On Getting Religion

I spent my life looking sideways at religious people.  Feeling superior, condescending, and flat out cooler than them.  I walked out of my childhood church, a Free Will Baptist one (pause for laugh line--yes, I did perceive the irony, even then) when I was 13 years old, and didn't step back in to one for about 30 years.  I started to write "save for the occasional wedding", but then, racking my brain to think when this caveat applied, I'm coming up blank. I don't even know anyone who got married in a church.  That's how disconnected my life was from religion. Huston Smith or Joseph Campbell was the closest thing to a religious teacher I had for many, many years. The closest I got, truthfully, to a community of faith may have been leading La Leche League meetings for a decade in various liberal churches on weekdays.  Or the B'hai kids I spent time with at some Rainbow Gatherings?  I'm reaching here.  I got shed of religion as soon as my mom and dad stopped taking me to church, is the truth of it.  I eventually went on to get a degree in sociology, the field (along with art history) noted by researchers as the one most likely to be tenanted by extremely liberal people, and the least religious.

The children's "altar" at UUFF

I was part of a tight knit friend group of hard core humanists and atheists from college on.  We stayed close, and formed a kind of diaspora, moving individually or by family, from Central Arkansas to Northwest Arkansas in our late 20s.  When one of our smarty-pants tribe returned to his religious faith, long rejected, we were aghast.  Was he crazy?  Scared? Self-destructive?  Depressed?  Any hypothesis re: his broken-ness was easier to swallow than the one in front of our decidedly upward-turned noses:  he wanted religion in his life again.  We were disoriented.  We were clueless.  We could not compute.  What in the world was he thinking?

And then I had my second child.  She actually believed me when I told her she was named after the most potent and powerful tree for Pagans, and asked me why they believed in a tree.  And why they believed the first woman was made from "her tree".   She asked me about the goddess.  She wanted to go to a pagan ceremony. She wanted to pray to the huge blacksnake in our garden.  She wanted to give it offerings in hopes that my upcoming homebirth would be a good one.  She talked her doctor's ear off at her physical exam needed to enter kindergarten, going on and on about how maybe he didn't KNOW it, but the world's religions used to be matriarchal, focused on mother earth, and that men actually took those religions over and convinced people that a male sky god was the true giver of life.  "Imagine that!" she fiercely told him.  "That's unpossible!  A man can't nurse a baby!"  I was relieved when he told he that he too struggled with a belief in god, but overwhelmed with the dawning realization that *my little girl was religious*.  She had heard my anthropologically-based feminist-focused talk with my friends and with her, and in her it had grown, unbidden, from a political message to a spiritual one. 

A Winter Solstice ceremony at our church

Huh.  Didn't see that one coming.  Now what? 

I checked out the website of the local UU church.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that my town had a religious offering that could meet her needs to talk about her burgeoning, "volunteer" faith development, without alienating her (as her peers at our local country public school were).  "Mama", she said, as she got off the bus one day, "they said I'm going to hell for not being a Christian.  What is sin?"  I was able to tell her that people believe lots of different things, and that we were going to seek out some folks who had different views about diversity of belief.  

Then I found out about OWL (Our Whole Lives), offered at the UU Fellowship.  I wanted desperately for my teen to get comprehensive, fact-based, sexuality education that highlighted both the sacred aspects of sex and the trust, responsibility, and respect that are core components of healthy sexuality.

And then I found myself in a pew.  My baby was in a sling, my older kids were in class, and I was just killing time, giving the sermon a chance, but holding my non-seeking nature as close as a lover.  On that day, the reading was from Wendell Berry, my favorite poet.  The hymn was about how UUs were a gentle, angry people--a combination I found surprising, poetic and stirring.  And while I have forgotten the message, I know that I was shocked to find tears welling up during the sermon.  I looked over at my partner and saw he was having the same experience.  A religious experience?  We walked out that September day into a kind of Spring.  Something had come together--the right combination of words and silence and teaching and listening and poetry and virtue and hope--and it felt like I was simmering, germinating, stirred up.

Inside the 2nd-6th grade class on Sunday morning--so much to learn

That was three and a half years ago.  Soon after that first Sunday, I saw a classified listing for a director of religious education in the local newspaper, and noted it was for "my" new church.  That seemed almost fated.  My background was in the direction of an education program at a children's museum, with lots of volunteer work with mothers and babies and teaching college kids how to write (and understand statistics) thrown in for good measure.  I thought, if I can be honest about my hubris here for a moment, that they would be lucky to hire me.

I had no idea how I would be changed.  How lucky I would feel to be engaged deeply in the work of religious community.  How the expansion of my spirit that began that day wouldn't change my belief in the existence of God (still a radical agnostic: I don't believe humans have the capacity to know) or the nature of our human imperative (I still think it is up to us to make the world better), but would change my experience of my own humanity, and the responsibility I have to constantly reach deeper, work harder, tread more carefully, love more.

Teaching Religious Education classes brings out your best

There is something about showing up every Sunday and making nice, even with the folks you disagree bitterly with over some facet of church leadership, that makes the forest visible, when our egos try to drag us back to examining one square inch of moldy bark on one tree.  Something about willingly diving into the "deep end of the pool", as my previous minister/boss called it, and submerging our individual egos and desires in the waters of religious community.  Something about being willing, as a human, to reflect consistently on whether one's actions and behaviors--even one's thoughts--are in line with the clear principles of one's faith.  And allowing others to have expectations of us--that we will live in accordance with our shared values.  That we covenant together to do just that.

I see the expressions on my non-religious friends' faces when I go off like this.   They are either wondering if I am crazy or sick, and if the latter, whether they can catch it by standing too close.  And though it pains me somewhat to say it, I do have the zealotry of the recently converted.  But we live in a culture that doesn't ask much of us.  Live and let live, you say tomato, I say to-mahto, to each his own.  I believe, however, that humans have a deep nascent need to be loved, to be called upon to serve, and to be needed.  I think the more we put ourselves in situations where that occurs, the better we will become.  The more fulfilled we will feel.  The more good we will do.

God speaks, in the Passover Play.  I can believe in God if it's a child.

I read that lung capacity increases the more you work at it.  That holding your breath, deep breathing, and sustained "breath work" can build one's ability to harness the power of oxygen in a way that can fuel an athletic or aerobic pursuit, like playing an instrument, or swimming.  I think faith works the same way.  We are all born with a religious perspective on the world--asking big questions, seekers of belief, trusting something larger than ourselves.  That diminishes as we grow, unless we work at it.  If we seek communities of faith, if we make acting in line with our shared, unifying values a sacred, daily practice, if we allow ourselves to be called into the service of a greater good, we are getting religion.  And, surprise,we are giving it, too.