Once, there was a boy. He was a relatively ordinary boy, as boys go. He liked to play in creeks and woods, and pick up horrible things and show them to his mother under the mistaken premise that she would find them as fascinating as he did.
He had no spiritual framework to speak of; his parents gave no thought to the Beyond; his father did not believe in a Beyond at all, and his mother had grown up in a Christian home but converted to Apatheism later in life.
Once, he asked his mother what this "Easter" holiday was all about, and she told him that it was a celebration of a time many hundreds of years ago when a man named Jesus was nailed to a cross made out of wood.
In our protagonist's youthful realm of experience, wood came in boards, and boards were inevitably stored behind the garage in anticipation of some project or other. So he wondered idly what this "Jesus" fellow had done that made people so mad that they wanted to nail him to something and keep him behind the garage. But, in the greater scheme of a young boy's life, a man stuck behind the garage hundreds of years ago did not figure highly when compared to the sheer number of things that were available, today, to be set on fire, and so he forgot all about Jesus for many years.
For the most part, he was not a cruel child, but he was something of a follower; what the other kids did, he would do as well, often without thinking too hard about whether he ought to be doing it or not. In this way it was that he did some cruel things; it was thoughtlessness, not malice, but the outcome was the same, and once, at eight or so years of age, he did something that still haunts him when he thinks of it. (The turtle, he recalls, and tries to forget).
But time moved on, and he grew up. And as he grew up, he made himself a pariah; he could not maintain a grip on his emotions, and over time he alienated one friend, then another. He was something of an outcast in school, because no one wanted to be associated with the kid who cried all the time. When sixth grade came and went, he swore to himself that things would be different in intermediate school; there would be a lot of people who didn't know him, and he could start fresh, if only he could keep his emotions in check.
He failed. One by one people stepped back, and he found himself becoming more out of control, rather than less. He threatened to kill a guidance counselor, loud enough for the entire school office staff to hear. They didn't lock him away, then, as they probably would today. But he learned to turn his emotions inward, rather than to shout them out. And as eighth grade came and went, he swore to himself that things would be different in high school; there would be a lot of people who didn't know him, and he could start fresh, if only he could keep his emotions in check.
He failed again. It only took a week before he had a reputation at his high school as the kid who'd broken down crying in first-period English class.
But as it happened, there were other misfit toys at this particular school, and so not everyone pulled away. Most did, but there were a few who did not.
In his sophomore year, he found out that his English class would be taking a break from reading Dickens. Anything is better to a teenager than reading Dickens, of course, yes? No. Because they would be reading, among other things, the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah, and selected texts from other religions. Not as religious texts (not in the public schools, no) but as examples of literature from various historical and cultural periods. And it should be taken as purest, most abject, random chance that the Bible was the text that the teacher found the most literary significance in (and her own faith of course had no bearing upon this) and therefore would be focusing the majority of the time upon.
He was willing to read the Torah, as assigned. He was willing to read the Qu'ran, as assigned. But when it was time to read the Bible, he refused. Flat-out, unequivocally, absolutely refused. It was probably out of fear, because he knew Christians and wanted nothing to do with their faith. He certainly didn't know any Muslims, and while he knew a Jew or two, they didn't proselytize, so they were no threat to his world-view. He received a failing grade for that unit, but he never picked up a Bible.
The following year, a friend he'd known since the beginning of freshman year invited him to come to Youth Group on a Tuesday evening. Nothing threatening, no in-your-face evangelizing, the friend promised. Just pizza with a couple of other guys and the youth leader.
One Tuesday became two, and two became several, and before long our hero was listening to what these people had to say, rather than just going for the food and the company. It turned out that the Bible had some really cool stuff in it, and it gave some answers to questions he'd been wrestling with. Early in the spring of his Junior year, he prayed, and asked Jesus to be his Personal Saviour and Lord.
He was not a model Christian. He wasn't even the sort of Christian that most Christians wanted around; the pent-up anger from his youth (that still plagued him) was such a part of his being that it could be read on his face. He listened to music fit to make a church lady have vapors. He drove too fast. He wore torn-up jeans and t-shirts with in-your-face Christian messages that, at the time, did not seem as rude to him as they would seem later on.
But he knew what he believed, and finally he had a source of forgiveness; forgiveness for all of the things he'd done as a kid, that he was still ashamed of. (The turtle).
He was not the sort, in his nature, to do anything halfway. If he were to do it at all, he would do it with enthusiastic zeal. And he took up his faith like a sword, and over the next few years, he used it as such, fighting a crusade to bring as many people to Jesus as he could.
Somewhere in his mind, the anger still burned, and beside it lurked the certain knowledge that, as he bore the sword of Christ, he did so as a hypocrite, for as he preached the path of the straight and narrow, he walked a different path. One thing he'd sworn, when he took up the Cross, was that he would save sex for marriage, as it was written. But he did not. He slept with his girlfriend early in college. Then he cheated on her with another. Then he broke up with his girlfriend and slept with another, and another.
And he still wore the shirts, and still went to church, and still preached. And the hypocrisy gnawed at him, and made him still angrier inside. For he was seeking love (in the wrong ways, to be sure, but seeking it none the less), and finding comfort in the arms of women, but that comfort was tainted by guilt, and was never enough.
In college he also began intuitively to perceive and work with the flow of energy that surrounds us all. He found that he had an ability (that he would later discover was called Empathy), an ability to both feel the emotions of others, as well as to project his own. The place he went to college was alive with energy, as any place filled with tens of thousands of adolescents and young adults must be. He learned he could shape and manipulate this energy. And his faith told him that this was rankest heresy, but his heart told him that this was what he was supposed to be doing. And the conflict within him grew, and the sense of hypocrisy; for what he did was Witchcraft, and of the Devil, and anathema to his faith. But it was what he was for. And he kept doing it.
Some time later, he joined a new church, one that lacked the obligatory piano next to the pulpit (and the equally-obligatory little old lady with her white hair in a bun to play that piano). This church was different. It had a rock band, and a preacher whose voice thundered with power, and a congregation of people who lived and breathed the energy he had been manipulating for years now, though they called it the Holy Spirit. He felt like he'd found a home.
But then he saw the gangrene beneath the silken glove; he saw the lie that the people in this church were living, and the terrible influence they were having upon their children. He watched grown women fall to the ground and writhe in patently-sexual ecstasy as the preacher shouted at God, telling Him to pour out more of His spirit into them. And he watched a five-year-old girl fall to the ground and do the same, imitating her elders, learning that an orgasm on the floor was the way to worship Jesus. He watched as these people, who believed that all personal problems were caused by infestations of demons, reached into one another and pulled dark energies out, and then released them thoughtlessly into the room to seek new anchors.
He never went back.
Years passed, and his path wandered aimlessly, but he still thought of himself as Christian (and the hypocrisy chuckled, and the anger told it to shut up).
Without others of his faith around, he began to pick at what he believed. His faith, as a fundamentalist Christian, was a self-referential system: The Bible is the true and flawless Word of God. How do we know that? Because God says it is. How do we know that He says that? Because the Bible says He does, and the Bible is the true and flawless Word of God. Ad infinitum.
The problem with a self-referential, self-supporting system of belief is twofold. First, it is intrinsically insupportable in its own right (See Gödel, Escher, Bach for a discussion of the flaw in self-referential systems). Second, once any part of the belief is convincingly challenged, the whole of it begins to unravel.
One day, he was watching his cat. This cat was the closest thing to a child he had, and he loved it very much. He was pondering the Biblical premise that the thing that separates Man from the animals is that we have souls, and animals do not. The soul is the part of us, according to Scripture, that gives us the capacity to know right from wrong, good from evil. And as he watched, the cat set about knocking things off of the counter. A cup, crash. A pen, clatter. The keys, jangle. Then the cat looked up, just as it was about to knock something else over. It saw him watching. It paused, stopped what it was doing, then leapt off of the counter and went to hide under the bed.
The cat knew what it was doing was wrong.
And the first thread came loose.
A job opportunity arose; good money in a far-off place. He journeyed to a place half a world away, and spent two months in the desert that Mohamed walked; the same desert that Moses wandered about in; the same sands that Jesus had traveled before they caught Him and put Him behind the garage.
He listened to the whispers of the wind as it blew across the sands of the Holy Land. And what the wind told him was, "You've been living a lie. Your faith is not your own, and in professing it, you are a liar, and a hypocrite. So stop already."
What was left? Wind and water, sand and the burning sun. The traditional elements of old, each embodying a different aspect of what is, and what could be. And a fifth, the spirit that gives life, separating "me" from "the bit of meat that walks around and carries 'me' with it".
An oversimplification, of course. His journey as a Christian ended in the desert, but it was some months before he recognized the new path he was on.
And that path has led him to a new place, where there is no hypocrisy, because there is no magical man in the sky who will forgive him for whatever he has done; forgiveness should not come so cheaply; for it is a dear thing.
He is a guardian now, one of the two keepers of a sacred Grove, and the steward of all of the creatures and plants that live there. It is his guardianship of this place that is, in part, his atonement for the vile things he did in his youth.
It was over a quarter-century ago that he and his friends killed that poor box turtle. They didn't mean to; they were just playing thoughtlessly. But he still remembers the sudden realization of what he had done, and the worse realization that it could not be undone.
This is not the only reason why I do what I do, but it is a part, and no small part. I believe that Tortoise has forgiven me for what I did to his little brother all those years ago, because he has chosen to keep others of his brethren in my care at the Grove. But he has not forgotten, and neither shall I, for in the seven years that I have lived here, never once has there failed to be a box turtle somewhere in my yard when I mow the grass. I believe Tortoise puts them there to remind me that I must watch out for them, to keep them safe. It's important. It's important to me now, because it should have been important to me then.
Why do you do what you do?
-Grovekeeper
