off and explore during our free time.  I loved the woods.  If ever I had more than half an hour to myself I would run through them, jumping over streams and tearing through the trees, all the while imagining myself in hot pursuit of some evil villain who I would effortlessly vanquish.  At one stage my friends and I put a substantial amount of effort into building an underground ‘fort’.  We found a hole in the side of a mound which we widened over a few months, making it into a little room.  When we found an old VW bug boot cover we thanked our lucky stars and used it as the grand door to our lair.  We creatively called it ‘TBE’, which stood for ‘Tunnel Below Earth’.  Ok, maybe it wasn’t that creative but I suppose we were only ten.  We never spent that much time in it either thinking about it because it just ended up being four of us cramped into this tiny space with our elbows in each others faces, not being able to breath.  But, to us, it was worth defending to the death.  Other groups in the school soon heard about our enviable base, admittedly because we deliberately talked about it too loud whenever we could, and they were soon there to challenge us.  We had some epic stick fight battles in the trees surrounding our makeshift home in the woods, and to our credit never lost possession of it.  

In any boarding school it’s important to make some sort of name for yourself so you don’t end up just being one of those fringe people who always gets overlooked.  I worked two claims to celebrity in the school which I milked for all they were worth.  The first was that I was fearless on a BMX bike.  I would set up bigger and bigger ramps and then announce at meal times that I was going to jump after we had finished eating.  I often pulled crowds of 30-40 pupils eager to see me come clattering down in a cloud of dust, and maybe even break a bone.  I didn’t mind.  They were there to watch me and that’s all I cared about.  I did, on one occasion, snap one of the wheels off its mounting when I landed too hard but I never did wipe out badly enough to hurt myself properly, just some cuts and scrapes.  I was lucky.

My second claim to fame was that I was the kid from Africa.  I was always treated with a bit more respect because if I could make it in Africa I must be tougher than I looked.  Little did they know that I lived in a clean suburb in Maseru, in a house much like any of their’s, but there was no ways I was going to tell them that.  I quickly realised they had some pretty naive assumptions about my home continent and they could be easily manipulated for both my amusement and my reputation.  I made up some of the most ridiculous stuff.  I told them that when I flew home for holidays the plane couldn’t make it that close to my village and so we had to land on a strip in the bush where people from my village had the elephants ready to ride the week’s trek, over the dangerous savannah, to my home.  I told them how difficult it was to keep a mud hut clean, how I had fought a lion off with a stick once (which obviously gave me huge ‘forest cred’ for our wars in the woods).  I have a scar on my left forearm from a botched TB injection I had in Botswana, but I let my friends know of the night I didn’t check my hammock for scorpions and how this scar showed the heavy price I paid.  I also told them that I was being taught...