
BY AARON STELLA About a year and a half ago, I began chronicling my stranger-than-fiction life story here on Phawker. Admittedly, much of it is hard to believe, but let me assure you that everything I have shared thus far really did happen. Since almost all of these events occurred during the presidency of G.W. Bush, I am calling this MY LIFE IN THE GHOST OF BUSH, a play on the David Byrne/Brian Eno album MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS. This is the 13th chapter, and for the benefit of newcomers, here’s a quick recap of the preceding 12 chapters: chapter one, life in a fanatic Christian cult; chapter two, post-cult life and coming to grips with my homosexuality; chapter three, the misadventures of a megalomaniac (and closeted homosexual) father; chapter four, my families exodus to Alabama to weather the expected Y2K apocalypse; chapter five, openly gay life in the Bible Belt and getting expelled from school because of it; chapter six, my 9/11; chapter seven, unwittingly moving in with a family of child abductors; chapter eight, forcibly committed by my family to a psych ward; chapter nine, life in an Alabama psych ward; chapter ten, how I got out of the psych ward; and chapter eleven, yet another disastrous experience with yet another foster family and the return of the child abductors; and chapter 12 kicked out of yet another house. You can read the first 12 chapters from beginning to end after the jump. But for now, I’ll set the way-back machine to the summer of 2003, Hanceville AL, where my mother and I have struck a deal in the dead of night that she would leave me alone for the rest of my life if I granted her a final wish. That wish was that I enroll myself in a Catholic Liberal Arts College, called Magdalen College. After being involuntarily committed to a psyche ward, asked to leave my house to live with friends of the family who turned out to be child abductors wanted in three states for various felonies, and enduring not a lick of tolerance for being homosexual (my family included) I had figured it best that I abandon all family ties for good. But the price for that would be costly—and yet, as it all turned out, strangely fulfilling.
Magdalen College sits high atop a plateau on Mount Kearsarge, NH, about a 20-minute drive up a mountain road from the lower lying town of Warner, NH. After easing off the drive onto the college grounds, the scene that seems to appear out of nowhere is idyllic as New England bucolic gets: aged conifers and spruces mothering over moody green grass; characterless dormitories and like classroom huts resting quietly aside dusty gravel paths; the White Mountains, looming in a perpetual haze on the horizon; then, at the center of campus, a large brick chapel rising skyward from a fanfare of flowering bushes and large smoothed boulders, with its haughty spire, reaching heavenward like a bleak finial atop this pristine, naturalist wedding cake. Striking, but still something felt fake, or forced, as I took in the
setting, like the feeling of being cornered in a diorama. It didn’t click until one afternoon early on in my first semester when I was walking around campus with a fellow classmate. All the sudden, one of the faculty members comes trotting up one of the connecting gravel paths to tell us that we need to split up since we had be walking alone together for more than 25 minutes. Apparently, that was prohibited.
The college is a small operation: only 64 students, myself included, were enrolled during my first semester (by my second, 10 students had left). Magdalen didn’t exactly appeal to a wide demographic: their student body consisted almost entirely of homeschoolers, and the brood of a special breed of fanatics I like to call “Taliban Catholics”. But I knew this going in my tenure. A few years back, my mother had tricked me into attending the college’s summer camp program under the ruse of it being a theater and music camp. There, I got a taste of Magdalene’s military-styled curriculum, which spared no charms of micro-managed living: no TV, no telephone, no Internet, no music, no reading newspapers until they’d been edited to ribbons, no dating (hanky-panky of any kind was punishable by solitary confinement. No kidding), no singing non-religiously based songs to oneself or in public, and most of all, no arguing the rationale behind any of the rules, no matter how glaringly draconian or indoctrinating they were.
A day in the life of a Magdalen student wasn’t any cheerier either: out of bed by 6:20 AM, morning chores, closet and drawers inspected for neatness, dress for 7 AM Mass (men wore suits and ties while the women wore ankle-length dresses and equally prudish blouses), breakfast, morning classes, lunch, afternoon classes, free time (20 minutes), choir practice for an hour (sometimes longer), sports (rarely co-ed), dinner, fun songs (singing censored bar and summer camp songs like you did in kindergarten), social activity if it was the weekend, study hall (nodding off was punishable by standing for the rest of study hall, which lasted about 2 hours) saying the rosary on your knees, then finally, bed by 11:30 PM. Rinse, wash, repeat every day for the whole year. At times, the faculty would rearrange the schedule to accommodate various events during Liturgical calendar, such as Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, along with other school wide events, such as trips, and St. John the Baptist Week—the school’s version of Spring Break—where the students would put on variety shows, hold a Sadie Hawkins-style dance with a live jazz band, and engage in other such thrill-inducing yet conservatively begotten shenanigans to relive us of the daily grind.
Speaking of the grind, the education style at Magdalen was quite unique. Almost all of the classes were taught using the Socratic method, meaning that instead of having professors profess to you the facts about various topics, students were encouraged to engage in dialogue with the class at large, ask questions, and come to understand their own truths (as long that those truths didn’t conflict with Catholic doctrine). Your “professors”, in this case, weren’t called professors, but “tutors” so that students would look upon their senior class sitters as peers in a forum rather than experts on the subjects. As it turned out, this method was surprisingly effective, and granted us a rich education on many great works of literature, as well as the intricacies of Latin, music, math, science and English; and what’s more, is that after digging into several class discussions with the same 20-25 people you spent with most of the day, you started to gain an understanding of each other’s perspectives, which made for fast friendships, all as trusted confidants.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed myself part of the time. Still, in retrospect, I’d never in a million years recommend anyone send their kids there. It’s just difficult to distill Magdalen’s defining elements without appearing to take sides. While the college sought out to reform the person, they also tampered with the reformation process to accommodate their religious mandate. Looking back, that long drive up the mountain road, the separation from the distractions of the modern world, all were part of a greater plan: not to liberate the soul, but to create brainwashed acolytes for the Church’s ranks.
I can’t end our story here. And so, for next time, I’ll delve deeper into the finer points of life at Magdalene, and, with a bit of luck and finesse, recapture the moment I had there, at which, I think I finally became an adult — the moment when I finally woke up.
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August 31st, 2010 at
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