She was so electrified by religious fervour that her wiry red hair almost stood on end. I was fourteen, she was enraged.
“ Miss Anne Whitaker, how dare you ask me if I believe in the theory of evolution. If YOU believe in the theory of evolution, you will be damned to hell everlasting !!”
I believe that was the last time I asked a question in R.E.
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Ardmore beach, during the summer holidays a few weeks later. I was just beginning to develop my pilgrimages, being at an age where I could slip away for a bike ride without attracting too much parental protectiveness and restriction. I had such a deep need to be alone, quite often. Sharing a room with my six year old sister, I had no private space in my parents’ home.
Here at Ardmore it was usually deserted. There was a rumour that World War Two mines lay buried in the sand. This may have been propaganda designed to keep people from wandering around the perimeter of the nearby airport. I didn’t believe the story about the mines; moreover, there was a great place between the dunes to leave my bike where it would not be seen.
The beach was about a mile long, approached through dunes spiked with marram grass and patrolled by terns. Here, I could walk, forage for interesting objects cast up by the tide, have solitude. The endless timeless rhythm of sea breaking and ebbing on the shore hypnotised me.
The sound I heard would have been the same a million years ago – would probably be the same a million years hence. This realisation was too big and awesome for my mind to hold for long. As I strolled, finding a slow rhythm, the tensions and tightness in my body generated by the lack of peace at home began to unwind.
I now understand that I would fall into a meditiative state on these walks, taken as often as possible from that summer until I left home at seventeen. In that state I felt just like a grain of sand on the beach – minute, but an integral part of a great Wholeness.
In those days as puberty began to thrust my body, mind and spirit from the cocoon of childhood, I found the Holy Spirit in the wildness and expansiveness of sand, sea and sky. It was certainly not present in my secondary school Religious Education class on the religion-obsessed island on which I grew up…
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450 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2015
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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Yes. Thank you, Anne, for sharing your experience.
You are welcome, Leslie. It does seem quite incredible in the context of modern teaching that anyone should ever have been allowed to get away with that kind of behaviour towards a child with an inquiring mind….but, as you know, it didn’t stop me! If anything, it fed my curiosity…
Wonderfully eloquent 🙂
Thanks, Eremophila! I think the eloquence is at least partly fuelled by the anger I probably still feel that children with enquiring minds were squashed like that at school when I was growing up. Still, this teacher’s behaviour contributed to my setting off on my OWN quest, which has led me into many an interesting highway and byway…
Oh I love this and can relate!
Thanks! Feel free to say more…