Religion...

The subtitle might continue... "Losin my..."

I was reared by a lapsed Southern Baptist and a fifth or sixth generation unchurched Unitarian. I don't think there's such a thing as a lapsed Unitarian. BOMFOG and all that--Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God--and years of struggling with an almost doctrineless inclusivity, to remain one of the smallest of Protestant sects, yet claiming as their own five American Presidents. Small chance there will ever be another one.

My parents' solution to the what will we do about church for the children was to have us attend the closest more or less middle of the road Protestant churches. They were never much involved and we moved often enough so that in one place it was Methodist and another Presbyterian, until my parents split up and we moved with my mother to her hometown in Kentucky. Up until that time I had been a good student in Sunday School as I was in school. I remember winning a prize for memorizing the books of the Bible. I asked for and got a Revised Standard Version for my thirteenth birthday.

In her hometown we had to attend the Baptist church. Her mother expected it. This is the woman who explained that the racial slur was really "Nigra" and wasn't a slur at all, and had stood her other daughter who was having what was called then a "nervous breakdown" in a corner and read the Bible to her until my mother had spirited her away to a treatment facility. Aunt M remained a nut case for most of her life, marrying the richest two men in the town in succession, and when my sister came to live with her in desperation at 15 or 16, locking her in the basement and nearly starving her. Good Baptists all.

The Baptist minister ran the town. The sermons seemed interminable to me and I was at first mystified, later intrigued, and at last appalled by the "call." The call to be saved. What sealed it for me was seeing his sons go down to the altar for the laying on of hands on repeated occasions and knowing that they would be bending or breaking norms or laws as they saw fit as they tore a path of terror through the town. Seemed to me that this being reborn in Christ stuff was a free pass to be a shit to fellow human beings.

Yet something about church appealed to me. When we moved to another town I started going to the Methodist church which seemed more reasonable. It didn't have all the "Jesus Saves" crap. I hung out with the youth group, sort of fitting in, and enjoyed our forbidden jaunts to a roadhouse outside of the dry town where the kids would dance.

Going to live with my father, he suggested that I try a Unitarian Church when I was looking for a place to go. One of the good things he did for me. It was at least a place that encouraged you to think. At the time there was a great comparative religion curriculum for teens and I ate it up. The young people's group was copacetic and mellow and often lots of kind of crazy fun.

Later, I became pretty involved in my church as an adult, but Unitarian congregations are pretty idiosyncratic so I tended to drop in and out and for the last twenty years, mostly out. I don't like the congregational politics much and it's hard to avoid. "Liberal Religious" churches seem to be constantly battling with fracture and dissolution. I wonder if it is the same in the more orthodox ones.

My religious education wasn't complete until my first serious girlfriend who was Jewish took me home to visit her family which featured a VERY Orthodox grandfather. The girl and her mother coached me so that I could "pass" enough to prevent a major uproar. In the process I learned enough about Judaism to have a great appreciation for it. Twenty years after that during a tough transition in my life friends took me to services with their "Neo-Hassidic" Rabbi, a delightful and wise man.

I don't believe in a god even I can recognize. I remember sitting on a deck overlooking the Big Hole River in Montana a few years ago reading Dawkins and getting it quite clearly that the typical indocrination of children into a "faith" is child abuse. So in a way I can thank my parents for their casual compromise. I was exposed but not indoctrinated.

Yet for all that, I get that there is something there. I can't listen to a Bach Magnificat without being moved. I love the "Messiah." The music and art created out of that inspiration are some of the most beautiful things we can experience. And at the same time I have that thought I know that some of the world's most inhuman behavior has been in the name of religion. Even those acts by regimes that disavowed religion are in an odd reversal still about religion. And our world remains torn apart in the name of religion.

I hate the division that so many seem to want to make between the spiritual and the secular, as though one is bad, the other good.

I remember looking up at Michelangelo's ceiling. I should have been moved, but I had waited in a three hour line and was jammed hamhock to butt with a cattle-car-like crowd replete with hoards of Japanese tourists trying to take illicit photographs of it. So I wasn't moved. merely tired and annoyed. Yet in another almost as crowded gallery was nearly brought to tears by my first sight of Botticelli's "Primavera." The one religious (Michelangelo), the other with pagan antecedents. Go figure.

I grok connection. I get that that is what the driver is. We want to be connected. We want to be connected to each other. We want to be connected to meaning. We want, hoping for something we cannot know, to be connected to something bigger. To be simply human somehow seems not quite enough. We know... correction... I know I am not quite enough and have never been, at least not all by myself.

So is it at bottom about relationship?