There was no truth or love to be found in them
by Stacey Warde
I burned a book once. Actually, I burned two books with the same title at the same time: The New World Translation of the Bible.
Yes, I burned, not just one, but two “bibles.”
I’m not proud; it’s just something I felt had to be done and, at 15, imagined that I had a good reason for doing it, and so I found an excuse to put a match to the pages of a book, and not just any book but a religious one: Anger being the primary motive.
“Fuck this book,” I said to myself after my absentee biological father, who showed little interest in me or my brother, tried to shower us with his “love” by sending us each our own copies of the preferred religious tract of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I knew from base instinct that I would never read it, knew that I was angry about receiving the book as a gift, and felt in my gut the cheapness of the gesture, of thrusting religion in my face without any sign of the love that religion presumably demands.
Despite my anger–coupled with the ongoing childhood fear of abandonment, the guilt and shame of neglect from a parental figure who ghosted his family more than a decade prior–I knew these books were bullshit. There was no love or truth to be found in them, at least not as demonstrated by the one, a devotee, who sent them, my absentee father.
Lucky for me, my mother remarried, and I found a real father, who wasn’t religious at all, who left the Catholic Church when it informed him that he couldn’t marry a divorced woman whom he loved until the day he died nearly 45 years later. The man who actually spawned me had mostly disappeared, with the exception of two brief encounters before his final attempt to win me over with Jehovah.
Once, as a boy of 6, I was playing with my cousins at the ocean’s edge at our favorite spot in Laguna Beach when my aunt, then in her mid-20s, came running down to the water, where we played in the wet sand. “Stacey!” she said breathlessly, pointing toward Main Beach, “Is that your father, walking this way?”
I looked, as any child would, with great eagerness to spy out the only man I could then imagine as my father, the one who left me two years earlier when I was 4. He wore a Speedo swimsuit, the kind of swimwear muscle men wore to the gym, and had a certain look about him.
I started running and stopped him to ask, “Are you still my father?”
He seemed startled, grasping for words, “Well, legally…” I heard him say, and felt my heart drop. I hated him at that moment. I knew his words were slippery, not to be trusted, escape mechanisms, attempts to shuffle the truth, create illusion and distance, and had no real substance to them. I knew then he would never ever, nor would he want to, be my father.
He tried once more to contact us when I was 10. I had already given my heart and loyalty to mom’s second husband, my stepfather who, by all accounts, was the only real father I ever had. Nonetheless, “Jim,” as mom used to call her ex, said he was interested in visitation rights with me and my brother.
He arranged to meet with mom and Mr. Radice (as most of my friends called my new stepdad) and work out the details. My brother and I were told to wait upstairs. When all was said and done, we were asked to come downstairs and say hi to Jim. We said hi, and that was the last we ever saw or heard from him–until he sent us those ugly puke green bibles.
I told my brother, “Watch this! I’ll show you what to do with these.” I took the bibles out to the curb in front of our home and placed them in the gutter. I poured gasoline over the green hardcovers with the gold lettering and the flimsy thin white pages of the two bibles. Then, I struck a match and tossed it onto the gasoline-doused bibles.
They burst into flame and crackled. I glowered in my contempt for my father’s hypocrisy, for his false and limited idea about what love was.
I felt a certain delight and shame, each emotion cohering with my anger and hurt until I wished the fire would burn itself out already, leaving nothing but the charred remains of the hideous, green books with gold lettering. I felt like I was doing my brother and myself a favor by finally cutting ties with a man who would always be a ghost to us, never real, never within reach, not a human face we would recognize.
I didn’t think for a moment that I was doing anything wrong, felt that my anger toward the man who fathered me without taking any of the responsibility of a father was fully justified; and what better way to show it than to put to flame this lame attempt of his to reach out to me and my brother after more than 10 years of virtual silence?
I wasn’t concerned about the books so much as I was about the statement I wanted to make: “Fuck you, ‘dad!’ Fuck you and your religious bullshit!”
By the time we’d received these “gifts,” he’d already fathered a half-dozen more children with nary a word about where he was or what he was doing. As a boy, whenever I’d ask mom why he didn’t seem interested in us, she’d say, “You’re better off without him.”
I never understood that, never believed it entirely despite his absence and disinterest, until many years later when I learned from a couple of half-siblings that living with a Jehovah’s Witness as a father was a living hell.
They left home as soon as they came of age, if not sooner; one of them committed suicide.
As the flames turned the white pages of the books into char, my late grandmother, Virginia, who lived to be 100, pulled up to the curb. I saw a look of horror cross her face as she raised her head to peer over the steering wheel and through the windshield of her car to take in the scene. She pushed her door open and bounced out of the car.
“WHAT are you doing?” she demanded.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry, grandma,” I said, “we’re just burning these fake bibles that Jim sent us.”
I didn’t think much of her disapproval, didn’t imagine that her horror had more to do with the idea of burning books than it did with me making a statement, or even simply starting a fire in the gutter in front of the house. She loved books and could often be found in her room, reading. Books were her treasures.
She came from a family of educators. Her mother, Marie Harding Thurston, pioneered the first schoolhouse in Laguna Beach. We were encouraged to read and educate and better ourselves. We visited the library often and became familiar with the ways of accessing information, sorting truth from fiction, learning to love both truth and fiction, and knowing the difference between the two.
The library eventually became one of my favorite places to hang out as I got older. There, I met fierce advocates of the right to access all kinds of data, if one was interested in really educating himself. There, in the library, I found people who really cared, who encouraged me to learn more, who seemed to suggest an endless flow of data was available if I wanted to have it. The sky’s the limit for anyone who wants to learn something, these librarians seemed to be saying.
I also found through many solo hours in the library that it wasn’t so bad to be alone. I’m grateful for my many hours of study and research in the library, finding treasures galore in books on the library shelves and elsewhere in the system.
I’ve never looked but I imagine you could find in the library a copy of the green-bound bible that Jehovah’s Witnesses have loved and cherished over the years.
Now, nearly 50 years after I set those bibles aflame, I still would not choose to read them, nor do I have any interest in doing so, but I would not burn them either.
Stacey Warde is a writer living in Mendocino County.
