Leaving the Quiet Room Quotes

“To your left is “The Quiet Room.” It told me a lot about Christianity. The Quiet Room is a glass-encased room where parents are asked to take their noisy children. Yes, my mother took me and my sister in there on a few occasions. It’s just a section of pews in the back of the church that are walled off with glass. It’s a noisy place on a Sunday morning. The room’s mere existence reveals much about Christianity. There’s no such place in a public library or a museum. No architect of a public library or museum specifically designed a room where unruly children are to be taken. If a kid doesn’t want to behave or even be in a library or museum that kid shouldn’t have to be and should be removed. Whatever’s going on in there just isn’t that vital. But this particular church was different. Church itself was different. Inside the Quiet Room was an intercom speaker that piped in everything that was being said at the altar. As I grew older, I began to wonder why I was separated from the rest of the congregation. Was there something wrong with me? I could see it all through the glass, but felt like we kids were seen as a problem. We were a problem in the society of the church that had to be segregated, but not separated from the intrinsic requirement of the mass. I thought to myself, “Why don’t we just go home?” Nope, not until mass is done.”
― Joe Zamecki, Leaving the Quiet Room: My Rise from Religious Slavery to Atheism