From Calvary to Gambrini E-Book

Matti Helelä

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 125

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This is a true story of my journey from Calvary to Gambrini, as I remember it from the 1970s and 1980s. Because I was bullied at school and I often felt very lonely, I needed an imaginary friend. At the age of fifteen, I publicly confessed my faith. I had found the suffering and bleeding Christ crucified on the hill of Calvary. He loved me and managed to save me from my loneliness. I made new dear friends, and life was more exciting. Faith guided my choices in life. From Calvary, I traveled a long way to Gay Gambrini. I opened its door at the age of 31. For sixteen years, I had denied myself and carried my cross. Now, being myself, I started a new life. I found a new kind of love, and many of my friends changed. What should I think about religion now? From the reader: "Vivid text and relentless humor. A ruthlessly honest investigation on searching and finding oneself. Never bitter, but, even when criticizing, with a gentle twinkle in the eye. An in-depth and touching journey of life. Thank you for the honor of having been able to take part in your journey and now being included in this story."

Leseprobe

Dedicated to my son Markus

Contents

Introduction

Childhood and Early Youth

To Calvary

Street Mission during the High-school Years

Year in America

Army and First Half of Student Life

Through the Changes in the Marital Status

Opening a New Door and Closing the Old One

New Life

Love without the Bible

Thank You

Introduction

This is a true story of my journey from Calvary to Gambrini as I remember it. Only the names of my friends have been changed in this text. Calvary, or Golgotha, was a skull-shaped hill outside the walls of Jerusalem in Israel. There the Son of God, Jesus Christ, shed his blood on the cross for us sinners. Gay Gambrini was Finland's first gay bar, located in a courtyard of Iso Roobertinkatu, out of sight.

Both places were therefore very significant in their respective fields. The significance of Gay Gambrini was naturally local or national. It opened on the fourth of July in 1984, and I went there for the first time on 19 April 1986. Calvary was very significant from the perspective of globalization. Like Gay Gambrini, Calvary has profoundly touched the lives of individuals, ever since the earliest times of our era. This story begins from Calvary.

I went to Calvary and spent time there only figuratively, and I have never been to Palestine. On the contrary, to Gay Gambrini I went in flesh and blood: I sat there at the tables, chatted with people, danced on the disco floor, bought drinks from the bar, and went to the toilet to take a leak.

On Calvary, I met the suffering Christ, and, as a song says, I saw a loving look. In Gambrini, I also found love: the love of a man for the first time. Fortunately, that man did not appear to be suffering. Quite the contrary. In Gambrini, as well, I saw a loving look, and later at night I came to know what loving was all about.

Let me quote the wise words of a skeptic here: “In order to live in the world, one has to believe in things. What you believe says a lot about you. What you don't believe or what you have ceased to believe is also revealing. ” (Translated from Jussi K. Niemelä, “Miten epäillä empaattisesti [How to doubt empathetically]”, Skeptikko 3/2018, page 11.)

1. Childhood and Early Youth

Childhood Faith

My childhood home was a rather ordinary Lutheran home, not particularly religious. We could see the church on the other side of the road. Very seldom did we go there. The sung liturgies were always so boring, not to mention the minister's sermons, oh my god. (Many years later it was quite different in the joyful charismatic circles.)

In the evening service on the radio, I heard that God had given his only begotten Son, and it was certainly worth believing in him, or otherwise you would go to hell. Even if God loved us so much, such a threat of hell was a little frightening to a kid under school age. But in the end, all you needed was faith. Quite easy then. After all, everyone apparently believed. So did I. Children tend to believe their superiors, right?

School

I started elementary school at the age of seven. After a minimum of four years, some students transferred to chargeable middle school through entrance exams. Middle school included five years, and voluntary high school was three years. I was really good at school and probably different as well. And I don't mean just always being by far the tallest in class. Those days, good discipline at school was self-evident, but no teacher seemed to be either at all aware of the bullying or the least bit interested in it.

Three of us first graders could already read when we started school. Maybe I had learned to read from the Donald Duck comics or TV subtitles. I didn’t like it at all when my teacher was pampering me and publicly made me the son of a bank manager. I would not have wanted to stand out. In fact, it wasn’t until school that I realized that many families were economically much more modest. "Mom, are we rich?" I asked at home.

I never understood why one boy who was a couple of years older always came to beat me up during the breaks (we were outside during the 15-minute breaks between 45-minute lessons). I've forgotten his name. Every time I was scared, he would see me and start letting his fists fly. I never fought back. But then finally one year, I finally dared to resist, and it was worth it.

There were a lot of us children near the school entrance waiting for the school bell to ring and the school day to start that morning. There were no teachers present yet. When that boy was beating me on that high pile of snow, I was hitting back the best I could. I had no experience and no idea how it would go. I was finally defending myself. I don't remember what year it was exactly, but I know he had bullied me so many times that I just couldn't take it any longer. Enough is enough, I thought.

I was so surprised when all the kids around the high heap of snow were cheering me and shouting “Matti, Matti, Matti!” (Now I’m crying as I write this.) I had never noticed having any support groups. I was hitting back all I could. My strength was dropping, and I just couldn't defend myself anymore. But just before I showed any signs of surrender to my attacker, he said “I quit”. The bully had lost, and he disappeared. The battle had ended.

When I saw that former school bully of mine during the break, he walked away. He was clearly afraid of me, although I had no intention of revenge. I never had to deal with him again, and I don’t remember even having seen him much. I guess he wanted to stay invisible.

After first grade, I was transferred to third grade, but I still went through four years of elementary school, because, for some reason, at home we agreed that I would go to fifth grade before middle school. That’s how I returned to my own age group in middle school.

It was early June and warm. I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt at the middle-school entrance exam. There was temporarily no municipal doctor at the time, but the nurse had given me permission to go to the exam, even though my arms were still full of pimples from rubella. I gained almost as many points as the girl who came second. A boy who was later called the electric brain of the class had clearly the highest score in the entrance exam.

There were also other impressive and talented students in my middle-school class. One girl's admirable talent as a writer amazed me. The pencil in her hand was in full blaze at the essay writing exam. For me, it was typical to receive the best grades in languages. The teachers always announced the top grades from exams.

A boy who had to repeat the first grade of middle school received similar top grades in Swedish. Our names were announced time after time. Ilari's grades dropped after he had repeated his first grade, and he became my worst bully, calling me very humiliating names. Some guys who had earlier been nice, started to imitate him at times. Ilari later came to the same high school in the neighboring town for one year, but there in the new kind of environment he was quiet and withdrawn.

It is unfortunate that the school bullies probably had their own difficult backgrounds. Unfortunately, there is no angel out there holding hands, and the child gets to suffer. I would gladly have provided guardian angels for my bullies if it had been up to me and not to God.

The elementary school principal was our teacher of woodwork in middle school. He was proficient at neglecting his responsibilities, and he spent the lessons at home across the school yard. Therefore, now I got to be afraid of bullying in class, as well, in addition to the breaks. During the break, this “teacher” of ours, with a disgusting smell of coffee, popped in to see what we were up to. A long line of boys was queuing to get some help in the little time the teacher bothered to spend with us. It was hard to learn woodwork with insufficient guidance and dull tools, and it shows in my grades. I didn't get to learn some basic hand skills for life.

Maybe it wasn't God's will to make our teacher do a better job. The boys wrote a poem about him. This is my translation of how it began: "During the breaks, our incomparable detective wakes." In my fifties, I wrote my own poem, and recently I translated it into English as follows.

School Bullying

School bullying today

Brings memories back my way

The guys were violent

But I stayed silent

They called me names

I felt ashamed

It wasn't fare

The teachers didn't care

To even stay alert

When I got hurt

What a way to grow

My family didn't know

You can start healing

When you face your saddest feeling

That is how

I'm a happy adult now

Nobody can hurt my soul

I am whole

© 2007 & 2014 & 2020 Matti Helelä

I didn't attend the first middle-school reunions. Once, when visiting my hometown, I even spat toward the school building out of the car window. But later, after dealing with my feelings, it was good to go and see my old classmates. And of course, there were many nice ones among them. In the first reunion that I attended, we spent a silent moment in the memory of two classmates who had passed away. They included my worst bully and the nicest guy in class. Very sad but true.

School Girls

During my first years of school, I sometimes envied the girls because they got to walk hand in hand and be close to each other. They had nicer games, and they didn’t beat each other. Their clothes were nicer, and they had long hair. At that time, there was hardly any imagination in what the boys were wearing. Sometimes I tried my mother’s skirt, but later I didn’t have any interest in women’s clothing, and I like being a man. I hated ice hockey, which was an annoying duty for the boys. I had a doll, but I also liked my plastic truck and especially the electric train that my brother and I used to play with quite a lot.

On the other hand, at school before adolescence, I had a crush on some girls, and they were my “love girls”, as I said to my mother. In my early teens, I used to like a girl in my class, and we exchanged letters in the summer. I don't remember having had any sexual feelings, and she wasn't in love with me. Instead, as a child, I understood very well why a female actor wanted to kiss the handsome man on TV. I would have liked to be in her place, but without being a woman. And I didn’t understand why the handsome male actor wanted to kiss the lips of a woman.

2. To Calvary

Letters and Morning Prayer

My only childhood friend, Kalevi, moved away when we were ten. Later he started writing to me about having become a new-born Christian. And about having attended some meetings. What on earth was that? What freaking meetings? And why did he have to be born again? Why did it take all that to just believe?

When I was fifteen, Kalevi's brother Teppo from the other town made a surprise visit to the local middle school to give a short morning prayer service through the audio system. Oh, what a beautiful song he played on his cassette recorder about how the eternal word of God beat the evil powers. I was very curious to hear more. Teppo later paid a visit to my home. I was fifteen. He was a born-again Christian. He had obviously “gone up front” at the end of some religious meeting.

My Loneliness Is Killing Me – I Must Confess, I Now Believe

After Teppo left, I knelt down on the floor in my room and prayed. All by myself, instead of “going up front” in any meeting, and I truly became a born-again Christian. It was October. I thought I had already believed in Jesus as my personal Savior, when attending a confirmation camp in the summer. Unlike before, now I understood that I also had to give up many quite ordinary things that I had never considered to be sins. So, I quit watching Peyton Place on television before going to bed on Wednesday nights. My mother was quite surprised. It wasn't until a little later that I had the courage to say I had become a believer. This happened sometime after Kalevi emphasized that one has to confess his faith. Otherwise, it is not worth much.

Then why did I turn out to become such a believer? It was naturally because I was lonely. I will never have to ask anyone how it feels to be alone. I had experienced it myself. I felt I had no real friends. There were some guys, but I never really belonged in the same way as others. I wasn’t anyone’s best friend. My brother went to high school further away from home than I did later. When he arrived home for the weekend, I was invisible to the kid across the street. The two of us were still in middle school.

I would no longer like to remember this discussion, and I have already forgiven it. It should be easy to imagine the feelings of a young boy from the dialogue: "You don't even have any friends." – "Yes, I do!" – "Name one!" Then there was only silence, because the first words were true.

I was bullied at school, although not as much anymore as during my first six years of school. But anyway. Now that I became a believer, I finally had a friend: a truly genuine and real imaginary friend. And I finally belonged to a group, even if the others were far from my hometown. Thus, I had my own reference group.

Well, I still had to be mostly by myself close to one more year. But not totally alone. Instead, now it was the two of us together: Jesus and me. A year later in high school, I made new Christian friends, and that strengthened my faith even further and brought quite new dimensions to it. Before that, I went to see Kalevi and Teppo a few times and met some other people with them.

When I was riding my bicycle to school on the following morning after my new birth, I sang a love song with great joy: “I see the morning with news eyes with you by my side.” Now I had someone who loved me.