The reason I have no religious education

From before I can remember until the age of 13, I attended the United Methodist Church with my grandmother and later my great grandmother and great aunt. We first attended the church that my parents got married in, at the corner of Mountain and Central Streets in Camden.

This was a classical New England church, made of wood and with a steeple. The following story took place here when I was barely old enough to remember, so some of this story is pieced together with third party observations.

I don't know who made the decision, but at one point it was decided that I should attend Sunday school, which was up a long flight of stairs from the main congregation hall. The first few weeks went without incident. My grandmother walked me to the classroom, I watched bigger boys eat paste, and I tried to interact with the older girls. From what I can remember, I was one of the younger children. I don't remember much going on during these "classes," all I remember is it being what I would imagine daycare was like. 

In my last week in Sunday school, I believe we made Jesus on a stick in a cup puppets. I think they are called peek-a-boo puppets. This is the only lesson I remember from Sunday school.

At the end of this class, for some reason, I was at the end of the kids trudging down the stairs to meet up with their families. I was walking with two girls and there was some sort of closet half way down the stairs. It is perhaps important to note here that when I was small, I was deathly afraid of the dark and of confined spaces. Perhaps the three of us had volunteered to put the puppet supplies away in this closet, I'm really not sure the circumstances. We all entered the closet, and the two girls shut off the lights and closed me in the closet.

As my grandmother told it, I screamed so loudly that the entire congregation assumed that I'd fallen down the staircase and had been badly injured. From here, things get blurry, it seemed like I was locked in the closet for hours, but I assume I was found merely seconds after I started screaming bloody murder. I was crying so hard that I'm not even sure who rescued me from the closet. I never saw those girls or climbed those stairs ever again. The experience was so traumatic that from that point on, I sat in the pews with my grandmother and great grandmother and listened to the weekly sermon.

Just a few short years later, the church was sold and converted to condos and the congregation consolidated with another church, first in their old building (which was not as nice as the one we came from) and then to a new state of the art modern facility that my great uncle helped build.

To this day, more than twenty five years later, that incident haunts and embarrasses me.