Not offensive in any way from a secular morality point of view. The instinctive sense of how to behave and react to others we are ALL born with.  Yet somehow, when you add religion, this picture makes some people want to Murder other people.  I think we can we all officially drop the “religion is a precursor to morality” card now.

Thanks ML for the lovely drawing.

Today, in a meeting, I disassociated. I felt myself disassociating.  As a young kid I became very good at doing this while sitting in church. Passing large amounts of time by shutting myself down.  Now I fight that skill as I sit in adult meetings.  Today as I was  glazing over,  I casually acknowledged that fact that I WAS glazing over. and BAM. I had a memory come out of my distant, distant past.

As an elementary school kid, never able to concentrate and being forced to sit for long periods of time listening to things I couldn’t focus on, I decided that I should collect Last Names. I knew of no such existing list, so I found a notebook and sat in church with a hymnal and went through every page writing down the last name of each hymn author. When that was done, I pulled out the church bulletin that had announcements, deacon contact info, Sunday school assignments, and prayer requests for tons of sick people. I cataloged every name, every week.  Each name on a different row, multiple columns per page.  Eventually, this hobby escalated to outside of church cause I felt a weird pressure that things were getting a little too out of control with all these NAMES! So many of them Flying unharnessed throughout the world!! And only me to take on this task. I started waiting till the end of TV movies and would frantically scribble down Last Names as the credits rolled. I would site on the living room stairs reading a book, and stopping every now and then to write down a name.  Knowing that I was only reading the book to FIND names.

Someone should have stopped me. But I was probably being just a little to good at babysitting myself. The result of this being that somewhere in New England rotting in a dump, is the unabridged and unlauded accomplishments of an 8 year old. 

Then I’m back in my head. In 2010. Walking away from the meeting, my friend mumbles, “I’m out of tiles to count in that room.”