On confusion and inclusion

I grew up in a spiritual bubble, of sorts. My parents disagree rather drastically about religion, and decided to raise their children in a neutral way. In other words, the topic was never mentioned. I had no learned answer when my six year old friends would ask, “Do you believe in God?” Puzzled, I would come home and ask my parents for clarification, with no success. Though my mom would’ve loved to talk to me about God, her response was typically to be evasive, and turn the question around on me. “What do YOU believe?” My dad’s attempt to balance atheism and neutrality was characteristically cryptic and went something like this: “Life is so complicated, the world is so complex, that I do think some higher power could very well be at play. But then I think, if there’s a God, why are there terrible things, like war?”

This philosophical musing could be, to me today, an interesting source of adult conversation. But to a second-grader, it was simply confusing. I appreciate that my parents wanted me to have the ability to make my own decisions about religion, but I often wish that spirituality had been taught to me in a more black and white way. It’s difficult to craft an educated opinion, let alone an entire belief system, without even a basic starting framework.

Growing up, I continued to have a strange relationship with religion. I did not know what it meant when my friends couldn’t come over to play on Wednesday afternoons because of CCD and began to imagine God as a Zeus-like figure, living in the clouds. Later, in high school, I became somewhat dismissive of organized religion. My derisive attitude was born, at least partially, of an utter lack of understanding. It was much easier to treat religion as something that was not worth my time than to view it as an area where my knowledge was lacking.

College transformed this attitude, as it tends to do with so many different aspects of our self concept and our understanding of the world. Meeting people from diverse backgrounds forces you to grow, and by random chance, a lot of my earliest and most enduring friends at Maryland were Catholic. Just being around them taught me a little about religion – the meaning of communion, what one does (or rather, does not do) during Lent, that Ash Wednesday is more than just a funny sounding date on my calendar. As I learned passively from my experiences, I no longer felt dismissive of religion. Instead, I became increasingly aware of just how limited my knowledge was. This has been an unending source of discomfort ever since.

One of my friends used to invite me to a free weekly dinner, hosted by the university’s Catholic Student Center. Feeling uneasy in a way that is impossible to articulate, I always declined, but she doggedly mistook my discomfort for timidity. “Father Bill encourages non-Catholics to attend.”

Another friend and I once met someone at a housewarming party who, for some reason, brought up that he was “Christian in name, but didn’t really believe in any of that stuff.” My friend turned and said, “Oh, that’s the same as Jason.” I shook my head, tried weakly to succinctly express the complexity of my beliefs, and ultimately settled for “it’s more complicated than that.” He gave me a blank look, and bluntly asked, “Ok yeah, but do you celebrate Easter, like for the real reasons?” Unable to claim any childhood memories of Easter that did not involve dyed eggs or rabbits, the unspoken conclusion of the exchange was, “So you’re not really a Christian.”

I have many uncomfortable memories like this, from being slapped with the flat response of “it’s Friday” when talking about ordering wings at happy hour during the month of March to exploring cathedrals abroad, including the Vatican itself. All are born not just out of a lack of knowledge on my part, but out of the paranoia, justified or not, that others somehow judge me harshly for my ignorance.

An episode of public radio’s This American Life is what inspired me to write about this topic in the first place. The story focuses on Reverend Carlton Pearson, formerly a rising star in the Pentecostal church. He alienated the evangelical world and drove away most of his 5,000 member congregation when he decided he no longer believed in Hell – that it made more sense to preach about God’s love than fear of His wrath. One of the most striking segments, to me, is an interview with Theresa Reid, a member of Pearson’s congregation who stuck with him through the controversy. She describes a time when she was confronted while on a walk by some neighbors who told her they thought that her beliefs were dangerous.

They felt no inhibition about letting us know that we were going down the wrong path. I’ve had that experience in the grocery store. It makes it seem even more ridiculous to me, the whole mindset that I grew up with, when I look at it and I experience it from the other side, as the target of the proselytizing. It makes it that much more clear to me that what we have done… to people of other faiths has been really pretty insensitive, and pretty mean, even though we did it in the name of God and even though we meant well.

When someone comes up to me and tries to tells me that I should change or I’m going to Hell, I kind of have compassion on that person because they don’t really know how that sounds. They don’t realize how mean-spirited that sounds.

I’ve never really been accosted by glassy-eyed proselytizers, and I certainly don’t think that my friends are trying to be rude to me. Still, Reid’s message resonates with me. It speaks, I think, to the subtle, macro-level challenge that I face. Why should not growing up with religion preclude me from having a relationship with God? I pray every night before I get in bed and once, while asleep, had what I believe was a deeply spiritual conversation with my cousin Melanie, weeks after she passed away. But without a background in organized religion, there is a part of me that may always feel inadequate.

Maybe I’m just being naïve, but I don’t believe that religion should be an uncomfortable experience. Because of my upbringing, I can’t just jump into a chosen faith – like my father, there’s too much that I disagree with, too much that I question. But I’m not willing to accept that this makes me ineligible for salvation. There’s something comforting about going to church, something about having another source of grounding and support that greatly appeals to me.

This is, to date, the conclusion I’ve reached. That I value God, but don’t quite agree with or understand everything about organized religion. I realize that this is in no way unique. Most people, I’m sure, go through periods of self-examination when they question assumptions they’ve been raised to hold as truths. And maybe that’s what bothers me the most – that everyone must ultimately find their own way, but that without an existing framework, I’ve had an awfully hard time getting started.