What a lovely day. I’m so glad you shared it, angst and all. It reminds me of the two trips Lenny and I took together to Paris, once staying for over a week. Did you ever feed the sparrows by hand outside Notre Dame? We were delighted to discover that they would eat bread crumbs right from our outstretched palms .

I can empathize with Lee’s fear of Satan and judgement. That fear was inculcated in me as a boy, and even though I stopped believing in any kind of God or the supernatural when I was 16, I continued to have nightmares about Satan well into my adulthood. And panic attacks. Sometimes if I were alone, especially in a dark room, I would panic over the idea that demons or Satan were lurking and coming for me. I would have to run out and find people to be around, and even then my breathing and heart rates took a long time to come down.

I had no way to explain what I was experiencing. I did not believe I was in real danger. I did not believe in Satan. But I panicked anyway. To a casual observer, it would probably just look like I was a grown-up afraid of the dark.

Nothing like this has troubled me in a couple decades, but such is the power of early religious experiences.

I thought about this once a few years ago when a friend of mine from Cameroon asked me not to talk about witchcraft. I wasn’t taking him seriously, because I knew he didn’t believe in such things even though his fear was based in his religious traditions. Then I remembered my panic attacks and understood why he wanted to change the subject.