Mom, are you religious? I wish I was religious. I think it would make life so much easier.
What are your thoughts?
There is no simple answer to this question, so let’s start at the beginning.
I was not only religious growing up, but I clung to it like a person might cling to a piece of driftwood in the middle of an open ocean. I was raised to be God-fearing and internalized such messages as, “God is always watching.” “If you think too much about yourself, God won’t like that.” While we sang songs about God loving everybody, I felt like God’s wrath was always right around the corner.
Now, I’m not going to go so far as to say that I was overtly taught these messages, because I would never know if I actually was or if I wasn’t. All I know is that I strongly internalized them. I was to fear God and if I feared him enough, then maybe he would grant me some goodness.
He would be good to me if I was good to him.
I tried so desperately to be good. But I kept fucking things up. I would slip up and think about myself or pray for something related to me or have premarital sex or do any number of things that God didn’t like (depending on whom you asked). When I slipped and prayed for something for myself, I knew that God didn’t like that, so of course I wouldn’t get it. What had I been thinking. So I saw God as a wrathful parent, more interested in punishing than in loving.
When I left my parents’ home and ventured off into the world, I carried with me a lot of questions. But I was one of those rare college students that continued attending church every single Sunday even when living in the dorms. I didn’t do anything cool like join Young Life, but I attended church services, even finding a lone friend who wanted to do this with me.
But I can see now that this was mostly superstition, not faith. I was terrified of losing my connection with God. I was terrified of losing my grip on my driftwood. I was scared to be out in the middle of the vast ocean with nothing to hold onto.
Some years later, after I was married to my first husband, it suddenly occurred to me that I needed to know how we were going to raise our kids. You see, he was Catholic and I was Presbyterian, but my future kids would need consistency! Frantically, I asked my husband if he would be willing to talk about this with me, so that we could come up with some sort of an agreement. It would turn out that we were still many years away from having our first daughter, so we had time, but I was urgent. I suggested meeting with pastors and priests so that we could come up with some sort of a decision that would make sense for both of us.
He said no.
He informed me that he would remain Catholic. End of discussion.
Which left me in a panic. I was married already. I was married to a Catholic. I wasn’t Catholic. In fact, I had a deep fear of Catholicism. I was very religious. And I wanted to raise my kids in a consistent faith. And divorce wasn’t something that I would consider.
What was I to do?
Again, I felt alone in the middle of a vast ocean, but was being torn between two pieces of driftwood.
Of course I was angry that he was so unwilling to talk about this with me, but he wouldn’t budge. So, I did the only thing I could do. I started talking to priests, searching for a way to come to terms with being Catholic, for the sake of my future kids. I didn’t even know them and I was desperately looking out for them, albeit in a terribly misguided way as I can see now. I thought that if I could predetermine everything we would have smooth-sailing for the entire course of our lives. That was not to be.
So, I set up meetings with priests, deacons, and even some nuns. I invited my husband to join me, but he declined saying that he already was Catholic and didn’t need any more information. Some of the priests were great, some of them really upset me, the nuns mostly all upset me, and I eventually found a deacon who seemed reasonable, like someone I could talk to. Now you understand that by reasonable I mean somebody who agreed with some of the things that I already fundamentally believed.
For instance, I believed that God was loving and kind. I believed that God wouldn’t condemn people to hell simply for never having heard about him. I believed that God was forgiving. And I absolutely did not believe that Adam and Eve and Noah and all those characters in the Old Testament of the Bible were real people. Yes, I had read the Bible and the old testament struck me as allegory and fable. And I found a deacon who agreed with me on most of these points, with one notable exception. I never met a religious leader that would agree with me on the fact of God allowing non-Christians to go to Heaven. This bothered me, as it made God sound unreasonably punitive.
Around that time, I also found a priest not much older than myself, Father Tim, who agreed to have real conversations with me and indulged my real, often difficult and always challenging, questions. We would meet every Saturday morning for quite some time. I’ll never forget what he told me – he told me that it was only my job to educate myself on the church’s teachings, but then I was free to do as I wanted, because ultimately it was all between me and God anyway.
So the year that I turned 30, I converted to Catholicism and moved from Denver to Pennsylvania.
Soon thereafter, we began having our children, three daughters, and I had fully embraced the Catholic religion. When it was time for the kids to start school, my then-husband informed me that he really wanted the kids to go to Catholic school. Another crossroads, something else we had never actually discussed.
But seeing as how I loved the idea of a small, private school, I agreed, and began interviewing priests and principals to find the right place.
When I dive into something, I tend to dive in hard. And I started to notice some issues. I started to notice that the teachings of the Catholic church as they were taught to me and as they were being taught to my daughters in the Catholic school, were different than the actual, on-the-ground beliefs of the Catholics I knew. They were certainly different than my own beliefs. So I continued seeking information, through reading, through talking to priests, and through doing Bible studies and the like. It always seemed to me that many devout Catholics or non-Catholics were more superstitious than they were faithful. For Catholics, the need to attend mass each week took on a life of its own, and they would even attend mass and pay no attention to what said, even leaving their coats on so they could leave before the ending. (You get credit if you stay for communion.) They just wanted to check the box. And it confused me.
Some things about the church I would come to love, and other things I just never did. But my real life daughters now started to ask me questions. They asked me about our pets that died and where they ended up. They asked me why their daddy had been in a terrible car accident even when we specifically prayed each and every night to keep him safe. They asked where their grandma had gone when she died. They asked about their uncles that passed unexpectedly and why God had let that happen. They asked some really good and hard questions. And I answered them honestly and to the best of my ability, which included my telling them that there is a lot that we just don’t know.
We eventually would move back to Denver, and after 20 years of marriage, we would get divorced. I immediately went in search of Father Tim who had offered me such wise and sage advice 20 years earlier, but found that he was now in prison for molesting young boys during that same period when he and I had been meeting. I guess he had educated himself on the church’s teachings and then done what he wanted to do as well. I was gravely disappointed.
Soon thereafter, we would come to discover that all of the priests back in Pennsylvania who had baptized our children and many of the priests that my now ex-husband had grown up around were similarly in jail. We would discover a deep web of deceit that would shatter some of the illusion of the Catholic church for my husband. While I had committed to raising our kids Catholic, even through and after the divorce, he soon decided to leave the church behind, freeing me up to raise my kids differently if I so desired. This admittedly created some additional chaos for the kids. Over the ensuing years, we would all leave the Catholic church, including my ex-husband, my then-boyfriend/now-husband, all of our joint kids, and myself. We would all leave for different reasons, including but not limited to sexual abuse by priests, fundamental differences in theology or emotional scarring by those in power.
God had gotten lost in all of the religion.
During the years, life had happened as it does to all of us, and God was feeling distant and elusive. Two brothers-in-law had died, both tragically, my husband had been in that terrible car accident but had been spared, friends had suffered profound loss, the divorce had ripped our family apart, and family members had betrayed us profoundly.
While I still looked for God, the view was a lot more cloudy.
In the meantime, I had found something else. In fact, I see now that I found many things during this time. First I found a large non-denominational Christian church that really fed my soul. I thought that I had found what I was looking for. And for a while that was true. I was receiving a radical message of God’s love and hope and it was life-giving to me. Soon, though, I would begin again to become disillusioned because of the way the humans ran the church, the deceit I would come to discover and the messages that I believed didn’t come from God, but from man.
Again, God had gotten lost in all of the religion.
It was during these years that I actually heard God’s voice. I hesitate to say this, because I have scoffed at similar such announcements in the past, but I swear to you that I heard God, loud and clear. It was incredible.
It was in the mountains of Colorado, when I was off by myself in the woods. And the message was clear. God told me to stop trying to be perfect, to stop beating myself up and that I was on the right path. It was an instant download that I believe will stick with me forever. It was a message of love, equality, forgiveness and moving forward. It was permission to hold my head high and walk forward confidently, regardless of what those around me might say. Keep going, it said. You’re heading in the right direction.
So that is what I did. I trusted myself. After this time in the woods, I would delve into the world of A Course in Miracles, Buddhism, spirituality, Carl Jung’s teachings, and other more integrated types of religion.
From the outside, it might have looked like my religious world collapsed, and it might have appeared, even to my own children, like I left my faith behind, but nothing could be farther from the truth for me personally. In fact, my world didn’t collapse at all. Instead my world expanded beautifully and colorfully. I brought in so much more dimension to my world, so much more color, to both my relationship with and my understanding of God.
Those in our lives that were still staunchly religious, either Catholic Christians or non-Catholic Christians started to shy away, as I appeared to stop following the rules of those religions. In fact, I no longer seemed to fit in anywhere, being more Christian than the non-Christians and less Christian than the rule-following, church-going group of Christians.
But I find that fear drops away when you open your heart to something that is not limited by man-made dogma and not restricted by structures created by people in an attempt to both keep people safe and perhaps keep them limited.
Freedom can be scary, but God made us to be free.
I now picture a shimmering thread running through everything. This thread is the commonality between all world religions. This thread is, at its essence, love. This thread is the truth. And as people, flawed as they are, have grabbed onto that thread, they have spun up entire structures, whole vast worlds, in an attempt to create safety for themselves. They have grabbed onto the piece of driftwood and started fashioning it into vast ships, even when God actually just put the piece of driftwood out there in the ocean and it was enough. But people have proven time and again that they are imaginative, fearful creatures. Our imaginations can run wild, and we build what we want to build, what we think we need. When really all we need is that thread of love.
When Jesus came to earth, however you believe that happened, he had a message of love, equality, acceptance, integrity, forgiveness and hope for people. And there have been many such spiritual leaders over time. I believe that all people who bring a message of deep and abiding love, equality, acceptance, integrity, forgiveness and hope all bring God’s message to the world. I don’t think that Jesus was the last messenger for us.
In fact, I believe that God is talking to us all the time. I think when we are still and can hear the truth underneath it all, I think when we are able to peel away all of the layered- up crap that is built from fear, ours or other people’s, we are able to know the true essence of God, that thread that runs like an undercurrent through all of humanity.
So back to your question. Am I religious? Unequivocally yes. But do I fit into any nice little box of religion? No, I absolutely do not.
It’s been a long and winding road for me, and I’m still on that road. “Being religious” does not make your life simpler or even better in the way you might imagine. There is nothing simple about living a deep faith in God, the world, humanity, with all of the layers that people put on it. There is nothing black or white about it. It is neither on nor off.
I do know with absolute certainty that there are things in this world that I cannot understand and that I will likely remain unable to understand.
I have witnessed miracles, things that defied the laws of the natural world. And I have also witnessed great tragedies for which no easy explanation is available. I believe that we all have God inside of us. I believe that God is not a looming father figured ready to punish us. I believe that God shows up in our intuition, I believe that God is in the spirit world, I believe that God is not fully understandable or quantifiable or knowable. But most of all, I believe that I am only human and I don’t know everything.
I remain focused on bringing a message of love, equality, acceptance, integrity, forgiveness and hope to the world. I don’t worry so much anymore about rules or I try not to. Instead, I let the driftwood be driftwood and I focus on the shimmering thread that connects us all.
