After meeting other friendly youths, I somehow found myself enticed and then enclosed by the friendly conversation about spirituality and God. They spoke of all Gods being one, and led me to a classroom where an older man, maybe in his 30s, taught a class of one, me, the evidence supporting the coming of Christ by an infallible timeline.
I sat for a good ten or fifteen minutes until the sudden thought struck through the morass of sweet, thick confusion my mind became, like drowning in syrup: “Holy shit, I think I am being indoctrinated.”
Then a panic swept over me. How was I to leave this uncomfortable scene without a complete bolting for the door. “Could I just get up and walk out while he spoke?” I did not think I could. These people were not rude, but clearly they were trying to enfold me.
I did manage finally to politely but insistently–and it took insistence–tell them I needed to leave. They were followers of Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church, informally his followers known as Moonies. One of my lonely teen claims to fame is having been kidnapped–almost–by the Moonies on my 17th birthday.
credit: Wikipedia
In the gaze of the other 