First Sunday Speakers

by Sam Vachon

April, 2004

Let me start by saying I grew up in a large religious family in a small town here in New Hampshire. I am one of 9 children; my Mother was very faithful to her church and beliefs. During her life she was a Sunday school teacher for 30 consecutive years and assistant treasurer for 11 in her church. The church we attended every Sunday was the Calvary Bible Church. Lets just say the bible was used every Sunday there and there was no interpretation, it said what it said and that was the word of God according to the minister. From this I learned that God would punish me for all the things I did wrong and even if no one saw me do it God would know.

So I attended church and Sunday school faithfully, somewhere in my stuff there are 8 perfect attendance pins for each year I didn’t miss a Sunday. The funny thing was that I could quote the bible, name all the books but deep down inside did not believe all that it said. That whole heaven and hell concept just did not make sense. And if God did everything, had his hand upon it what was I here for. Even with those doubts I continued to attend and was very active in the church.

At the age of 18 I became the youth director in the church and the youngest person ever to serve on the board of directors at the church. During the 2 years I was youth director the group grew from 5 or 6 attending each week to 30 plus each week. We were very active but I did not center the meetings around anything biblical, it was topics the kids wanted to talk about and subjects they had an interest in. The church leaders recognized me for all my hard work and the minister stated on more than one occasion that “God had his hand on me and was working his will through me”. He could not have been more wrong! You see the kids were not attending to learn more about God and the bible. They came because it was a place where they could talk about their thoughts and questions about God and I was open to talk about them. And for me it was a place to rebel against the teachings of the church and to question the bible. During this time a few parents complained about the topics discussed at the group, but I think the church leaders were just happy that someone was willing to do this so they didn’t say much to me.

I truly enjoyed working with these teens and learning from them. But at this same time I was coming to terms with who I was, and I knew how the church felt about being gay. The bible says it is against God’s will and you will burn in hell for being with another man. The guilt I felt about my feelings was incredible. I did not know what to do so I continued to see men and feel guilty every time I did. Also I questioned why God would make me this way if it were against his will! Because God created everything, remember.

Then one day a member of the youth group, a young man named Nate came to me and told me about the feelings he was having about other boys and asked me what he could do to stop it. I knew just what he was talking about and I knew that if I was not honest with him he would be in the same position I was in, going through life as a hypocrite. It was in that moment I knew I had to be true to me. So I told him it was okay to have the feelings he was having, and there were many other people in the world that felt the same way. I don’t know if he felt any better after our conversation but I know I did.

Well to make a long story short let’s just say Nate went home and decided to share this conversation with his parents. Then the fires of hell came up out of the ground, as they would say in that church. The minister called me to his office, as he was pounding his bible and telling me that God would punish me for the blasphemy I was telling. I knew the jig was up, I knew that I did not believe in the God of this religion and I knew for sure that the bible was truly nothing more than a book. I resigned from the board and as youth director for the church. This was a big scandal for this little church; I was the talk of the place.

So after leaving that church I decided to join a new religion, the church of material stuff. Life became all about making money, buying the bigger house, the nicer car. The creed in this religion was “if you can’t hide it decorate it”, so if you feel empty inside or feel that something is missing in your life buy yourself something that makes you feel good. That 15 years of my life were all about me, what would make me feel good. There was no god, no higher being religion was for weak people who could not take responsibility for themselves and needed someone to blame for their problems.

Then at the age of 35 my life fell apart, all the material things I had worked so hard to have were gone. On top of this the larger issue was that I felt totally empty inside, there was a void inside me and I needed to find a way to fill it in order to have any peace and serenity in my life. I had to find a spiritual way to fill this void.

Right around this time a new friend in my life came to me and asked me if I would be interested in joining a new spirituality group he was forming with some other guys. In this group we would read and talk about how other people find their spiritual path in life. So I joined and we explored Native American spirituality, pagans and Wiccans, Buddhists, the supernatural. We read books by the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra and many on how gay men find spirituality. With this group of guys I found peace with the God of my understanding and my spiritual path. It is not one belief that works for me but a combination of many, taking the best from all of them and patching together to form what feels right for me.

So how did I get to this church, well I looked around for a place like this group I had been attending but on a larger scale. A place where I could believe what I believed and the person next to me could believe what they believed. I did not want a place that was going to tell me how I should walk my path of spirituality. After some research I got up one Sunday morning back in 1999 and came here. It seemed like a nice place, a good looking building, people were nice but not pushy. Marcel was an interesting speaker and you served coffee after church. So this place might be all right. So I kept coming, not sure if this was the church for me or not. Then one Sunday when I was looking through the bulletin the quote in the thought to ponder at the beginning spoke to me. It was a quote from an unknown slave; I ain’t what I wanna be, I ain’t what I’m gonna be, but oh Lord, I ain’t what I used to be. This was how I felt, and this is the place I belong.

I hung around here for about year and decided in December of 2000 to join the church and make it my spiritual home.

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