The One About Religion

Not too long ago, Matt asked if I would be interested in going to a Unitarian church. My sudden, emotionally negative reaction to the idea surprised me...I never had anything against Unitarians. But it started me thinking about what I did have against churches in general.

I was a very religious kid, and in some ways (which I'll get to) I am a religious adult. But the religion I knew as a child was always split, and confused. On the one hand was the feeling of simple belief that a God existed, who cared about me, and loved me. I talked to that person all the time, like some kids talk to their imaginary friends, but more secret. I sometimes felt ashamed of that God, because it was so different from the god I was being taught about in Sunday school.

From the age of 10 on, I went to a lot of Sunday school. My dad rediscovered his fundamentalist upbringing, and decided he needed to be the religous head of the household again. So now instead of letting Mom drag us off to any old church every week while he stayed home, ate donuts, smoked cigarettes and read the paper, he went with us. I would have preferred us all staying home, eating donuts and reading the paper, but I felt at least this was slightly more fair.

The churches we went to changed, though, and were places that believed in speaking in tongues, which was at first scary and then just uninteresting to me, and raising your hands when you sang. I didn't mind that so much. I was too young to absorb the sermons, but I did absorb my dad's growing fascination with eschatology, i.e., the book of Revelations and prophecies about the end of the world. Hal Lindsay and others like him convinced my dad that we were just on the cusp of the return of Christ, and we'd better stay saved, or we would be stuck in the Antichrist's hell on earth for seven years, with all its plagues and disasters and political oppression. And then a real, eternal hell after that if you weren't willing to be martyred by refusing the Mark of the Beast. Gripping stuff, especially to a 10 year old. More than a little frightening too. I know now I'm not the first kid to wake on a weekend morning with no-one in the house and no-one outside, and wonder, did the Rapture happen? Did I get left here? (Maybe that's why Home Alone was never that funny to me.)

Anyway, the message I was being taught was that God, far from being the understanding friend whom I talked to all the time, was mad at us, or at least disappointed. Every day we sinned, and we couldn't help it, but it was still our fault somehow. God had had to send his son because we were so bad, and the only thing that would wipe out our badness was a blood sacrifice of a perfect man. If we didn't believe in this sacrifice and that we needed it, or if we believed and then stopped believing, we would go to hell. Until the day we died, we were all in danger of that. Salvation was never quite certain. And now we had a clock hanging over our heads as well, the possibility of the Rapture and the Tribulation, coming even before our deaths.

I was an obedient kid, and I liked making my Dad happy. I did my best, for a long time, to believe that the world worked this way. I felt guilty for the way I enjoyed non-Christian music and the hatred I felt for Amy Grant. I believed that heavy metal records had backward masking that enticed kids into Satanism. I believed that I shouldn't feel discomfort when my church asked me to pass out pamphlets (not Jack Chick ones, but still) to strangers and "witness" to my non-fundamentalist friends, whose Methodism or Catholicism probably wouldn't save them from hell. I tried to repress my indignation while being told repeatedly that men were the "natural" heads of the household, that women didn't belong in leadership positions in church (and by implication, anywhere else), that I would be happiest marrying a man who would make all the final decisions for both of us. I tried, I really tried. I lost friends over it. I threw away books and records that I felt might be sinful. I obeyed my Dad when he forbade me to play Dungeons and Dragons, though it looked incredibly fun.

But little cracks kept appearing in the facade. I was becoming a teenager, and "Because I said so" was becoming less and less acceptable as a reason for not doing something. I had to argue with my Dad when he was watching a Jimmy Swaggart TV show railing against the evils of rock and roll. Swaggert wasn't just talking about regular rock and roll, either, but Christian musicians playing rock and roll "beats" which were somehow inherently sinful. "But isn't an electric guitar just an instrument, like a piano?" I asked. "How can it be evil...wouldn't it depend on what you did with it?" My dad grumbled some answer that basically boiled down to, "Well, he's got a point, that kind of music can lead to bad thoughts," or something like that. I wasn't convinced.

Another argument I had with my dad was about fiction, I think, about using your imagination. He didn't really approve of any of my fantasy reading choices, Tolkien or Anne McCaffrey, or others. Their covers looked suspiciously "demonic." "But the authors aren't telling me to believe in real magic," I maintained. "It's just imagination. It's just a story. Imagination isn't bad!"

"Yes it is!" he said, irritated, and I think that was the beginning of the end for me. I'd been pushed too far. I refused to believe that fairy tales, fantasy novels, any form of imagination was suspect, demonic, or inherently evil and would lead me to torturing cats in the name of Satan.

I was in high school, then, and I didn't know that my Dad wasn't going to be around in a few years. We just stopped talking about art, or literature, or politics. I knew what I thought, and I knew what he thought, and the arguments didn't seem worth it. When he died, those things were still unresolved, but he had mellowed a bit. We ended up just not having enough time to have those types of discussions anymore.

I tried to keep up the Christian pretense in college, but couldn't muster the enthusiasm anymore. College was teaching me the strength and potential of my own brain, and I wasn't willing to be lectured to by guys who never read anything but Bible commentaries and Reader's Digest. I didn't choose the time-honored Girls Gone Wild partying route, either, though. I could tell that wasn't any better. So I lived a weird sort of unreligious, monkish existence.

But that other God that I'd had to push away, the person I talked to, the one who cared, survived somehow. I talked to them more now, actually. Life was still hard. I still prayed, probably more honestly than in church, and listened for answers. When my dad died junior year, it was God I argued with, yelled at, talked to, cried in front of. My friends were there and my family, and I loved them, but God was there for me in the middle of the night when I didn't want to have to explain my feelings or be polite in my grief. And I survived it, and got through, and tried to pay attention to what that kind of pain could teach me. And I believe that I was helped.

The world remains a mysterious place to me. I see the people around me, and I see two things; the familiar everyday faces, and every now and then, a strange kind of beauty they are unaware of, when they are especially happy or caught up in something. The world is the same way; boring and same and familiar. And unexpectedly, beautiful at the strangest times and places, for no reason. This beauty is like a secret, hidden in plain sight, and I can't help feeling that it is intentional, a gift. A clue.

Science only deepens the mystery as it tries to explain it; go past the Newtonian universe and you are plunged into extra dimensions, string theory, chaos that still follows its own internal logic, dark matter, and infinity. When I think of a God-made Reality, I don't picture an Aristotelian universe of perfect symmetry. I think of a place that is stranger and more interesting and just weirder than anything humans could have come up with, that defies our rules while it tempts us to make new ones, so we can discard them, too. I think we were made so we could do just that.

I don't know what we should do with the old religions, and I have no interest in making new ones. I don't have any use for them. I talk to God and I listen for answers; sometimes they come in a way I understand, sometimes they don't . I try to follow my conscience, which can require a lot of deciphering, and making mistakes, prayer, and agonizing. But I don't need religion to do any of those--just a desire to not stop until I find the best thing to do. There's no trick, no mantra, no ceremonies. There's just being willing to try, which is hard enough for anyone.

And I fail, sometimes, listen to the wrong part of my brain, the part that's afraid, or lazy. But I don't dwell on it, once I've done all I could to fix it. I move on.

I don't know what happens when I die. Does it matter? I don't think it does, anymore. I only have this bit of life that I can know anything about, and it's hard enough. It demands all my attention and all my energy. I don't believe in Hell, because I don't believe in a God petty enough to create eternal punishment. Maybe none of us survive death. Maybe some do, but the ones who used their time on earth to hurt others just don't exist anymore. Maybe we exist awhile, then are dissolved. None of that matters. If a God exists, it's in their hands.

We each only get to see a little bit of the truth of all that there is. What's good about that is that everyone's experience is absolutely unique; that there is some truth in everyone's life that exists nowhere else. If we can manage to share some of it with each other, then we haven't wasted ours. And to me, that's enough.