From Atheism to Faith in God. Part 2: Childhood

My testimony: From convinced Atheism to joyful fellowship with God
Part 2: My Childhood.

I was born in the early morning of Wednesday, February 19, 1969.

February 1969 was nine months after May 1968, which was a cultural revolution in France. In some ways, I could therefore be called a baby of May 1968. This month of May in France was a month of massive general strikes, with the occupation of universities and factories across France. It brought the entire economy of France to a standstill. Political leaders feared civil war and the national government momentarily ceased to function after President Charles de Gaulle left France for a few hours. The unrest was triggered by a series of student occupation protests against capitalism, consumerism and traditional institutions, values and order. It then spread to factories with the strike of 11 million workers, about 20% of the French population, for two weeks.
It was the largest general strike France ever saw, and the first nationwide wildcat general strike. It was confronted with strength and resolution by university administrators and police. Yet, the strong attempts to quench this national fire failed. The president, general De Gaulle, dissolved in June the National Assembly and called for a new parliamentary elections in June. This crisis manifested the fact that a majority of France perceived De Gaulle as too old, too conservative and too anti-American. A year later, the referendum of April 1969 would be the end of De Gaulle’s presidency and a turning tide in French culture. May 1968 could be pin-pointed as the rejection of firm authority and of decreasing moral landmarks. Two key slogans of this month were: “il est interdit d’interdire” (it is forbidden to forbid), and “jouissez sans entraves” (enjoy without hindrance).
For my parents, this month of strikes and unrest was not on their agenda, and they continued to work hard in order to provide for my father’s two parents, my sister and the new baby I was. I would grow up in a French culture where the consequences of this cultural revolution would spread broadly and deeply, changing morals and society in major ways.

February 19, 1969, was ten months after the birth of my sister, Cécile. (Cécile is a feminine name in France, not like in the English-speaking world). We were very close, and our relationship was similar to the relationship that can exist between twins. We developed in our first 15-20 years in opposite directions. She was very extrovert, I was very introvert. She was very good at learning languages and all things related to expression and communication. I was very inner-focused, becoming very good at mathematics, computing and science in general. It would only be after our 20s that we would each develop more balanced personalities. In the case of my sister, after studies in business she also did a degree in science. On my side, after a degree in science, I would pursue degrees in theology, learning languages and improving significantly my limited skills in communication.

February 19, 1969 was also Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, forty days before Easter. In some ways, my life started a like the period of Lent, in a somber meditativeness, and it took me more than twenty years before experiencing the exhilarating resurrection of Easter and the joy to be alive.


When I was four years old, my parents moved in what became for thirty years our family house, in the town of Yerres, twenty kilometers South-East from Paris. It was a little after the birth of my younger brother, François. In France, most children go to school already at the age of 3. This meant for me that I changed school after the first year. In this new school, there were some kids coming from a rather tough neighborhood, who sadly experienced violence at home and would replicate it at school. The first day at this new school, one tough kid came hard on me, and I discovered the emotions of fear and panic. He would jump on me and call me by names, followed by others. This rough start triggered in me deep fears and paralysis in front of violence. I did not know how to react, how to fight back, and became the target of many humiliations in the coming years. As so many kids in the world, I learned the painful experience of being bullied.

My schoolteacher tried to keep me in the classroom at the breaks, but it would just make things worse after. I shared with my mother, with the limited communication skills I had, but she honestly did not know what to do, since she was working hard as an engineer in computing. My father, a general practitioner, was also working hard. He would leave home before we woke up, return home when we were in bed, and handle paperwork on the week-ends. This means that I did not see much my father for my first nine years, until the time when he chose to end his job as general practitioner that he loved. He then became a doctor for the social security, this job allowing him to spend more time with his family that he loved dearly.

Since neither my schoolteacher, nor my parents knew what to do, I stopped mentioning it. I continued to face this unpleasant situation at school for years, which provoked key changes in my behavior. I became extremely introvert, full of fears when meeting people. Fear would rule in me for years, leading me to be scared in many settings, with the accompanying strong stomach pains and inability to think straight under stress. One of the ripple effects of being bullied was that I hated school, not wanting to do homework in the evenings or week-ends. Decades later, I find this element pretty amazing, having spent more than thirty years of my life in school and having developed a thorough love for studying and teaching others. Another consequence was that I spent most of my time at school day-dreaming, struggling to concentrate. My body was at school but my heart was like a bird trying to fly away. I did not like my life, I did not enjoy life.

At school I wanted to be at home, and at home I wanted to have my extrovert sister leave me alone. This meant that sometimes, after my sister had insisted for a while to play with me, I would burst in an explosion of anger. Many years later, she shared with me that when she would see this kind of anger in my eyes, she would flee and lock herself in her room for protection, she knew I could be dangerous.
In my family, I was seen as a dreamer. This implied faith in things not seen, and that was not part of the family culture. For instance, at about 6 years old I was believing in the father Christmas. When someone in my family would say to me that father Christmas did not exist, I would answer confidently that I saw him on a cloud. One of my uncles, around the time of Christmas, trapped me by surprise in a large bag and pretended to be the ‘père fouettard’ (the whipping father - a kind of opposite of father Christmas), bringing me to the cellar to whip me. This provoked in me such terror and crying that my mother demanded for my uncle to stop this. Yet, I learned my lesson well: faith is dangerous and should be avoided. In these years, my life was not much fun, with not much peace.


Around my twelfth year, two events crystallized my approach to life.
It seemed that my attachment to life was fragile, and this manifested in different ways. I had quite a few bones broken, two times a leg broken when skying in the winter, later an arm broken and a wrist broken. Once, I was riding a bike with my younger brother and a cousin, and as I was trying to check if they were OK, I made a U-turn on the road and was hit by a car. I was told that I flew in the air, and fell on the ground, unconscious. The police came and drew my body on the floor with a white chalk. When my mother arrived, not far from my home, she thought that I was dead. Yet, after a moment I woke up with no brain damage or injuries. I spent the next two days in hospital, to check there was no problem, and did not have a single sequel after this accident. In the following days, I would see from the school bus the chalk drawing on the pavement, like what we can see in crime scenes on TV, realizing I could or should have died then, until the rain washed away the image of what could have happened.

In my twelfth year, the first crystallizing event was related to a stray cat who would come to our house sometimes, and we would give her some milk or food. When she came I would pet her, and share some of my inner world with her. In some ways, this pet was the only living link to the emotions swirling inside of me. Sometimes, I would sing in tears what I felt inside, sometimes I would talk. I did not like people, and wanted to be alone as often as possible. I did not enjoy life. Yet, with this little cat I could let the pains trapped inside of me come out, which would bring me some sense of peace.
One day, I found the cat dead in our front yard, perhaps poisoned by a neighbor who did not want stray cats to roam around. I then cried uncontrollably for two days, I did not know why. My parents did not understand neither. At school, even the principal got concerned by this kid crying the whole day long, and came to try to be kind. Inside of me, it was as if something snapped, as if a tenuous thread that connected me to life was cut. It is like if the song of life was trapped in me as in a prison, and that I had lost the key to open it. For the next twelve years, I would not shed a single tear and did my best to forget about the memories of humiliations.


The second event or set of events of my twelfth year happened in relationship with school and learning. When I entered high school, I still did not want to bring anything from school at home, which means that I did not do my homework. After the first months, the key teacher of my class decided, following the day when I received three fail marks (0 out of 20) for homework not done in her subject, to speak to my parents about having me stop high school and start instead an apprenticeship. My father brought me to an electrician repairing TVs in a small room of his small apartment, probing if I would like to be his apprentice, something that did not appeal to me at all!

I had a very good math teacher, Marsac, who encouraged me and I became the best student of the class. He was a very wise teacher, who would say that when a student did not get it, it was the teacher who should find another way of explaining the concept, instead of repeating in the same way a difficult concept. A very simple yet powerful notion. We had very tough teenagers in our high school, dealing with drugs and once attacking a teacher and wounding him severely with a bike chain just outside the school. Marsac, also a rugby player, was famous in our school for being respected even by the two toughest kids, playing chess with them during exams since they did not want to study. I believe that his example, his encouragements and validation played a key part in my life. It is perhaps why I still love today to encourage kids who struggle with math.

At home, my mother began to check almost every day if I had done my homework or not, sometimes spending hours to help me do it. This proved a tough battle that lasted for years. Yet, since she was very persistent, I began to do my homework. The hardest was when I needed to write something for the subject of French. She felt like she had to painfully pull every single word out of me. Today, I am so grateful for her love and persistence, which were key in allowing me to remain in school and succeed in this challenging environment, opening doors to many blessings in my life.

This year 1981 was the year when a new game, the Rubik’s cube, became widespread in France. Nobody knew how to solve this puzzle and many kids would bring it to school. I decided that I would find a solution, and spend many hours and days working on it. During the vacations of Easter 1981, I finally found a solution on my own. When I returned to school I proudly challenged one of the kids that was popular, telling him that I could solve the cube. He did not believe me and we agreed that if I could do it I could slap him in the face, if I failed he would slap me. Many kids surrounded us with disbelief. I did solve the puzzle, but the slapping did not give me much joy; I felt rather stupid for accepting such a deal. Rapidly, things changed at school. I was still sometimes joked at and very awkward in relationships, but through my budding intellectual capacities I felt a new sense of value and dignity in front of the other children. Even at home, specially when I showed that I could do the last sets of moves to solve the cube behind my back, I felt many in my family were impressed, and this gave me a new sense of worth and esteem.

At that point, my father had changed his job from general practitioner to social security doctor, and had some time to spend with me. It was the beginning of personal computing in France. My father purchased what was then called a pocket computer, a Sharp PC-1500, with basic programming capabilities, and allowed me to use it. I quickly learned, with binary calculations and the basic language, how to make a little train cross the tiny display line. In 1983, I asked him if we could get one of these new personal computers, which he agreed. He purchased a small computer, the Oric 1 from UK, which had the then impressive Random Access Memory of 16 kilobytes (about a million times less than most smartphones in 2016). I became more aware of my capacity to learn on my own, and the impact this could have on the outside world. I learned on my own programming, with a very rudimentary manual. My father learned in parallel to me. I believe that he also had developed from his childhood years the capacity to learn alone. After a few months, I had developed a little game, similar to Pac-Man (a famous game of the period), and my father brought me to the computer shop, where we proposed to sell it. Personal computing was in its infancy, and things were pretty informal, like developing or selling software. My game was too simple, and was not retained to be sold, but I was very proud of my accomplishment. In all this, the support of my father was very important to me, although it took me years to recognize it.

I found out that in the domain of analytical thinking and mathematics I could be a good student, and this encouraged me not to abandon school but to rather fight my way through. Instead of being humiliated, I would impress or even humiliate others through my intellectual capacities. For instance, I would come to my one year older sister and show her how to solve her math problem, letting her feel inadequate and clearly inferior to me in this domain. Today, I am very sorry about these kind of attitudes I had toward some people, doing my best to encourage children who struggle with things like maths.
In some ways, it was like if I was exalting in me the capacities of analysis and despising the inner turmoil of emotions. I would do my best to forget all about the years of humiliations and focus on proving to the outside world that I could succeed. With all this came a growing pride and disrespect for others. I was not a nice guy, I was rather what some would call pejoratively a “nerd,” pushing others down when I could in order to elevate myself.

This period of my life would last about twelve years, before the season that would bring healing and profound joy.