Theology II

When I was a junior in high school I dropped out of classes second semester at Omaha Central High School. I developed my own academic discipline as the McCoy homeschool.

I had read in a book about different ways to homeschool a child and the options that I came across included unschooling.

This is a discipline of not having assignments for the child but rather allowing them to pursue their own education at their own pace in an environment that provide the resources to learn.

Other disciplines focused on classical education, eclectic studies and the general “buy your own textbook curriculum” sort that most homeschool families used including my own.

When I dropped out from Central high school I had become as popular as I would ever be.

In the span of a year of going to school there I had become president of the ultimate frisbee club instead of playing basketball in Coach Eric Behrens state title winning program that I had gone to training camps for since I was old enough to attend.

My popularity came naturally since I was friends with the most popular kids in school from attending Dundee Presbyterian church where I was a natural charismatic personality.

Living in Dundee at the time of my drop out put me in the dead center of the intellectual community that was left in Omaha.

I would read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” at Blue Line Coffee shop, F Scott Fitzerald’s “This Side of Paradise” in a tree at Memorial Park and buy books like “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs and The Anti-Federalist from Jackson Street booksellers downtown and Pageturners bookstore down the street. 

In my room I had a type writer, a record player, a desk, a bookshelf and a bike. I worked at Homer’s record store and liked to go to music concerts at Slowdown, Sokol auditorium and underground and the Waiting Room including Wolf Parade, Broken Social Scene, The Faint, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, The Black Lips, Capgun Coup, Bear Country, Tapes n’ Tapes, Aqueduct and Cold War Kids. 

I would go to Film Streams and watch Joy Division’s “Control”, a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, another about Chet Baker.

I would have friends over and we would talk about art and have impromptu jam sessions.

Camping and biking were hobbies of mine.

This was my education and it was an elegant one.

Then it hit me that I would need to produce something from this experiment at a crucial moment of my social development so I published a zine with my friends creations and my design. 

It was called Bad Taste.

Looking back and probably knowing at the time subconsciously that my dropping out and freewheelin’ to create a shrine of hipster knowledge and a record collection that included Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’, Rolling Stone’s Between the Buttons and the Flaming Lips “This is It” was actually a power move in the long term designed to attract myself and others to destruction.

I returned to Central my senior year in the second semester with McCoy homeschool credits in hand and taking classes from zero hour to ninth with an extra couple of early summer courses so that I could graduate in the eyes of my peers.

My charisma flew out the window my senior year. My quest for truth through studying existential classics on my own led me to realise that I would need a high school degree from an establishment in order to survive in society. My greatest strengths as a person is my ability to make people admire me and inspire myself. Without a high school degree it would be hard for people to admire me since I rely on my creative intelligence and if I didn’t have a high school degree it would mean that my inspiration was an idealised fraud. My senior year I became all business for my own journey to the truth and to get my degree.

When I went back I had two AP classes that actually allowed me to continue my classical education the way I had been on my own. In AP English I was in a group that read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. This book really shook me and hit me in a deep place. In AP World History I read and made an essay on the book, “Aristotle’s Children.”

I got my degree by the hair on my teeth. In my pursuit of truth I had put my faith on the rocks. This journey was essentially my introduction to reason. The cold, hard kind that enabled the Union army to beat the Confederates. After I graduated I realised that my faith in Jesus Christ was who I was and that without pursuing my faith I would not get far with truth.

My integration of my new mode of reason and a recommitment to my Christian faith led me to finding Reason with a capital R. I came across this naturally but found that it was an idea that Thomas Aquinas established to bring the Catholic Church and Europe out of the Dark Ages by uniting the philosophy of reason through the senses of Aristotle and the Catholic Faith.