Excerpt from “Round Trip:  Reflections On My Life and Rebellion”

          A quiver went up my spine like a tremor deep inside the earth and woke me.  Am I really dead:  a spiritual skeleton?  I do all the right things.  Attend services regularly, teach Vacation Bible School, help in the office, serve as chairman of the women’s group.  Is that just a veneer – the white side painted on?  There used to be a saying, “Please God – on the morrow we’ll do such and such.”  I seem to have it turned around – do such and such and please God.

            Like a soup bone simmering in a crock-pot, I had become immersed in religion.  The church was everything to me – flavoring every aspect of my life:  choice of mate, child rearing, education, relationships, use of time. 

 “Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?” says Oscar Wilde.  Perhaps it’s time I try.  Get away from the noise of the church’s liturgical party.  Go into the cellar of my sub-conscious – like my dream suggested and find out who I am.  Why I do the things I do.  What I believe.  What it is I’m objecting to.  God or the church?  Did the church set me on the wrong track or was it my own failing?  And creeping in along the edges came my old doubt – is there really such a thing as God?  Lots of fish to chew on.