In Defense of Organized Religion

At 6 years old, she went to church every Sunday, with her mom, her two little sisters.  Dad didn’t always go.  Mom’s look told the kids she would brook no discussion about this; regardless of what Dad did, they were going.  And she went; to Sunday school first, to do crafts and listen to adults with kind voices, absorbing little of the content but most of the intent.  Then to church, for about ten minutes, enough time to sing a hymn and wiggle around uncomfortably in the pew, before kid’s time and playing in the nursery.  After, the family always got donuts.

At 12 years old, she went to church every Sunday with her mom, her three little sisters and her brother, and sometimes Dad.  It was a small church on a military base, and it held two services, one for Catholics and one for non-Catholics.  They went to the non-Catholic one, and she wore an acolyte’s white robe and lit the candles with a long brass stick.  She sat through the whole service at the front in a carved wooden chair, though she still wiggled, in full view of the congregation and her stony-faced mother who whispered loudly “Sit.  Still.”  One warm Sunday when her youngest sister was one year old, they were all five baptized together at the front of the church.  The preacher made a cross with water on her forehead, and she scratched the spot.

When she was 15 years old, her Dad began going to church all the time, and they all went for most of the day.  First the morning service, then Sunday school, then the late morning service.  After the second service was handbell practice, choir practice and youth group.  Church became her musical education, her social calendar.  She did choir tour every summer, and thrilled when she sang her solo for the homeless people at the mission in downtown Oakland, convinced she was bringing them something of value.  Unaware at the time when one unzipped his fly in the back row and was quickly covered with blankets and firmly marched outside.  Besides choir tour she went to retreats, big and small.  The big ones were in convention centers and had huge hanging tv screens and soul-stirring music and altar calls.  She cried and closed her eyes and held her hands up when everyone sang, and felt the surrender, the relief, the community.  She felt the Holy Spirit.  She could never bring herself to run up the aisle and fling herself down at the feet of the speaker, though she envied the others who did, their abandon, their re-birth.  The small retreats were less stirring but more fun – just the youth group and leaders, sometimes in cabins, sometimes in church folks’ homes.  They played flag football and took hikes and did devotionals.  They sat cross-legged on the floor and the adult leaders went round the circle and told everyone nice things about each of them.  She’s never forgotten the wonderful things said about her when she was a senior in high school, and the tears they all cried then.

A few days before her eighteenth birthday she went off to a small church-affiliated college in the heart of America.  She put up some old posters with Bible verses around her bed and read her Bible every night.  She walked to the small church in town and taught Sunday school to the two-year olds.  She took Theology and the Environment, and The Bible as Literature, and Twentieth Century Women Writers – she studied Sylvia Plath and Jamaica Kincaid and Virginia Woolf.  She read “Gaia and God” and “A Room of One’s Own.”  She kept teaching Sunday school to the little kids, but started teaching them more about loving their neighbors and less about Jesus the Risen Lord.  She decided to major in theatre and in classical studies, and read stories about Roman gods by Ovid and became friends with actors, some of whom were gay.  She began to see the Christian religion as one of many in the world, and understand its similarity to other religions, ones she’d once dismissed as foolish, pre-modern.  She began to despise her former self, the blind obedience, the uneducated slathering worship of a god right out of a ridiculous Ovidian storyline.  She ducked her head low when walking past groups of people singing Christian songs, saying prayers, always with their eyes closed and looking foolish and self righteous.  She said the words “Jesus Christ” now with a smirk, or as a curse.

At 21 she was finished with college, and traveled the world, leaving her Bible in a box in her parents’ garage.  She remembered reading in it that women were to be deferent, lesser.  They were to obey their husbands and fathers, and not one was welcomed into discipleship with Jesus.  God was a Father, not a Mother.  Jesus was a Son, not a Daughter.  People who were gay were deviant, openly sinning, smote down by an angry God.  Parables were nonsensical.  She trotted out the usual arguments – about religious wars, religious judgment, the subjugation of nature and of women.  She felt certain, and unfettered, and clear-headed.

In her twenties she began to feel un-whole.

She began looking for her spirituality, for a belief system she could embrace.  She skimmed through Zen Buddhism, looked over Judaism, flirted with being a Quaker. On the odd Sunday when she went to church, she felt like a child again, a good feeling and a bad one.  She didn’t see much war, or judgment, or active subjugation in the small congregations of worshipers – just some nice people, taking up money for people in trouble, and telling each other to be kind.  She once again envied the re-born, and also atheists – for their assurance, their whole conclusions, their commitment.  She began to try to cobble together a faith.

She still won’t profess a commitment to Jesus Christ because that would be a lie.  She couldn’t say something like that with a full heart.  But she wants to say something.  Thinking of the children she hopes one day to bear, she wonders what she could, in good faith, teach them, knowing that she can’t in good faith teach them nothing.

The collective mind of humankind has always found something to celebrate in the spring of the year.  Christianity’s Easter observances are mingled with pagan fertility traditions.  Instead of finding that to be hypocrisy, as she would have years ago – now she sees tapestry.  She sees her pre-Christian ancestors, her devout mother, her quietly and firmly Christian husband, her unborn children all stretching their hands out to her through a space-less, time-less void, closing their eyes to the terrible black and stretching their longing towards her, and something to bind themselves to her.  She sees the fear of death and the unknown, and the balm of believing that life and death are governed by a benevolent divinity infused with Love and care, a parent.  She sees the softened and peaceful face of the devout in prayer.  She sees value in her twenty odd years of faith, but also in her ten or so years of faithlessness.  She sees the limitations of organized religion.  She sees the limits of life without it.

She wonders what is next.