The Alcohol Exile

And so, I entered the tenth grade. On my first day back from summer vacation, I approached Paul.

-I think you were right, I uttered.

Paul knew what I meant.

So here we were. The alcohol ban still in force for me and Paul. The stricter regulations had now been lifted but there was always the specter of suspicion, especially from the dorm parents on the floor below mine. As they were not my dorm parents, they very rarely had any real power over me, but they still gave me dirty looks (or so I interpreted them).

We could not drink, so Paul and I devoted our time to making movies. We had invested much of our time over the years to making short films based on biblical passages for our respective Bible courses. While other groups slapped together tiny passion plays, our group staged larger, more complex productions requiring more effort each semester. At the beginning of this semester, it was my turn to film an issue relating to the Protestant reformation. Paul planned to make my bible project his project for video productions. The subject matter was fairly violent and fairly sectarian. Basically we distilled the Protestant reformation in to a large gang-war.

As our films became more stridently Christian fundamentalist, our religion became more obviously atheistic. Deprived of our substances, we found less benign ways to rebel. It was in these days that I began openly challenging the outliers of religious belief which I found most obviously erroneous. I argued with dorm mates that swearing was much less egregious than other words spoken in malice, I said that masturbation harmed no one (especially if no lust came into it), and (after a quick foray into Marx's Communist Manifesto) I suggested that capitalism might not be the most moral system of governance. All these arguments were made with a veneer of Christian pragmatism; I was merely testing the limits of my own faith, I intoned. I gained a reputation as the Devil's advocate, but no worse (certainly not an unbeliever).

The tensions were certainly rising between me and the authorities by the day. I no longer stood or sang in chapel or church. I had also found worship songs banal, but I now found them downright loathsome. One day, a chaplain approached us as we sat and ordered us to stand for the song. We stood. A few days later, my dorm-parent lectured me on the need to be more engaged in the chapel experience. It became clear that even when I was sober there remained a great deal of tension between the authorities and myself. And I certainly was not going to stay sober forever.