Religion

What religion were you brought up with?

My dad grew up Catholic, went to Catholic schools, got yelled at, suspended and held back by Catholic nuns. In my mind, that sums up his religious background. My mother grew up in a strict Methodist home. By 'strict' I mean: no playing on Sunday, no buying milk or the paper on Sunday, no alcohol in the home, things like that. Church was a big part of the entire family's life. My grandfather knows the Bible backward and front and he preaches it to us from his living room chair at 96 years old. One generation removed, I can appreciate his influence and knowledge. On the other hand, I think she felt conked over the head by religion. It was a weight that became too heavy for her to carry while functioning in society.

So when my parents formed a union, I wonder if perhaps there were unspoken words between them: Let's not do religion. For the most part, they didn't. We attended my mother's childhood church while we vacationed summers in my great-grandfather's farmhouse. I went to church with friends once in a while, but my parents seemed to want to steer clear...and allow us a religion-free childhood. It was not as though they were turning their backs on Christianity, they just hadn't figured a way to untangle it from the overwhelming religious ways by which it had come to them.

Though I enjoyed church, the singing and preaching, Sunday school gave me the sweats. All the kids knew their verses, the order of the books of the Bible, and all the rest of the general rigmarole of the classroom and I felt lost. Like an interloper. I felt like I'd missed the boat on the whole church thing, so I'd have to find God on my own someday.

Sometime in my early 30's I had enough of the mess I'd made my life and I looked to God, the God that I had always known was with me, but I didn't know quite what to do with. I had smiled at him from time to time, asked for things probably, thanked Him for things probably, but for the most part I didn't know in the least what it meant to be a Christian. So when I looked to Him, I found a great big hand reaching down through the night sky waiting to scoop me up and take me on the adventure that has become my life ever since.

Part of that new life has been trying to assimilate into the "religious" element that is part of being a Christian. That's the really hard part for me still. Fitting, translating, incorporating (literally) my relationship with the Lord into an establishment, framework, religious structure, etc...I don't know why it's so hard for me. Sometimes I think I think too much, that I make it hard. Other times I think that I'm just stubborn. Maybe it's because I wasn't raised with the Lord of my heart in an established structure. To me, Jesus was the one to whom Grammy and I prayed while snuggled in her bed, not the one pictured on every Sunday school wall leading the children up the green slope. I felt like trying to figure out and keep up with everything in church and Sunday school made me think of everything BUT the Lord Jesus. I got nervous, I didn't know the lingo, I wasn't sure when to stand, when to close my eyes, what to wear...

Sometimes my Grammy, during church, would see that those hard wooden pews and those long sermons could be a little rough on a tyke like me. She'd glance down at me and smile, unclick the double metal knobs on the top of her purse and pull out a single piece of Wrigley's Doublemint gum in the silver metallic wrapper. She'd tear it clean in half and handed me one half, which I unwrapped quietly and slipped into my mouth. She chewed the other.