Being Other

"But, Mama!  Why did Jesus get to come back and Daddy doesn't?  That's not fair!"

This has been an ongoing discussion in our household for just about 2 months now.  One of the perils of sending my daughter to a religious pre-school is that I'm forced to sometimes navigate the tricky waters between her emerging faith and my established religious beliefs.  I knew that in sending her to pre-school, my options in this area were religious or nothing.

I have recently, officially made peace with the fact that I am religiously 'other'.  Here in Virginia, most everyone is something.  Most of my friends are Baptists or Methodists or lapsed this or that.  For years I have been a lapsed Catholic and then became part of the "SBNR" crowd--spiritual, but not religious.  I knew I believed in something, but I was hard-pressed to decide what that something was. 

Still, when my husband died, everyone rushed at me with invitations to church from all different directions, genuinely with the best intentions of their hearts aimed at helping me find solace and comfort.  And being that I was widowed at the age of 36, it began to feel extremely isolating.  I suddenly wasn't "couples friends" any more, yet I had a child which made me have to be more responsible than my freewheeling friends in their 20's and 30's who hadn't yet married and/or had children.  I felt 50 years ahead of my time.  And I knew I needed a sense of community.  A place to belong, a place where I could figure out who I was and what I did believe.

When we lived in Massachusetts, Mike and I found and attended the Unitarian Universalist church in Watertown, MA.  I liked it there very much, but when we moved out to the suburbs of Acton, it was impossible to continue attending.  We moved to Fredericksburg and tried attending Mass again at the local Catholic churches, but they were huge and felt impersonal. 

One night at dinner, I told Mike I had found the UU church here in Fredericksburg and asked if he'd like to go.  And then Mike dropped a bombshell on me.  "To tell you the truth, I think I'm an atheist.  When you die, I'm pretty sure that's it."

It was shocking.  I was OK with that belief, but I had never thought he wasn't a person of faith.  So I dropped the matter.  But nine months after his death, I felt a very strong urge to get out and find somewhere to go, so I looked up the UU service again, and I was pleased to find out that they had moved into our neighborhood.  So one Sunday, I took Leah, dropped her off in the nursery, and sat in the sanctuary for an hour.  One year later and 3 months later, just recently, I was introduced with 7 other people as an official member of the church.

Being a UU is now a central pillar of my life.  I volunteer with the choir, community action, and the religious education committee and once a month I go out to dinner with the women's group.  Even when I think, "Oh, that's not really my thing", I still go to church events and I always have a wonderful time.  I feel like here, in Virginia, amongst people who are religiously devout, I have found a little bastion of religious freedom.

One of the central tenets of the UU is a free and responsible search for the truth.  The UUFF (Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fredericksburg)'s website states, "We offer an open-minded and supportive environment for those seeking philosophical, spiritual, intellectual and religious exploration."  I have taken the time to seriously devote myself to that sort of study in the past year.

I am excited to raise Leah in this environment.  It is one in which it is ok, expected even, to ask questions.  And it is ok to choose your own belief system.  I very much doubt you will find 2 people in a UU service who believe exactly the same thing.  

I lived for years with Catholic Guilt.  No sense that I was worth anything, that I was born a sinner, I would die a sinner, there was nothing for it but purgatory if I was lucky and hell if I wasn't.  I thought and re-thought and decided and revised my decisions over and over and over again, never trusting myself to make good choices that would be approved of by God.  I prayed for things and never took credit when my own work resulted in something working out, and accepted that it wasn't God's will if my prayers went unanswered.  

But until July 12, 2012, I truly believed that if I needed a miracle badly enough, God would provide it.  When Mike collapsed, I prayed as hard and as earnestly as I had prayed in my entire life.  I offered my own life in exchange for Mike's.  I prayed for the doctors.  I prayed for the paramedics,  I prayed for Mike, I prayed for the family.  And he died anyway.  And not only did he die, but he died in such a fashion that a loving, innocent 3 year old had to witness it.  And I had to live with the guilt and shame of not being able to save his life.  And his good, bright, big, bold light was extinguished for no good reason.  

And it was then I realized that the God I had always believed in did not exist.  Had never existed.  

So now I am embarking on my own search for truth.  The term "Unitarian Universalism" indicates two things I do strongly believe in:  Unitarianism being that there is only one deity/force in the universe, none of this Father, Son, Holy Ghost trinity business; and Universalism, the belief that every person will be saved.  How and why, I don't know.  It's not my business.  I'm leaving it to God.  "What about Hitler?  What about child molesters?"  I do not know.  It's not my business.  I'm leaving it to God.

As I have learned more about God (haven't completely radicalized and starting referring to that force that controls the universe as Goddess), I learned other labels and recently came to the conclusion that I am a deist.  A nice little definition I found online is "A deist believes there is a God who created all things, but does not believe in His superintendence and government. He thinks the Creator implanted in all things certain immutable laws, called the Laws of Nature, which act per se, as a watch acts without the supervision of its maker. Like the theist, he does not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, nor in a divine revelation."

(Read more: Theist, Deist, Atheist, Agnostic | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/theist-deist-atheist-agnostic.html#ixzz36ShPbSpQ)

In short, I don't believe God answers our prayers.  I believe he is very hands off and impersonal, if he exists at all as a 'person'.  I'm still trying to figure out what exactly God is.  But the idea of an old white dude on a throne with flowing robes and a long beard no longer jives in accordance with my beliefs.

So Leah spent 2 years in an Episcopal pre-school, as I believed it was the best early education she could get.  And I have no regrets about sending her.  She also went to Vacation Bible School for two years, but that came to a quick end after last year when she came home telling me things like, "I have Jesus in my heart" without actually being able to tell me what that meant to her.  To me, that smacked of indoctrination--being able to repeat something without understanding WHY or what it even meant, so we don't do VBS any more.  

But I want her to feel she can ask hard questions and get answers that make sense.  So she got on a kick about Jesus coming back from the dead.  And she was sure if she just wished hard enough that Daddy would come back from the dead too.  And I was torn between not wanting to quash what could be seeds of her own belief in something with what I feel to be true for myself.  So I tried explaining it to her that when Jesus came back from the dead, he only came back as a ghost, not as an alive person, and he didn't get to stay, he still had to go back to Heaven with everyone else who died.  And no one has seen him in 2000 years.  

And she asked, "You mean like the ghosts in Scooby Doo?"  And I said, "Yes, only a real ghost, not a person hiding in a mask."  And for a while, that worked out OK.  But just today, she asked again, "When is Daddy coming back from the dead?  Jesus got to, and that's just not fair."

And so, in the parking lot of our local Wawa, I looked my 5 year old in the eye and said, "Leah, the story about Jesus is just a story people tell themselves to feel better about the fact he died.  It's just a story."  And in so doing, not only did I tell her what I believed, I told myself.

She asked me what I meant that it was a story, and I said, "Do you know how you feel so sad that Daddy died?  Wouldn't it be fun to think of a story in which Daddy came back to life for a day and got to do fun things with you, even if he had to go away again?" and she said it would.  I said, "It's the same with Jesus.  Everyone was so sad that Jesus died, they made up a story about how he came back to life and they got to spend some more time with him.  But it's just a story.  And if the story makes you feel angry or sad about Daddy being gone, then you don't have to believe in that story any more."

I know that in the future, she will run into people who have a very, very strong faith in Christianity.  Frankly, this blog post scares me a lot because so many of my friends are so faithful and devout and I worry that I have offended them or they will dismiss me because of this.  And somewhere down the road, Leah herself may decide that she believes in Jesus, in the Trinity, and in a more traditional set of religious beliefs and values that I do not share, and I will choose to be OK with that.  My own religious journey caused considerable concern and heartache in my family, and I don't want to feel that way about Leah's journey, whatever it may be, provided she doesn't join a cult of some sort.  :) 

I am going to raise her to seek out information about these kinds of questions, to make her own decisions, and to believe what her conscience dictates.  I struggle with my UU faith.  It makes me want to be a much better person than I am.  Not because of some lightning bolt hurling deity in the sky but because it shows me that the people around me deserve love and compassion and that every single day we have together is a gift.  I struggle with being non-judgmental, jealous, and with holding grudges in particular, but I know now those aren't cosmic failings that will condemn me to an eternity of torment but very real human emotions that I can work on so I don't feel separated from or superior to other people.  

I recently had to make a decision for myself and my daughter that ordinarily would cause me to do something I didn't have my heart in because I would feel bad because I would let God down by not keeping my promises.  And then I realized "Hey, no longer do you believe that God operates that way".  I was able to make a decision based on my own well-being and that of my daughter without fear of divine retribution.  That felt so amazing after years of a burden of guilt and fear.  I don't worry any more about what God wants out of me and my life, because I don't believe that he cares about anything in this world beyond the creation of the universe.  The day to day struggles of humanity are things we cause to happen to ourselves, and we can resolve and fix.  My recent car accident was just such an example.  My family was kept safe because of the development of engineering in cars over the years to where safety doesn't have to be as much of a concern because cars are so much safer than they used to be.  We were protected by my car.  God wasn't going to call the insurance agency and deal with the paperwork and the rest of it, I did all of that, and I didn't need divine help to get it done.  I was able to make phone calls, put things to rights, heal my wounds with the help of doctors, get myself together mentally with the help of a counselor, and get back on the road.  

 

I can own my success instead of chocking it up to a being in the sky.  I can accept responsibility for my failures, I can strive to do better.  Not because of divine mandate, not out of fear of not getting to play a harp and sit on a cloud forever, but because that is the human condition.  

I am so grateful to the UUA and the UUFF and all I have learned from the beautiful people with whom I've associated in the past year and a half.  It has been a time of tremendous growth and change in my life, in what I'm sure would otherwise have been a very dark and difficult time.  People have made the difference.  Liberal religion has made the difference.  And for that, i am truly grateful.