Tears welled and filled my eyes, blurring my vision as trails of snot rolled through my nose all the way down my face. I could feel my hand clutched around my dad’s leg, begging for his reconsideration. It was my first day at Sunday School, and I clearly had no intention of staying any longer. Having a religious family was plenty of fun before this point: exciting festivals, feasts every so often, and extravagant holidays were the norm. However, my entire world flipped upside down the second our car pulled into the parking lot of a building I had never seen before. The sign in front read “Brooklawn Middle School,” but I was only 10! There was no chance I was going to skip two years ahead to middle school, and even less of a chance that I would stay docile enough to accept the cruel and unusual punishment of going to school on a Sunday.
Needless to say, my first impressions of the place were nothing compared to being thrown into a world I wanted nothing to do with. Before this point, I accepted my religious traditions only at face value when they would benefit me, like a child that accepts gifts on Christmas but doesn’t know the slightest bit about Jesus’ birth. I knew nothing of the many gods, their stories, and even less about their morals and lessons for humanity to use. At home I had every resource one could ever need about learning the ancient scriptures; however, they were never easy ground for me to step on.
One promising day, my grandmother brought me to the bookstore at the local temple and for the first time in the lengthy years I spent there, something caught my attention: a comic book! How on Earth was something so pure in this seemingly wretched place? A single second of judgment lapsed before I left my grandmother’s hand and picked the book up. Suddenly, a deluge of confusion surged through my brain upon looking at the cover closely for the first time, with enough force to flip my entire world upside down for the second time.
On the cover was one of the gods I had never given a second look to, one of the figureheads in temple and school that I had never truly understood or connected with. As I carefully dissected surprisingly complicated British-English vocabulary without the slightest trace of American slang, my eyes widened at the possibility that I was finally going to understand the religion I was born into. While belatedly comprehending the stories my family attempted to pass down to me by flipping through those beautifully thin off-white pages, I saw a world of possibility created by a medium through which I would finally understand my culture.
An entire section of my room’s bookshelf rapidly filled itself with every edition of comics that existed, bridging the gap between my parent’s generation and mine. They did what my entire family could not manage to do, all in the time of however long it took me to scan the front cover that one glorious day.
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