Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty

alone.
    To be honest, I’d already been on quite a ride. Because my parents were both ministers, my siblings and I had to be doubly perfect. We attended church twice on Sunday, in the morning to hear my father’s sermon and in the evening to listen to my mother’s. We also had to go to another service midweek and be star students in Sunday school, which was taught by Mom. Every morning we did devotions before breakfast, and at night we often memorized passages from the Bible.
    Mom and Dad met while studying for the ministry at a Bible college in Winnipeg. They had taken different paths to get there. My father, Charles, was a tall, handsome man with curly hair, dark eyes, and a quiet, understated demeanor. Our Tory ancestors had picked the wrong side in the American Revolution and after the war moved to Ontario, where they received a land grant from King George III that became the Jackson family farm. My dad always thought he would go to college, but after he failed the qualifying exams—in large part because of ill health—he left school in eighth grade and worked the farm. Along the way he also spent some time as a lumberjack in Hudson Bay. Then one day, while milking cows in the barn, he suddenly got the call to join the ministry.
    My mother, Elisabeth, was a striking, charismatic woman, with crystal blue eyes, blond hair, and strong Germanic features. She grew up in Wolf Point, Montana, where Grandfather Funk had moved the family after World War I to avoid strong anti-German sentiment in Canada. All of her siblings were valedictorians in high school, but Mom missed out by two tenths of a point because she had to skip six weeks of school to work on the fall harvest. Later she was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse when she attended a Pentecostal revival meeting and was swept away. By her early thirties, Mom had established herself as a traveling preacher in the small towns of eastern Montana.
    My father was a widower when they started dating. His first wife had died a few years earlier while pregnant with their second child. (Their first child was my half sister, Joan.) My parents were drawn together more by a profound spiritual connection than by a romantic one. They were both captivated by the Pentecostal movement, which had spread quickly in rural areas during the 1920s and 1930s, and its fundamental idea that one could find salvation by connecting directly with the Holy Spirit. They were also taken by the prophecy in the Book of Revelations about the second coming of Christ and talked about how important it was to prepare spiritually for His arrival because it might come at any moment. Their deepest fear was not being right with God. “If you died today,” my mother often asked, “would you meet your maker in heaven?” That was the big issue in our house.
    My parents also strongly abided by St. Paul’s teachings about separating yourself from materialistic society by being
in
this world but not
of
it. We weren’t allowed to watch TV or movies or read comic books or go to dances—or even socialize with our school friends at the local canteen. Joan wasn’t allowed to wear shorts or a swimsuit, and my brothers and I wore white shirts everywhere, except when we were playing sports. When I asked Joe recently what scared him as a child, he said being laughed at in school when he made mistakes. The other kids teased us relentlessly, calling us “holy rollers” and making fun of what appeared to them to be a strange, antiquated way of life.
    When I was about eleven, my mother told me it was time for me to “seek the infilling of the Holy Spirit.” My brothers and sister had already been “baptized” in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. This was an important aspect of the Pentecostal faith. For years I’d watched other people go through this ritual, but it was never something I wanted to experience myself. But my parents really wanted me to do it, and they prayed with me every Sunday night after services,