I grew up in a Catholic family in Boston. As you can imagine, this was an especially Catholic upbringing.
I loved being religious. For my first communion, my grandmother gave me a gold cross on a gold chain. I would kiss the cross before walking up to the plate at my little league baseball games, feeling the grooves of the gum I’d packed in my lip with my tongue to settle my nerves against a familiar texture.
At night, in the room I shared with my two brothers, I’d sit crosslegged on the gray carpet next to my bed and say an Our Father. I’d ask for stuff. I’d ask for a good grade on a test or that a certain girl would talk to me the next day at school, and that when I talked back, I’d be funny and I’d say exactly the right thing. I’d pray that there would be no more hunger or pain or other bad things in the world. I felt like someone cared about me, and was looking out for me, and that there was an underlying order and justice to the universe.
I liked praying and I liked sitting in the thin wooden pews in church on Sunday mornings. I liked following my mind wherever it wandered, only occasionally interrupted by the priest telling me to stand/sit/kneel. I liked the organ, which sounded scary, and the singer, who had a cartoonishly high-pitched, unsteady, grating voice. I liked how the light came in through the high windows behind the altar, which was covered in a heavy purple sheet. After church, we’d drive through nice neighborhoods with big houses. My parents would ogle and guess at how much each was worth while the four of us kids tried to keep our knees from touching in the backseat.
Our church could loosely be classed as ‘fire and brimstone’, though I’m sure there were more doomer-y ones out there. The priests talked about hell a ton. It kinda seemed like you could be sent there for just about anything. I thought about it all the time. I knew I lied, and I knew I wanted the wrong things. I wanted to be a famous skateboarder. I wanted money and I wanted ten girlfriends. I was not meek and I would not inherit the earth. I liked to fight and I liked to eat as much as I could at dinner, even though there were kids who never had anything for dinner.
My freshman year of college I joined a poetry club. As you can imagine, I arrived incredibly naive and insulated from disparate perspectives. I met a bunch of people there who were quite different from me. These were not the aloof, rough boys of my youth lol. It occurred to me for the first time in a meaningful way that the doctrine I’d been steeping in my entire life was wrong.
I now looked at my religion as punitive, irrationally vindictive, egocentric, naive, deeply prejudicial, and frequently hypocritical about important things. It was suddenly clear to me that many of the tenets of Catholicism were the machinations of mortal men trying to keep women subservient and self-subjugating and the poor delusional with hope, such that neither group would try to change their circumstances in an organized or decisive way.
I functionally abandoned Catholicism, though I didn’t tell my family and so still went to church when I was home from school. I didn’t mind going at all and still enjoyed the ritual.
Until very recently, I’ve thought very little about organized religion apart from generally disliking it for all the unresolvable conflict it tends to generate. I’ve never minded one way or the other if friends of mine are religious, but I’ve always known it ran counter to my own value system.
But now I’m having a kid. I’ve been thinking about the comforts of religion that did serve me at one time, and whether or not I should make those comforts available to him somehow.
I think there are several benefits of being part of some organized spiritual group. You have community, a clear-cut moral code or general design for living, rituals that serve as grounding tentpoles across the long lawn of childhood, and some kind of answer for the hard problem of ‘why’ that is extremely palatable for kids.
That said, there is no way we are going to adopt the Catholicism I grew up in. It would be way too confusing for him. We’d be telling him, on the one hand, every person has innate dignity and deserves compassion and respect, and also God loves all his children, but on the other hand, gay people are on a fast train to hell for some reason, where they’ll burn for all eternity, and so is anyone who doesn’t atone in a very specific way for the inherent sin of being born human at all.
Life is full of contradictions no matter how you look at it, but IMO that’s a bit too contradictory. So I’ve been thinking about other forms of spirituality/community/rituals that could provide a grounding framework for my little growing family.
My wife works in hospice and many of her coworkers/friends are spiritual guides of one kind or another: there are rabbis, chaplains, reiki masters, priests, death doulas, you name it. Whoever you might need at the end of your life, should you need a spiritual guide at all.
She grew up vaguely ‘Christian’ but never went to church or anything like that. She doesn’t seem to have any religious baggage, but her parents believed in the Christian God and by extension she did too, albeit very passively. However, now that our son is nearly here, she has said she wishes she had more to hang on to as a kid re: ‘why are we here’, ‘what is the point’, ‘what is death’, etc. Perhaps this is typical of innately curious kids, who knows.
On Sunday I went and visited a rabbi at a local synagogue to talk about all this. I met her through my wife’s work and she’s chill/smart. After a far-reaching, invigorating hour of intellectual sparring and answering my questions with questions, she basically said ‘you guys should just do whatever you want.’
She told me to read this book about the history of Tarot, which I will do. Apparently it started as a card game, and then it evolved into a way to gamble, and then a kind of cult formed around it, and then it finally morphed into the source material for divination rituals.
The ‘moral’ of our discussion was that ‘spirituality’ can be anything. It’s just a vector for faith, which we all have a mysterious compulsion to express. We love being devoted to something alongside others who get it.
She advised I go to a gathering of Wiccans that meets in a major city near my suburb, so I’m going to do that and report back. I’m going to check out a bunch of different organized spiritual groups, including a Unitarian church in my town. My friend’s wife is Catholic and says she knows of one of those woke, more upbeat Catholic churches, so I’ll check that out, too.
The likely result of all this sampling is that we opt not to explicitly belong to any one group, but that me and my wife figure out what kind of ‘answers’ are palatable and sensible for children who ask about ‘the big picture’.
Re: what I’ll tell my son. Well, nothing much for a while. He’ll be a baby. But soon, when he becomes curious about the world - why it’s here, what happens later, if there’s anywhere he can go to deliberate these questions, I’ll tell him about all the organized religions and all the disorganized religions, and all the versions of those answers made available to us through science/math/physics, and let him follow his nose.
Of course, the rabbi asked what I believe in when we were talking in her office. I said I believe in people, and the constant, improbable, latent possibility for good in the world.