Dear God (if there is a God), save my soul (if I have a soul).
-prayer of supplication to St. Ambrose the Agnostic, as pronounced by my father.
In the future, we're all going to be atheists, I swear to God.
- a student in my friend Pam's AP US History class
Q: What do you get when you cross a Unitarian Universalist and a Jehovah's Witness?
A: Someone who knocks on your door and tells you to believe whatever you want.
I have found that parenthood raises all kinds of questions and offers no immediate answers. For the past two years, my attention has been consumed by burning issues like "What do I want out of my child's education?" "Isn't it selfish to add another person to an increasingly polluted and fragile planet?" "How can I make sure I raise a morally sound child?" "Where did my waistline go?" and "Am I going to get a restful night's sleep again ever, and if so, when is that going to be?" There are times when I feel my brain does nothing all day but hop from one question to another without ever adequately addressing any of them. Some questions seem to resolve themselves over time (the answers to last two questions, for example, are "gone far, far, away, never to be seen again," and "no,") but others are so large and thorny, I don't think the benign neglect approach is going to work.
Watching India develop from a passive, gurgling blob of baby into a toddler who mimics our every quirk and foible has driven home the terrifying reality that Warren and I have tremedous influence over all facets of her development - moral, physical, intellectual, and spiritual. And, as I know so well from my experience as an educator, you can't just ignore the bits you're not as comfortable with, because failing to act is a form of action in itself. We can't just stick India in front of the boob tube and think she's going to develop her coordination, for example. And somewhere along the line, we're going to have to address the issues of our spiritual beliefs. What do we believe? What do we want India to believe? How do we teach her about our beliefs and allow her the latitude to develop her own? And what do we do if what she believes is 180 degrees opposite of what we believe?
India has been brought into a family where her father is Buddhist, sort of, if anything, and her mother is agnostic, which is a wishy-washy way of saying I'm basically an atheist but willing to entertain the alternative. We were married by a Unitarian minister, since we both have been Unitarians at some point in our lives. Warren attends a Buddhist meditation study group once a week and I don't do squat. This is one of those situations where I envy people who are devout
practitioners of - well, anything, really. It must greatly simplify
things to be able to say, "We're ____________________ (fill in the
blank - Orthodox, Baha'i, Presbyterian) and that's what we believe." Part of me would like to believe that there's a benevolent force guiding the universe, and specifically humankind, to do good works and be better people. However, I just find the whole concept somewhat unrealistic. First, if there is a God, I have a hard time accepting the fact that He (and just for the sake of convenience here I am going to use the male pronoun) would trouble Himself with half the nonsense we get our panties in a twist about in His name. I don't buy the idea that the Bible (or the Koran or the Torah) is the literal word of God, infallible, handed down to be followed to the letter. It doesn't make sense that God would send a prophet/messiah/messenger to offer salvation and eternal life to one certain group of people, and allow other groups to go on merrily existing for millenia in complete and total ignorance and therefore unable to accept or reject the terms of that offer, thus dooming themselves for eternity. And yet these seem to be central tenets of a lot of major world beliefs.
What puzzles me is how we can see the fingerprints of humanity all over religion, and yet we are constantly told that's not the case. Take the Bible (or any sacred text, for that matter) - why is it so hard for people to accept the idea that a great deal of it is an amalgam of myth, local legend, oral history, and what-have-you, and that as a result, probably bits and pieces of it have been changed, dropped, or added over time? I remember sitting in my freshman "Bible as Literature" class in college, and asking the professor why the Bible claimed that Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. I asked if it could be some kind of translation error, or if the record-keeping was in some kind of unit other than years. "Oh no," the professor said, "Methuselah lived to 969 years old." Now how does that make sense? It is biologically impossible for someone to live that long, and I couldn't help but be a little let down that this very intelligent, learned person didn't at least comprehend how that statement might be juuuuuust a little hard to believe. Also (and I realize I am picking on Christianity here, but that is my cultural background and what I am most familiar with), the timing of some major holidays is a little too close to old pagan rituals to be coincidental. Isn't it interesting how close Christmas and Easter fall to the winter solstice and the spring equinox? Why might a relatively new belief system hoping to supercede pagan traditions choose those dates for their major holidays? Beats me.
Increasingly, I also feel that the discourse around what belief in God is and how it should be expressed is being taken over by very conservative forces, forces I don't agree with and often don't like. I don't think God has favored the United States above all other nations on earth; political and economic power has waxed and waned all over the world since empires came into being (just ask the Chinese). I don't think that a politician has to be a regular churchgoer to prove that s/he is capable of sound moral reasoning. I don't think God cares for one minute if we love our own gender or the other gender or some of each part of the time; I think that's part of our innate biology and not something we can control. These issues (and a lot of others) are ones that we humans don't agree about, so we use God and faith to bludgeon each other about the head and shoulders.
On the other hand, I know many people who derive a great deal of strength and satisfaction from their faith and from being part of a community. I don't want to deny that to my children that if that's where their hearts lead them. After all, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are churchgoers. I have noticed that when we visit these friends, they frequently have really cool, interesting people visiting them as well, or they mention their recent outings here, there, and everywhere. When I ask, "how do you meet so many great people to hang out with," they usually just shrug their shoulders and say they met at church. And of course, there's the whole "Flaming Bags of Poo" phenomenon, as explained by Nervous Girl, wherein one gets to share one's issues and concerns with an entity far larger, wiser, and more powerful than oneself. I can certainly see the appeal and comfort in that. The catch is, one has to believe that this entity exists first. That's the part I have a difficult time doing.
Clearly I am going to be at something of a disadvantage when India begins to ask The Big Questions. I don't want her to believe what I believe just because it's what I believe. I want her to have the opportunity to form and modulate her own opinions as she comes to understand her own mind.
Since I categorize myself as agnostic, I can look at various spiritual practices without being a complete hypocrite. I decided to give regular churchgoing a shot last year in hopes of finding something that might qualify as a "spiritual home". Obviously, given my gripes with established religion, I was going to have to find a church that espoused a very liberal theology, meaning Unitarian Universalism was about as far right as I could go. I was also hoping to find a church with ties to my neighborhood, so perhaps I could expand my neighborliness along with my spirituality. So I picked a church to try for two reasons: It was conveniently located up the street from my house, and it was theologically so loosey-goosey it made UUs look like Mennonites. As one might expect of such an establishment, this church was much given to lay-led sermons and the singing of 1960's folk songs, and we sat around in circles frequently. Sounds promising, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, my own foibles prevented me from fully participating in my adopted community. As I have confessed in this very forum, I am something of a fashion nonentity. However, I do know enough to avoid the obvious faux pas, like mixing stripes and plaids or not checking for spinach between my teeth. But for some reason, being of a theologically liberal bent seems to have a direct correlation with being a total fashion disaster. In other words, the more you use phrases like "our church seeks the universal truth in all humanity," the more likely it is that you will be wearing socks with orange toes and sandals when you say it. It was really something. Rough-hewn garments woven by indigenous peoples were much in evidence on both genders. The men were prone to wearing camouflage trousers and peace activism t-shirts, despite the obvious internal contradiction inherent in choosing those two items of clothing. "This is my best dress t-shirt," one man said in the context of a lay-led sermon, again without any recognition of the oxymoronic nature of that statement. And the women - my goodness. I spent a service seated across from a woman wearing a loose off-white dress made of some kind of natural fiber, matched with black knee socks and white sneakers, all topped off with (I am not making this up) what appeared to be a very large blanket of hunter green and fluorescent orange plaid worn as a sort of serape. Looking over the congregants of a Sunday morning, one might well wonder if we had been rousted from our beds by kidnappers and forced to grab whatever we could find in our darkened closets before being abducted. India was by far the best-dressed person there, being that she was dressed in toddler outfits where all the pieces came in sets that matched - so she was coordinated by default.
Clearly I was far too bourgie and superficial for the hard-core lefties, so I beat a hasty retreat back to The Establishment, i.e., the UUs. I started attending a church with a fabulous reputation for its inclusiveness, its community activism, and its family-friendly atmosphere. The minister, a lesbian and lapsed Catholic (both of which reinforce her liberal street cred), wove references to poverty, justice, and addiction issues into her sermons. Heads of various earnest-sounding committees dedicated toward promoting peace and justice, environmental activism and the like stood and made earnest-sounding appeals for new members. We sang songs that carefully avoided referring to God as "He" and that celebrated the potential of all human beings. And I felt ... nothing. The sermons were interesting. The child care provided was wonderful. It was nice to have a place to sit and think about Lofty Ideas once a week. But I didn't feel the sense of replenishment or reinvigoration that I have experienced at other times and in other contexts. After attending regularly for awhile, I slowly found myself thinking of church services as a "hafta" - just one more thing I had to do on my weekly list of things to do - so I stopped going. If the point of this exercise is to model a deep, enriching, life-enhancing spiritual practice for my daughter, what's the point of faking it? Why go through the motions if what I'm trying to teach her is that spiritual development requires not just going through the motions?
So I am back to worshiping at the Church of Sunday Morning Coffee while Warren goes to his meditation group. I know sometime soon, India's favorite question is going to evolve from "what's dat?" to "why?" and then "who?" I just wonder when she's going to look at me, brow furrowed in puzzlement, wanting to know, "Who's God, Mommy?" I also wonder what I'm going to say. We'll all have to wait and see, huh?
