Some of life’s most important lessons are learned in church—but for a budding music fanatic with unconventional tastes, it was in the church’s library where she found both her darkest temptations and brightest inspirations.

Sometimes, you learn the most life-changing things in the most unlikely places. In my case, it was the church library.

I grew up in a devout Protestant household, but was sent to a Catholic all-girls school run by nuns. You could say I got the worst of both worlds. Aside from getting over the confusion of Catholic versus Protestant (we have the same God, so why are we fighting?) and finally picking which side I wanted to be on (Protestant ministers can marry, married couples are allowed to use contraceptives, plus—we confess straight to God), I realized the real trouble I was in: Neither side endorsed what you would call good music. Even worse, both sides, at their most fervent, condemned non-Christian music as the work of the devil.

This was just after the death of Heavy Metal. Grunge had just come into the scene, with Kurt, Dave, and Chris donning plaid flannel shirts and playing music that killed a whole genre. Everyone was still up in arms about how “rock music” was evil. I remember people coming to my school to give talks on backmasking. You know, where you spin a record counterclockwise to hear “hidden” messages like “Worship Satan”—designed to make teenage listeners subconsciously disobey the will of God. I also remember a pastor at our church giving us a Sunday School sermon about the evils of secular (read: non-gospel) music and the artists who made them. He even had a video that chronicled all the evil men and women who made noise that was not joyful to the Lord. The video listed the names of a bunch of artists like, oh, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, KISS, and so on, lovingly chronicling their rise to stardom, the (evil) influence their music had, and all the evil things that the world was going through because of it. While my churchmates were turned off by stories of men wearing makeup, of people biting the heads off live bats on stage, of women who dressed like men, I found myself being drawn to them.

Now here’s the thing about those anti-rock videos: They tell you why you have to stay away from the music, but they don’t let you know what it sounds like. Now how would I know what kind of music to avoid if I didn’t know what it sounded like? So I approached the pastor and asked him how I could learn more about this kind of music, you know, so I could avoid it in the future. This is where the church library came in.

The church I went to during high school had a tiny library filled with, well, books. You could say it was progressive for its time because, aside from the prerequisite Bibles and religious textbooks, it had some pretty interesting reading material in it as well, like C.S. Lewis’ stuff (several versions of The Screwtape Letters, for instance), religious comics whose main characters were a bunch of religious hippies who traveled everywhere in a VW Combi and dissed the Catholic Church and whose adventures could seriously warp a young child’s mind, books on everything evil, and, of course, books that told you how evil rock music was.

There were dissertations on the evil found within the rock beat, dissections of pop and rock lyrics where the Eagles’ “Hotel California” (which, verse for verse, talks about the Church of Satan) and even the theme song of Ghost (a song that encouraged listeners to get “frisky”) weren’t spared, as well as breakdowns of musicians’ dangerous philosophies, like the meaning behind The Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road album cover. There was even a book that explained why all rock and some pop musicians, from AC/DC to ZZ Top and Annie Lennox to Wham, were on surefire roads to hell. Even the comics had stories about how some white Christian missionaries went to Africa and were treated to a debauched heathen ritual complete with pagan dancing and a music with a sinister beat. The music so affected the missionaries that they got sick and had to be sent back to America, except that when they got back home, they turned on the local radio and heard that same demonic beat, set to what was now known as rock music. It was in books like these where I learned the Who’s Who of the music industry.

I learned that k.d. Lang was evil because she wore men’s clothes and thus blurred gender boundaries. I also learned that she had a voice that was so strong, beautiful, and expressive, it could make angels drop from the sky. I learned that Metallica was probably going to hell for their questionable lyrics and dark instrumentation, but I also found that their songs spoke to a side of me that none of the music my friends listened to ever could. Anthrax was probably destroying my brain with songs about automobile accidents, but all I knew was that whenever I studied with their CD playing in the background, I got high grades in Chinese. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a rock chick in any way. I liked everything from Enya to Take That, Billy Joel to John Denver, and at my weakest, some David Pomeranz—which I will never be able to live down. Needless to say, this odd mix didn’t sit well with my schoolmates.

My unconventional tastes in music got me in trouble with a lot of my friends. Most of them made fun of me for liking “weird” music. They couldn’t understand why I preferred “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” over “It Might be You,” or why I wanted to borrow their father’s Beatles and opera CDs because, well, they were old people songs. Others didn’t quite get how I could purchase The Dead Milkmen, The Chieftains, and The New Kids on the Block in one go. There was only one girl in my entire batch who understood my interest, and she fueled it more by lending me tapes of classic acts like Poison and telling me I wasn’t weird. We are still friends today.

But in standing up for what I liked to listen to, I was standing up for myself and who I was. Not an easy feat in high school. Of course, I didn’t know what I was doing until after writing that last sentence, actually. While defending your taste against your peers is a feat in itself, it’s another thing to defend it against authority figures.

By this time, the pastor who had introduced me to the wonders of the church library had caught on that I was, er, applying my readings to real life a little bit too enthusiastically. So he set about trying to get me on the right path. And it worked, for a while. To make a long story short, I ended up giving him all my books and tapes of things that would make me go to hell. Out went Nirvana. Out went Metallica. I threw away my Bush, too, but I later bought a new one. I was wracked with guilt for liking the devil’s music, and was glad that I had seen the light just in time before the Second Coming. But throughout all this, I still visited the church library, hoping they had acquired some new books about brilliant, unique, fearless people that I could read about.

After a while, the devil’s music scare died down. Partly due to the death of Metal and partly because we Filipinos have a tendency to forget things and move on to the latest fad. (I think by that time, it was Marimar, which I didn’t get into—thank goodness.) I found myself drawn to music once again, this time to artists like Oasis, Blur, and Garbage. Thankfully, these artists were so new they weren’t listed in the books in the church library. Or maybe the pastor had lost interest and had found other things to cast fire and brimstone on.

You may laugh at me, but it took a long time of soul-searching before I allowed myself to listen to the “devil’s music” again. Now, I listen to something because I like the sound of it, and I won’t let anyone tell me otherwise.

Reading about those artists in the church library helped me find their music, and later, find myself. They helped me appreciate a broader range of styles other than the bubble gum pop played on the radio that all teenage girls seem to gravitate to. In a sense, those books introduced me to music journalism, teaching me to break down what makes a sound good or bad, instructing me on what makes a musician’s profile interesting. It’s opened me up to a wide range of creativity, a different universe of imagery, and affirmed my belief that there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t think that “It Might Be You” is a classic.

So, to the people who stocked the church library, and to all the people who told me not to listen to rock music, I have only one thing to say to you, and that’s: Thanks.