WHAT HARM COULD A PEACE SYMBOL DO?

Remember when people drew peace symbols in the sixties? Believe it or not, certain superstitious Christians believed that drawing one was an evil act. Moreover, they taught this superstitious nonsense to impressionable disciples as if it was some sort of commandment from God Almighty.

This was one of many ridiculous doctrines that I learned at a cultic house church. Being new to the faith, I didn't know what was biblical and what was bologna. Wanting with all of my heart to please God, I obeyed these sometimes painful injunctions.

Here's an excerpt from my upcoming How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity memoir that shows not only how credulous I was but how misguided those church members were.

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Because nobody discipled me until I joined Thee Church, the Christian faith seemed to consist of many arbitrary customs and prohibitions. One of these was the drawing of certain symbols.

A few years previously, a cereal company offered free booklets depicting famous scenes from N.H.L. hockey games in each box. When the pages were flipped, the players seemed to move. Though I hated sports, I became enamoured with the concept of still pictures being arranged to produce a short animation.

During my first month at Jay and Linda's home, I realized that I too could make my own animated booklets. Whenever I had an evening with no homework to do, I sat at the kitchen table and drew each frame of my short animations. One of them displayed a peace symbol rolling like a wheel.

"Look at this, Jay. Isn't it cool?" I said after showing him how to animate the pictures.

He frowned at the booklet and then at me.

"You shouldn't draw this. Peace symbols are evil."

"Evil? How come?"

"It's an ancient pagan fertility sign. Christians should have nothing to do with it because it's of the Devil."

Not knowing any better, I sighed as I dropped my creation into the garbage and refrained from drawing peace symbols.

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How I Was Razed is my testimony of how charismatic house church elders misled me for more than fifteen years. After leaving that congregation and turning my back on God for almost a decade, due to the lies that the cult taught about him, he revealed his true nature to me. I now realize how blasphemous that house church's doctrines were.

Why books need pictures.

Imagine if you couldn't read but you wished you could. Because I had no magnifying glass when I was a child, I could only enjoy the illustrations in regular print books. I was fortunate that the library at Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and Blind had a number of these with well-drawn illustrations. The multiple shelves of stories and encyclopedias would have been of no help to me otherwise.

I wrote about my discovery of the library's treasures in my Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School) memoir. Its books helped me endure the painful autumn of 1967 .

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In addition to studying, I began to borrow books from the school library. One described the lives of cavemen, including plenty of exciting drawings. I felt strongly tempted not to return the book. The print was too small for me to easily read without a magnifying glass but I did enjoy the illustrations. Of course, I eventually returned it.

The pictures in the dorm's encyclopedia were interesting to look at as well but the print was far too small to read. I especially liked leafing through the volume with the clear plastic pages displaying the human anatomy. Various internal organs were painted on each sheet. As I turned pages, I could see different parts of the body revealed.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

LIKE A VOICE FROM ONE'S HOMELAND

To an exile, hearing news from home is wonderful. I believe that I've earned the right to understand that feeling. When I was a child, the government of Alberta and British Columbia sent me to an institution because they assumed that I couldn't be taught at my local public school. Because I was among strangers in a strange province, I feel justified in empathising with outcasts and deportees.

In Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School), I wrote about how radio became my best friend in that uncaring asylum. It kept me sane and helped me momentarily forget how far from home I was.

One day in November of 1969, it also brought the feeling of home to me. Here's how that happened.

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The atmospheric conditions also provided a different type of sublime experience. On another foggy afternoon, I sat on my bed while tuning the dial of the vacuum tube radio. Suddenly, I discovered distant stations coming in. That was unusual since they generally were heard only at night. As I turned the tuning knob, I heard CFRN, one of the Edmonton radio stations. It seemed like a voice from home. A delightful nostalgia filled my heart. For that brief time, I felt connected to the place I loved.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

THE COMPANIONSHIP OF ISOLATION.

How can being isolated from people be sublime? When a person lives among uncaring strangers, being alone becomes a better restorative than merriment. The gospels record how Christ often left his disciples and spent hours communing with his heavenly Father in the wilderness. On occasions, we all need a break from our humdrum circumstances.

In November of 1969, I had an experience that seemed to transcend my mundane world of supervisors and dorm mates. It was as if I stepped into a different dimension or into another world.

This excerpt from Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School) describes how I came to sense something awesome for a brief moment.

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One asset of being a child is the gift of imagination which became very real to me one murky Saturday morning in the fog that Vancouver commonly experienced. I decided it might be fun to venture out onto the lawn below Tyler House.

"You better be careful not to get lost," Michael cautioned as I put on my coat.

"I won't," I assured him, "I can always just keep going until I come to a fence".

It was an awesome eerie experience as I walked until all the scenery vanished behind me. At one point, I stood on the lawn with no landmarks visible. All I could see in every direction was a twenty-foot circle of grass and the light grey fog. It was as if I was in my own little world. I imagined how wonderful it would be to have a planet all to myself where; no one would dominate or bother me. For a second however, a chill of fear went through me. I became unsure where I was in relation to the dorm. Then I remembered that I could walk to the top of the hill and find the dorm eventually.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

SEE FOOTBALL THROUGH MY EYES.

Imagine if you went to a football game but you couldn't see the field or hear a play-by-play announcer describing the action. Would you patiently sit there for a few hours or demand your money back?

This scenario isn't as far-fetched as you might think. My blind schoolmates and I endured hours of boredom at various sports events. We had no choice in the matter either. Supervisors and administrators decided we needed to attend games and that was that.

In my Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School) memoir, I wrote about one occasion when everybody at the game became unable to see the field. For a while, they experienced the same tedium we did at those outings.

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It was a rare occasion when the sighted public found themselves in the same situation as us visually impaired students. Our supervisors periodically took us to various UBC football and hockey games on weekday evenings and weekends. On one particular sunlit Saturday afternoon, Mr. Moiarty ordered everybody into the school bus. I sat in the bleachers and fumed as the game began. Football appeared to be a waste of a beautiful day. Since our supervisor seated us fairly high up, all I could see were tiny coloured blurs moving around the turf.

As I waited for the game to end, I noticed fog begin to obscure the field. It soon became so dense that play was stopped. I burst out laughing. For once, the sighted spectators and I were in the same position. Everyone needed to wait for the fog bank to roll through before play could resume.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

A REMEMBRANCE OF A LIFE LESSON.

We certainly have it good here in North America, even with the economy stagnating for the past few years. The blessings of peaceful prosperity that we've enjoyed for decades came at the price of the blood, sweat, tears, and lives of our military.

Because of these perennial benefits, children tend to think that they're entitled to have whatever they desire. I know this because I once felt that way when i was young.

From Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School), here's a turning point in my life when I learned that there are no free snacks, let alone lunch.

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During that autumn, I learned the hard way that life did not owe me a living. The weekend supervisor, a loud-voiced, heavy set, middle-aged, authoritarian whom I shall call Mr. Moiarty, took us to the beach one November afternoon. We walked along a road, which ran parallel to the ocean, for a few hours. We finally stopped at a kiosk selling candy and chips.

"Could you buy me one of these?" I asked our supervisor and pointed at the chocolate bars.

"Use your own money; I'm not your dad. This isn't the little kids dorm. You're supposed to buy your own candy. You can't expect people to always buy everything for you, you know," he chided. Mr. Moiarty's rebuke stung. I foolishly hoped some measure of grace would be extended to us and we could have a few more treats than usual but I realized then that I must make do with my allowance and could not expect help from others.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

BEWARE OF FLYING HOCKEY PUCKS.

As I've written before on my blog, supervisors and teachers at Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and Blind frequently took us to events which we couldn't enjoy due to our disability. Their "good deeds" were only for show. Escorting us to the Ice Capades, the circus, and sports events certainly must have looked good on their reports and created a favourable impression in the minds of their superiors. I'm sure that some of those civil servants meant well. For us though, outings meant sitting on hard benches for hours while the fully-sighted audience enjoyed the spectacle.

Though I hated sports when I was young, I was allowed to keep a souvenir from one game that I was forced to attend. Here's an excerpt from Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School) that tells how a hockey puck became mine one November afternoon.

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During one game, my boredom was abruptly interrupted. As I sat and yearned for the end of the third period, an object hit my chest and landed in the row in front of me. "Hey, it's a hockey puck," Brian exclaimed as he picked it up.

"So that's what hit my chest," I said as I rubbed the spot.

Brian pondered the puck in his hand and then said, "Well, I guess it should be yours since you're the one who got hit by it."

Though I thought the sport was a complete waste of time and effort, I felt excited to actually hold a real puck which was used in a game. That was one item I felt proud to take home from Vancouver to show my family.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

VANDALS ALWAYS HAVE TO RUIN IT FOR THE REST.

We've all experienced this, haven't we? Authorities revoke a wonderful privilege or ban a device because of one unthinking individual's rash behaviour. Our sense of injustice is multiplied when the perpetrator of the mischief receives little or no punishment.

This excerpt from Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School) shows how an expensive machine was ruined by one boy's bone-headed stunt.

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This room also contained a primitive print enlarging machine. Light from an incandescent bulb illuminated the page and lenses in a box projected it to a white translucent screen. This made reading more enjoyable. Furthermore, I discovered I could see my drawings in greater detail. Volcanoes were what I passionately enjoyed sketching at the time. I created my own "television shows" based on what I drew. I loved that machine and used it often that autumn.

I felt devastated when Jimmy yielded to a destructive urge and jumped off the top of the bookshelf one Saturday. He deliberately put his foot through that remarkable print enlarger. I don't recall if Jimmy received punishment for his vandalism but the school removed the machine and they never replaced it.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.

THE GREAT CANDY CONTEST OF 1967.

Now that all the trick-or-treating is over, children across North America have an ample supply of goodies. Even so, parents usually dole out candies, peanuts, and other snacks to their children during the first weeks of this month. Though kids would rather eat as much of their halloween swag as they want, they understand that this rationing is for their own good.

In this excerpt from Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School), my fellow dorm mates and I received the rare privilege of keeping all of our halloween stash. This is what we wisely decided to do with our windfall.

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Those of us who were new to the dorm felt pleasantly surprised when no supervisor confiscated our goodies. For the first time at Jericho, the authorities actually trusted us with our Halloween treats. I stashed mine in my locker and rejoiced that my candies were not seized "for my own good."

"I don't know about you guys but I'm going to try and make my candies last," I announced the next evening.

"Yeah, let's have a contest to see who can make theirs last the longest," Geoffrey encouraged. All four of us roommates agreed and carefully hoarded our bootie. Though we had a monumental struggle to resist the siren call of the treats in our lockers, I felt proud of myself for being one of the last to run out of candy.

I grudgingly ate the apples first to prevent them from going bad, remembering all those "starving children in India" lectures from grownups. Apples weren't much of a treat compared to chocolates, popcorn balls, peanuts, caramel kisses, and other sweets but they were better than nothing.

This process of sorting and hoarding taught me to conserve my candy and make it last for a couple of weeks. Every single one of us prized the privilege of being trusted with our treats and did not want to lose it by becoming ill from overeating.

We did, however, yield to temptation in another matter. Weeks passed as we waited impatiently for someone to collect the UNICEF money boxes. I felt no qualms when I spent those pennies since I rationalized we were needy children too and deserved the cash. The other boys shamelessly spent their UNICEF donations as well.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.