On a childhood mystery

In ancient Greece, a Panhellenic religious festival called the Eleusinian mysteries existed for nearly two thousand years. A travel-truce was imposed for fifty-five days so participants could journey to Athens for the eight-day festival that included a fourteen-mile pilgrimage to Eleusis. What exactly happened as part of the central initiatory experience at Eleusis is unknown. It is, after all, a mystery cult.

What we can estimate with some degree of confidence is the following: it addressed Greek anxieties about the after-life; its language borrowed heavily from agriculture and grain harvesting; the central myth’s main character is Demeter (Roman name Ceres, from which we get the word “cereal”); there was a priest called a hierophant; initiates were shown sacred objects and told secrets.

Revealing the secrets was punishable under law, but the mysteries’ influence was everywhere, even providing St. Paul with generous metaphorical language to describe the resurrected body to the Corinthians who lived only sixty-some miles from Eleusis: like a seed emerging from the ground transformed into a plant, we, too, will emerge from death with transformed bodies. The language of the mysteries is so pervasive in 1 Corinthians 15 that you wonder if the apostle was initiated just so he could evangelize the Greeks of this region. The cult was a catalyst for spiritual renewal couched in the tangible, everyday experience of farming.

Childhood brims with such transformative experiences. Our time spent perfecting a jump shot or hitting a changeup often distracts us from noticing these experiences the first time around, so some of us find our middle-aged selves making a pilgrimage along the path of our memory to those places in search of what could have been transformed decades ago but we just weren’t ready for.

I’m currently in search of a resurrection.

Until recently, I would not have thought a childhood friendship with my friend Craig would invite a journey inward. I should have known better. About twenty years ago, I discovered a picture of the two of us from first or second grade when we both attended Sarasota Christian School in Sarasota, FL. I snatched it out of my pile of keepsakes at my parents’ house and have kept it nearby in a desk drawer or a book instead of filing it away. I have written several letters to him over the years, some of which I have mailed though others were eventually tossed out because I either chickened out or didn’t know where to begin searching for an address.

Between the ruckuses of the academic calendar, our family has occasionally visited Sarasota where you can swim in the ocean on Christmas most years without much discomfort. I grew up in this Gulf Coast community, but it’s something of a mystery to me itself. An afternoon of academic work at a downtown Starbucks on one visit led me to take a walk out among the shops, and I realized how little I knew of Sarasota’s history. I might as well have been in Chios. Sure, the circus had once wintered there. I knew that. I had seen John Ringling’s name smattered about the town on various pastel-painted buildings, his mansion remaining until a couple of years ago as a place to explore like Parisians in the catacombs. Sneak in, paint graffiti, sneak out. Old Sarasota was marginal in my childhood. My Sarasota’s acropolis was Palm Grove Mennonite Church, its gymnasium Palm Grove Christian School, and its Sparta anything deemed secular. I grew up thoroughly inoculated to old Sarasota but found—that afternoon—a new entry for my bucket list. I will someday enjoy the rich artistic history of Sarasota without hurry.

Craig belongs to the Sarasota mysteries. We spent a couple of years together, but his family’s church was deemed “liberal” and our school where we met “worldly.” Childhood was a steady process of narrowing perspective to life behind the long walls of conservative Mennonitism. We met on the first day of kindergarten instead of Mrs. Byler’s orientation, which included a story about a mitten that I colored and attached some yarn to. My mom, I’m sure, has it tucked away in a rectangular cardboard box in their North Carolina attic. On day 1, he’s looking away, occupied with hanging up his backpack and getting situated in this new chapter of our lives called school. We would get to attend most of the next four years together, though I remember mounting anxiety as to whether Craig and I would be in the same class. I can’t remember if we both had Mrs. Bontrager for second grade, but I know we had Mrs. Kurtz for first and recently saw proof that we had Mrs. Hunterford for third.

Speaking of resurrections, Mrs. Hunterford once claimed to have been dead for several hours until her husband prayed her back to life. I’m unsure of what to think about that other than remembering the awkwardness of the moment, which she had a penchant for creating.

From those years, I’ve kept this photograph that some unknown third person took of us. Mrs. Kurtz once allowed us to sneak out the door facing the playground and snap some pictures with a 35mm camera I had. Craig was being his usual silly self, sobering enough to put his arm around me in a rather uncomfortable pose as he was at this age several inches shorter than me. I’m unsure whether this photo is from that shoot or not. Here, though, we’re both in light blue polo shirts, SCS’s uniforms that show we’re not kindergartners who didn’t have uniforms. The rough, cobbled trunks of live oaks blur the background.  

Why the picture means so much mystifies me. There is, of course, the friend part. Craig represents that time in childhood before life gets awkward, before my family’s religious culture got in the way of two kids who loved playing anything provided it was together. He was the first person who invited me to a sleepover. The first person I knew with a swimming pool. The first with He-Man action figures. On one occasion, Craig and I went to work with Craig’s dad, Andy, who built houses, and on the construction site we built a raft that Andy brought home with us and helped us put in the pool. It floated but didn’t take kindly to riders. Gave us splinters for months.

The photo contains all these memories.

But it’s more. Reading through my journals the other day, I came across an entry about an embarrassing experience during my twenties. The humiliation left me feeling alone, dreamless, existentially destitute. Apparently, I had the photo nearby and used it as a portal to talk to my seven-year-old self: Don’t stop dreaming. You’ll face disappointments. Don’t stop dreaming, is what I wrote. It was all very sincere and tear-filled, but the compassionate voice that rose above the inner tumult came from this photograph. It grounded me. It gave me myself to talk to, a self that had a friend whom I loved and could see.

The photo is quite literally a memento of the most concentrated form of friendship from my childhood, but it brings a dull ache. Like cherry blossoms in Japanese poetry, its beauty is inseparable from its transiency. For fourth grade, my parents enrolled me in what would become our church’s school. I remember from the first day the strangeness of that place. Three supervisors (they didn’t call themselves teachers) monitored all twelve grades that all met in one room with twenty-five to thirty students in all. So, I went from a class of twenty in my grade level to roughly the same number that spanned twelve years. Friendships were limited to who of the five or so around my grade level weren’t in a mood that day.

As kids are wont to do, I’d dream of returning to SCS, a homecoming that would render unnecessary the one day we observed a yearly truce in our interactions with the more worldly Mennonites and visited the SCS auction. On that one day, I could catch up with Craig and run about with him and his murder of friends like things had never changed. He always made me feel welcome. The grand return, however, never came, and the auction remained an event reminding us that our differences would keep us apart until next year.

I’m not bitter at my parents over Craig despite the rhetoric it takes to describe the loss. I wonder how he is, who he’s become, what he spent his teens, twenties, and thirties doing. We’re now in our forties. Yes, switching schools effectively aborted the friendship, but I know now that the carefree days of childhood were about to be clouded over with an even broader exclusivity. Gothardism was about to leave its scar on Palm Grove, and though I would increasingly push back against the more legalistic of these values before discarding them completely, I was only seven, and my elementary school self would go forth an enthusiastic initiate of the Overholt household fearing the evils personified by Stryper, spooked by back-masking, and promulgated by television. Before all of those fears took form, Craig disappeared from my life, evaporating into the Sarasota mist as an immaculate, untarnished, but inaccessible Platonic form—friend. To this day, his friendship lingers just below the conscious where I’ve talked with him daily.