Monkey in the middle, with apologies to my siblings, who didn’t ask to be on my blog.
This photograph needs work, needs me to crop and center, balance the colors, sharpen the focus, maybe eliminate the age spots – but at the end of the day, it stands best as it is; a testament to times past and bad photography. (Also, can we talk about the set of scales? And the potted plants of Justice and Mercy? And what looks like either turkey legs or metal fish on the wall? What is with the preponderance of metal wall art of that time period?? Ah, the seventies. So much for which to answer.)
At three, I already had church shoes, church dresses, and carried a church purse. When I was dating Tech Boy, my mother sent him a snapshot of me at the age of two, red tight-clad legs crossed, felt Bible on my lap, feet clad in shiny patent leather, head tilted to listen attentively. (I think that was a less-than-subtle clue that I was a Church Girl. Read into Mother Actions what you may.) At that point, I already knew all the songs for my set, a great many of the stories, and The Reason we got up and got dressed early on a weekend morning when it seemed that no one else in the entire neighborhood had to move. I was raised in the church.
This week, I read a piece in Slate about the “Nones;” parents who want to raise their children “in faith” but who have abandoned their faith and just want to keep the connection. Not surprisingly, the desire for children raised with church seems to be a desire for mainly its customs. When so large a percentage of the dominant culture in America is either busy appropriating another culture, or denying the need for anything but a bigger melting pot, there is still an active minority with a deep and vibrant wish to enroll their kids into a history, a collective greater than their individual selves. They want them to share the same stories and songs, to know and to value the same aphorisms, to pick up and tie into a long abandoned, frayed and knotty cord which once bound us in a nostalgic, *largely imaginary “one nation, under God.” And for that, they’re willing to send them with grandma, and/or schlep them to synagogues and sanctuaries themselves.
It strikes me, again, what a disguised blessing not conceiving has been. From observing the deep cracks in the foundations of primary school education (oy, Common Core math!) to seeing the battle for control of speech and expression and belief on university campuses this week — I quail. I would be well out of my depth to guide any progeny through faith issues. I am reading the news of the day and trying to keep up, and can barely find greater comprehension for myself, much less for another, whose choices and experience would need to be curated and vetted. And yet, when she was far younger than my old self, my mother did do all the things I’m too troubled or anxious or uncommitted to do. She did raise me in faith.
Though our Venn diagram of beliefs have less overlap than they might, though any denominational tenets I disagree with I tend to …ignore in a ridiculous and thoroughly immature way, though I’m not sure I’m actually all that good at this organized religion thing, nor can I embrace the fiction that mine is any better than yours (except for those whose faith require sharing from door to door – as an anxious introvert, that wins the WORST), I’m here. I am here. I am part of a collective, greater than myself. I know songs that a lot of other people know, and have had the experience of believing whilst singing. I have, in a manner of speaking, the privilege of faith culture, though not a mega-church thing; we’re small and weird, and that’s okay, too. Religion, a cup with its cracks and crazes (or is that just crazies) and obvious flaws – is a graceful vessel which holds something life-giving, a thing which still has value if it teaches us to think deeply of what we do not understand, and to accept broadly that we never will, and may not need to do so. As a mile marker that points me “along a trail that’s rising always upward,” it shows me the path where others have gone before. And even when I don’t care to walk where or how they have walked, I am convinced this road has value. I am grateful for being raised “in the church.”
*Keeping in mind that the phrase “under God” was added to the declaration in the relatively recent past of 1954, and that neither civil rights nor civil liberties were established for anyone but white males at that point, we cannot possibly say the nation was “under God” then, nor is it now, as a democracy isn’t a theocracy. Thus, my description of it as “largely imaginary.” I don’t doubt that the Mayberry version of Christian American existed for someone somewhere, but not for the entire nation by any stretch.