When I was a child of about nine or so, some 6 years before I would move to Britain and go on my adolescent tour, but some time (a year or so) after the last shorter visit with relations in England, I lived for a while in rural Pennsylvania. It was an uncomfortable experience for me, not because of my skin color, which is pretty much white, but because of my cultural differences. My family was not Christian, nor did we behave so, and I suppose my differences were obvious. Everyone around us, for example, claimed to belong to Jesus (or to America, which curiously, especially in children’s minds, seemed to mean the same thing), and mostly, they were quite vociferous about the importance of salvation and warding off anything that might endanger grace. We were, I think, suspiciously quiet. In addition, I had a British accent, which, at first, my grade-school teachers took for a speech impediment, because they could not recognize it for what it was. (It was my father’s appearance with his pronounced British accent at a teacher’s conference that finally got me removed from my “speech therapy” sessions, which consisted of coloring pictures alone in the nurse’s room.)

By the time I was beaten up so visibly that my parents couldn’t pretend that the gulf between our family and those around us was not dangerous to their children, they had decided that perhaps Sunday school would be a way for my younger brother and me to integrate with the people with whom we went to school. And so for two weeks I went to Sunday school.

The memory is sharp in places. The basement room of the church: light came in on rafts of dust straight, it seemed to me, from the sky to the brown wooden tables where we children sat. There were eight or perhaps nine of us. I am no longer sure. I remember more clearly the man who was our teacher. In his black clothes, he had a sense of specialness that as a child I connected with, the sweep of his long belled sleeve, the plainness of his clothes, the way the sun lifted up his black-robed shoulders as if he were going to grow raven wings. I don’t remember the lesson, mostly because I could hear singing above me. Along the road where the church building stretched, upstairs in the sanctuary a service was being held. Adults, my parents not included, were singing far enough away that I could not hear distinct words but close enough that my ears would not move away from their attention to the feel of the singing. My whole body was tuned to the cadence of blue light that I could feel coming from the people-song above me. It was if the basement room where I sat was being filled with the yellow light of the sun and the blue light of the song. I was entranced by the way the two sources of sensation made me feel, and I suspect I didn’t give our teacher the deference which he thought I ought. But then he started to read us psalms and I heard that, even above the play of the light and song. I listened. When he was finished he assigned each of us a different psalm to memorize and recite the following week.

I don’t remember clearly what psalm I was to remember. I think it was the first one, because even today, I get a powerful sense of awe and wonder reading that song. It was the trees I think, their steadiness. At the same time, my awe of the psalm arises from realizing that spiritual steadiness, which comes from a kind of psychic rootedness—which comes from practices like quietly paying attention to the world—could be so clearly written and that many people, even those who claim this tradition as their own, apparently do not get at all what this implies. It’s as if they can read, even recite, but not understand: they can feel its power but not reason from its argument. It is the trees in that psalm that bear, for me, the lesson: Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked…they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. It seems to me that it might be suggesting that the life-world of trees might have something to teach us about how to be happy, how to wait, where to take nourishment, how to root in a place where all these happy things can happen. It does not seem to me to suggest that, wanting apples in March, the tree should be cut down as unproductive.

I went back to Sunday school the next week. I remember that I was prepared. I felt excited, open. I liked the psalm and I wanted to feed its seed, sitting in my head as the memorized lines, so when it came my turn I stood in front of my chair as the other children had done before me but instead of closing my eyes and reciting my assigned verses I asked a question instead. I asked, what does it mean? I suppose I should have recited first then asked, but as it was I was so excited by the feel of the song in my body that I wanted an answer immediately and it never occurred to me that he might not want to answer me nor care whether I understood.

The young man in his black robe, in his sun garment, standing at the head of the table, hit me. For impertinence? I don’t know.

I took off, out of the church and across the road. My brother followed. A whole series of contingent events gusted up in the wind-storm of that slap. I ran across the road to the corner store. Even though my brother and I had never stolen anything in our lives, we stole some candy. My brother felt so guilty and scared, that he confessed to our father, telling him that I was the instigator (and I was the elder). My brother came to tell me. He told me that he confessed and that he had blamed me. I was still so angry, having refused to tell my parents’ why I would never go back to Sunday school or any church ever again, still so angry from that slap, from his face as he slapped me, from his look of fear and its unbidden rage, from his look of disgust, that I pushed my brother down. He fell down the tall slope behind our house that separated the forest from our dwelling. He rolled down. He hit his head on a concrete block and went utterly still. I thought I had killed him. I ran into the trees as my mother came running out from the house. I stayed out all night, only coming home the next day.

My brother, although knocked unconscious, lived without damage. My parents wisely said nothing to me, figuring, I think, that a night out in the forest was a good enough teacher. I never went back to Sunday school. I knew from that slap, from the night with the trees, knew deep in my body, even if not in my conscious mind, that there was a fundamental difference between what the trees in the Psalm had to teach and what religion had to offer. I knew what the trees had to offer was something I could be; I knew what religion had to offer would only cause more misfortune. I knew then that I was safer picking my fights on the playground. I thought I stood a better chance at surviving the cruelty of the people I went to school with, than I did surviving adult people who like chaff that the wind drives could not control themselves in the face of their own feelings.

To be clear: I knew all these things in the long moment between the slap and the next day when I came in from the forest, but I knew them not to speak them but as feelings in my stomach, legs, my skin and hands. Nothing could have dragged me into that church again and made me stay. My entire body rebelled, recognizing the danger.

And yet the forest, even though there were real fears, of skunks and dangerous plants, of drowning and broken legs far from home, these were manageable. They did not make me rebel, did not make me run from terror or hatred. They made me pay attention to where I stepped, knowing that if I was careful I could probably manage this. Contrary to the church, I knew the forest might take my life but it would never try to break me.

As an adult, I have not lost the anger, not in all these years, but I think about that young man with some compassion now. I wonder what kind of life drives a body to strike at its own young with so little provocation. I wonder at the tenuous hold someone like that must have on the system to which he has given his life that a child’s question about meaning should evoke such a response. I think about why he did what he did but I cannot come up with a plausible answer. I do not know what my question meant to him but I still, occasionally, think about it—especially when faced with another violently angry or abusive Christian. Today, I think mostly about his face and the revelation of his emotions, displayed, I am sure, without any conscious control. When faced with a child asking, he broke. I think now that this means that he doesn’t actually believe in his god nor even in his faith, but rather he believes only in his church, in his place within it, his position and his authority. And so when his church hates, he hates. When his church loves, he loves. He has, in a sense, become the system that animates him. Perhaps he had no other place to go.