The BiPolarity of Human Existence

        There are so many things I could go on and on about Charlie God. My very first class on my very first day of college, if you don’t count my walking into a speech class by mistake, was Intro to Religion. This was a reasonable choice to be required at a Jesuit college which expected 20 of one’s 40 classes to be core curriculum. The Jesuits’ goal was to have a well-rounded individual graduate from their institute of higher learning. If one’s major was not religion, then the core requirement was, if I recall correctly, 3 religion classes.

        Intro to Religion sounds like a good beginning. Father L made quite an entrance with his large stature, red face, and full Jesuit robes. His object was to empty us of all that we had been filled with – ostensibly by our parents – so that we could start thinking on our own. To his credit – he did not try to fill us with his own stuff. We nicknamed him Charlie God – Charles was his first name – his ego got him the surname. He was a Freud follower – back in the seventies, Freud was still a somewhat legitimate authority in psychology.

        He would get all huffy if anyone walked into class late – often Charlie God would not let the latecomer in at all – yelling and red-faced and slamming the door in the student’s face – opening it again and yelling down the hall after him or her! If we did not volunteer answers to his questions he would take it personally and call us names. First semester freshmen, in his opinion, were the worst people in the world. Unmarried eighteen-year-old girls, may or may not be lesbians, but they likely were! Absolutely everything was a phallic symbol! I had never heard of phallic symbols before and now they were literally everywhere.

        One day a kid got so made about phallic symbols, he yelled at Charlie God – “I bet you think that window there is a phallic symbol!” and Charlie looked at the window with an expression like, “isn’t it?”

        If someone crossed her legs during class, Charlie God might ask what that was all about! One didn’t dare tap a toe or scratch an itch – there might be a Freudian explanation he would want to embarrass you with!

        A couple of posts ago I mentioned cussing but I did not mention the times in my life when I myself cussed. There were a few months in junior high when my mouth got blue – although never at home. And then one day I realized that every thought in my head began with the s-word and I decided that I did not want to live that way – with so much anger. So I stopped cussing – even in my head! Until Charlie God came along. He made me so angry – and the swear words came out again – I didn’t cuss at him, of course – but at everything else – that lasted for the four years of college – even after a very good-looking senior guy told me that guys actually do notice the girls who don’t swear – I didn’t believe him and felt that I did get more attention for all the blue language. It wasn’t until a year out of college and into the workforce that I stopped once again and for good – the anger and unattractiveness made me turn it off. I know my daughters don’t agree with me on this, and that’s okay. “Shoot” is just an expression while the s-word, for me, is anger and condescension, self-loathing and disrespect.

        So that’s my history of cussing and my blaming Charlie God for some of it.

        There are times in the past when I’ve gone on and on about Charlie God – trying to figure out if he was purely evil or genuinely doing his job. I guess I finally concluded it was the latter – but only decades afterward.

        One day he was so mad at us because someone had stopped him on the quad and asked if he believed in hell! How dare some freshman ask him, Charlie God, about is personal religious beliefs! I thought, isn’t college a time for asking those questions? If you can’t talk to a priest about hell, who do you talk to about it? Now I realize Charlie God had wanted the student to conclude on his own about hell – sharing would have only swayed the student, and that was not Charlie’s job. But he did not explain it to us that way – just that he was furious at the insult of having been asked! Charlie could have done a better job with stuff like that.

        In the meantime, during the actual classes, I wondered if we were actually learning any Intro to Religion? We did have a term paper we were supposed to write and turn in. I thought, “wow! Just what I worked so hard in high school for – finally an actual term paper to do!” It was supposed to be on an actual religious experience – either our own or someone else’s. I wrote about Leo Tolstoy – research, bibliography, typed on my own $40 typewriter I had purchased with babysitting money – I might still have the term paper. But it turned out to be one of those things that I took a whole lot more seriously than the other kids. One classmate showed me his one-page handwritten term paper about his own religious experience at the hand of the nuns at the Catholic grade school he had attended!

        One of the things Charlie God did attempt to teach us was his pet philosophy, aside from Freud, the bi-polarity of human existence. And he would draw two sticks on the board with a circle connecting them – two poles one existence. I used to be able to give people the whole lecture, but nowadays, I am at a loss for the explanation. Poor Charlie God – the one thing he succeeded in getting into my brain besides the cussing! And now all that’s left are two sticks and a circle!

        That class, thankfully, only lasted one semester. One day during the spring, I happened to pass Charlie God walking on my way back through the Sears parking lot. He stopped and said hello, and I asked him if second semester freshmen were far superior to first semester freshmen? His face lit up and he went on and on about how much more mature second semester freshmen were – he was excited because I had stroked his ego, and it did not occur to him at all that he was insulting me – or rather the person I had been just one semester earlier.

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