When I was a lad…

“Come here THIS INSTANT boy!”, She wasn’t graceful, but Mrs. Sarah had a real knack for discipline. She was British and she and her husband were elders on the commity at my father’s church, whcih was Lutheran. Something few people know about Lutherans is that they value discipline just as much, if not more than their Catholic rivals. As a kid I came to understand this intimately. Most of my childhood consisted of church related functions. I would frequently predict the sunday school lessons and “kid’s talks” durring sunday worship, something I was later corrected for. These and numerous other confining experiences like being forced to attend funerals of people I never met, constantly being introduced to borning adults who all think the same, led me to reject much of what I came into contact with as not having any validity whatsoever. It wasn’t untill much later, when I realized it was unfair for me to call myself a Christian, when all I had ever done was put up with the environment I was born into that I came across the motion picture “Luther” which was about Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. That movie actually had a much more profound impact on my life than any of my father’s sermons up to that time. Reading this article I was reminded of my first experiences seeing that film and the fascination I had with the idea of writing. The printing press collasped the pre-reformation following. Luther publishing the Bible in German struck a blow that Orthodoxy never quite recovered from. Interesting article!