I AM SHOCKED THAT I MADE IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH SEMINARY
I didn't have much support when I left my country home in Rhodelia at age fourteen to go to high school seminary in the city of Louisville. Even my pastor, who at first refused to fill out the papers, told me I wouldn't make it to Christmas. I am shocked that I managed, not only to make it to Christmas, but the whole twelve years! The last six years got easier and easier as I completed each year, but the first six years were, to put it bluntly, quite often hellishly filled with ridicule, shaming and bullying! For many years, I have been ashamed to tell these stories believing that I was "defective" in some way.
Those of us who came from "the country," were subjected to the regular ridicule of name-calling by those born in "the city:" hillbilly, redneck, hick and yokel! They added an extra ridicule for me because I was from "Rhodelia." "Hey, you! You from Rhodesia!" That kind of name-calling was not "every once in a while," but constant - and often accompanied with a laugh!
I had the "misfortune" not only to be born a "hick," I was a skinny underweight "hick" which invited bullying as well. I was regularly stuffed into my narrow little locker and then the door would be shut. Those who did it, would invite others to come and laugh at me. They would open the door just wide enough to look in and then leave laughing. Sometimes this would go on for an hour. I remember trying to hide my shame and act as it it didn't bother me in hopes they would quit.
On other occasions, I was stuffed in a tall trash can and then the trash can would be lifted up and set in a window sill. I had to sit there as people passed by and laughed. I had to sit there because to move would have meant that I would drop about three feet onto a terrazzo floor folded inside a tall metal trash can! I don't believe it is an exaggeration by any stretch to say that if the can fell to the floor it could have broken my neck or broken my back!
Even the head priest, the Rector, joined in in his own way. With no help, guidance or counseling, I struggled with "culture shock." During my first year, I never knew what people were talking about. They talked about movie theatres, restaurants and sports events. I knew about bailing hay, loading lumber, feeding pigs and stripping tobacco. As a result, I tested to do well academically, but my performance was substandard. My focus was not on academics, but on simple survival! As a result, the Rector called me into the office at the beginning of my second year and told me "they" were sending me home because I was what he called "a hopeless case." I had to beg for a second chance.
Because I was underweight at 90 pounds as a high school senior, I would stuff myself with the only extra food that was allowed - bread! I would squish slices of it into a ball and eat as many as I could. I did that for several months and got up enough nerve to go up to the Infirmary to weigh myself. The Rector ran the Infirmary and you did nothing that he could not see. With the Rector watching me, I got on the scales and it showed that I weighed 99 pounds that day! As I left, I had to walk through two lines of waiting students along the halls. All of a sudden, I heard the Rector call out at me in a ridiculing voice, "Knott, come back when you weigh 100!" Many of the students giggled as I "walked the line!"
In my last year there, my second year of college, I was sitting in Greek class. The Rector taught that class. All of a sudden, he called my name! That meant that I had to stand and read a passage in Greek that he had chosen and translate it. I still remember the first word! It was "pneumata," meaning "spirit." I was so shocked and nervous and caught off guard that I could not pronounce the word. I was trying to pronounce the letter "p" and "n" together which ended up with me just stammering since the "p" is silent in that Greek word. After I had struggled for a minute (which seemed like an hour), the rector yelled out, "Knott, just sit down! You have been a ball and chain around my leg for six years!"
Sports was another source of ridicule and shaming. I went to a small four-classroom country school. At recess, the girls jumped rope and the boys "played ball" in a gravel parking lot with an old tennis ball and a flat board. Sports, in the city, may have been something played at school with the guidance of a coach or something they watched their favorite team play in person or on TV, but sports were neither played nor watched on TV in the country when I was in grade school. We worked after school.
In the minor seminary, we went to school all day Saturday and were required to play sports one afternoon a week. Everybody presumed you knew the rules of the game, whether it be softball, football, volleyball or basketball. We were simply assigned to a team and left to figure it out for ourselves simply by watching others. There were levels. In basketball, I was usually assigned to a D-TEAM, so you can imagine how humiliating that was for a skinny country boy. I won't even mention football! I was a little better at volleyball. I even "helped" win a game one day when the ball came over the net, hit me in the head and went back over and landed in their court when they did not expect it! I did better in sports where two people played, rather than a team, sports like tennis, handball, ping pong and shuffleboard. I even grew to excel in handball. My partner and I won the championship game at a school tournament. I attributed my ability to "get better" to the fact that in a two-man sport I had someone to explain things to me, rather than running around confused by what everyone else was doing.
I learned to lie in the seminary. I lied to get out of reading or speaking in public because I was so bashful. I lied about finances because my family only sent me $5.00 a month to live on. We were all required to own a metal breadbox in the canteen room for "goodies" and "snacks" sent to us from home. I must have set a record in those days. I owned a metal breadbox for six years that never held any "goodies" or "snacks" from home. After coming in from required sports, someone would say "let's get a coke and a snack." I would lie regularly by saying something like, "I'm not thirsty or hungry!" I was ashamed. To that, I was always having to "borrow" pencils, pens and paper because I did not have the money to buy them and was too ashamed to admit it.
You might conclude that I was "damaged" by all this or that I am "looking for sympathy." Actually, I look at it as a very important part of my "formation" as a priest. I have ended up specializing in reaching out to people who are lost, fallen-away, marginalized, left-out, overlooked or hurt by the institutional church. If you don't believe me, just look at my work at the Cathedral of the Assumption between 1983 and 1997, examine my weekly column in The Record, An Encouraging Word, that I wrote weekly for fifteen years and read some of my past posts on this blog!
I even argued with the editor of these stories about whether it was "wise" to tell my story about bullying. I insisted including it because "bullying" usually happens in secret - even in places like minor seminaries! Telling this story might encourage a bullied young boy or girl out there that "there is light at the end of the tunnel!"
