The nerd who wanted nothing to do with God

At one point my father bought a 24-volume encyclopedia. To this day, I'm not sure if he did that to get rid of my authority, or as a thoughtful investment in my thirst for knowledge. Probably a bit of both. What he didn't expect was that I would decide to read that thing from A to Z. Systematic. Aardvark to Oxygen, including the additional volumes supplied later to keep the encyclopedia up to date.

I was eight years old.

My aunt discovered that talent at a communion party, when I tried to start a conversation about arachnophobia after she said she was afraid of spiders. She looked at me as if I had done something crazy. I didn't understand that. I had helped her, hadn't I?

That's a bit what my childhood looked like.

The chicken coop logic

In kindergarten, the teacher took the class to a petting zoo. Afterwards, she asked everyone to draw a chicken coop. I drew a chicken coop. No chickens with it, because she hadn't asked for that. While all the other children cheerfully placed clucking animals around their coops, I submitted an architecturally correct but completely empty structure.

The teacher asked where the chickens were.

I explained that she had asked for a chicken coop and that I had drawn exactly that. If she had wanted to see chickens, I reasoned as a five-year-old, she should have formulated her assignment more clearly.

My wife still says that I was completely wrong here and that every child automatically draws chickens with a chicken coop. In my world, however, that is not correct. A question is a question. You analyze it and you answer what is stated, not what might have been meant.

That logic has followed me my entire life. It is my greatest strength and my greatest blind spot at the same time.

What I did and did not believe at eighteen

I believed in science. Completely, sincerely, without reservations. For me, science was the only honest system to understand the world: thesis, antithesis, conclusion. Everything reproducible. Everything verifiable. I only accepted axioms after I had tested them myself. Dogmas were for people who were too lazy to think for themselves.

I believed in logic. In the power of argument. In the fact that if you build an argument well enough, the conclusion imposes itself.

And I believed, above all, in myself. That sounds arrogant, and it was. I was an eighteen-year-old who commented on everything, had few friends because adult conversations were more interesting than teenage stuff, and who considered myself someone who simply saw the world more sharply than the rest. A healthy dose of self-criticism was completely lacking.

God? That belonged in the category of dogmas. My parents had taught me that religion was at best a historical artifact and at worst a system to defraud gullible people. I had no reason to disagree with that. The religion classes at the Catholic school — I attended a classical diocesan college, purely for its educational reputation — were a pleasant break for me between the exact subjects. Jesus was a likeable figure with a good heart. I didn't make more of it than that.

Science explained how the world worked. That was enough.

The love-hate relationship that led to Italy

In my final year, I had a love-hate relationship with Latin that I only learned to appreciate afterwards. At that moment, I hated the grammar, the cases, the endless conjugation of verbs that I wondered who would ever use them again. But I devoured everything about ancient Rome that came with it. The emperors, the intrigues, Cicero's speeches, the way a republic slowly but surely slipped away from the people who had built it.

That combination — hate and love — ultimately brought me to Italy. The college had a tradition of taking graduating students on a twenty-day study trip. Twenty days of culture, museums, architecture, in nice hotels, without parents. For a nerd who had read about all those places his whole life, that was a dream.

I had no idea that trip would become my Road to Damascus.

That is a biblical image — the apostle Paul, who on his way to Damascus is thrown from his horse by an appearance of the risen Christ and is transformed from the fiercest persecutor of Christians into the most productive apostle there ever was. I vaguely knew the story, as one of the many stories from the religious lessons I had half-followed. It had no personal meaning for me whatsoever.

Until I arrived in Assisi.

But what exactly happened there — that's another story. One I'll tell next time.

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