against the rules

When I was a kid, my family moved around a bit. Not like every year we’d move, but from the time I was born until I graduated high school I think we lived in 5 different cities. I’ve often thought that was the reason why I still tend to move around a bit and don’t have any roots anywhere I’ve been.

Well, turns out that it’s even more true than I’d remembered. The reason that we moved was my parents’ job. The worked for the Salvation Army.

Many people don’t know that the Salvation Army is a church. It is its own separate church—a fairly standard Protestant Christian denomination—and not a part of some other church. They just have a strong emphasis on actually helping people in need, and they use military terminology (the idea being the church is at war against sin and Satan). So, Salvation Army officers (Lieutenants, Captains, Majors, Colonels…there’s one General at a time: “General” = “Pope”) are, in fact, ordained ministers.

My parents were officers, so from time to time we’d be re-assigned to some different city, and off we’d go.

Well, I spent the past several days at my parents’ house, and for some reason we ended up talking about moving when I was a kid. My mom brought up something that seemed vaguely familiar, like maybe my parents had mentioned it once when I was a kid. It’s that when the Salvation Army sent them to a new assignment, it was against the rules for them to maintain contact with the people from the previous assignment. In other words, we were not allowed to maintain friendships. Of course, we might see some of those people at summer church camp or other regional church gatherings, but officially, my parents weren’t supposed to actively keep in touch.

Apparently that rule is no longer in effect. I think the reason for it having been a rule was that the Salvation Army wanted to discourage officers from being involved at the local level in a city where they were no longer assigned; and the local members wouldn’t feel they could go complain or gossip about “the new guy” to the former boss. I’m sure it was a well-intentioned rule, but, at least for me, it had the effect of separating me from people in a very real way. I don’t know how actively my parents discouraged us kids from contacting old friends, but I definitely picked up on and obeyed “the rules”.

So I never learned how to be part of a community long-term. When my family was re-assigned, we left the place, but we left the people too. The thing is, I still do that. I move around a lot. In the past ten years, I’ve probably lived more than 20 different places. And when I leave someplace, often my brain just sort of let’s things go. So even though I’ve sometimes returned to the same city, during the time I’ve been gone, I often have not maintained much contact with people there. So I end up with a lot of acquaintances, but not many actual friends. 

Knowing that there was a rule restricting my parents from maintain friendships and that rule filtered down to me, emphasizing my own tendency toward isolation, is a little bit of an “Ah-ha!” moment. It makes a certain amount of sense. But it also makes me angry. Yet another way that growing up in church with preacher-parents helped to mess me up. 

Institutions and their damn rules. Ug.