When I was seven years old, my best friend in the whole world's father died. Her mother, previously not a church-goer, started taking the three children to church and Sunday School. Every once in a while, I would sleep over on Saturday night and go with them Sunday morning. I loved it. I don't know why. I got to wear a nice dress -- one of the friend's, she had many -- and go and colour pictures and be in a nice building. I don't know what it was about it -- it certainly didn't fit with my usual personality, which was to wear denim overalls and climb trees. Perhaps even at that age, I knew that there was something there that I needed.
When I asked my father why we didn't go to church, he told me -- at seven -- that religion caused too many problems in the world, and he didn't believe in anything that made people kill each other. My father's family had bought into -- in a definitive way -- the idea of materialism, that we are only what we are -- mammals -- and that there was no God, no spirituality, no other. My father was an astrophysicist, my mother a biologist, and there was no room for God in our house.
My mother's mother went to church regularly. She was a private person, and I never managed to ascertain her personal beliefs about God. I always had assumed -- because no sane person can believe in God, so I was told -- that she did it for the community. She lived in a neighborhood of many older folks, and the church had potluck lunches and a bargain basement, and it was just a good place to hang out with the neighbors.
I had my first spiritual experience when I was only 2 or 3. My grandfather, my father's father, had a small den where he worked, and he had filled its walls with family photos. My grandparents had emigrated in the 1950s, and none of their family had followed, and the pictures were their links to those precious people left behind. When we visited, they would procure a small cot that was small enough to fit in that tiny room, and there I would sleep. One evening, long after I had gone to bed, I looked up at the wall and saw one of the photos moving. I knew, somehow, that she was trying to talk to me. But being the sensible and materialist child I was, instead of listening, I ran. My mother tried to soothe me, but ended up taking the photo down from the wall so I would sleep. I remember getting up in the middle of the night and making sure, with small, shaking fingers, that the photo was indeed face down on the desk.
I soon was too large for that cot, and stopped sleeping in that room; rarely having reason to enter and gaze on the photo, it ceased to bother me. Some years later, my grandfather died and my father packed up all the family photos when he moved my grandmother. The photo wasn't displayed at the new place. When I was 16, my grandmother passed away, and the many boxes of belongings were resurrected and sorted through. "Oh look!" my father said one afternoon. "It's that old photo of my grandmother that scared you so much." The feeling that went through me was akin to a shock, and a shiver of recognition. But now, many years later, the shock and fear of a photo that talked, something that certainly did not fit with my materialist views, was also mingled with some curiosity -- what the heck had she been trying to say?
I grew up in a town -- in a country -- where lack of strong belief in religion or any kind of experience beyond science is not uncommon. People are filled with doubt. It never bothered me. This is normal of course. This lack of a relationship with the divine, this smug sense of knowing everything there is to know through the revolution that is science -- that is reality. And yet, when I first met, at twenty, someone from another place who had a conviction -- a real, solid religious belief and conviction -- instead of feeling skeptical, I felt ... envious. I wished I had that, that much certainty of a higher power, of a higher purpose. Of faith.
Over the years I've tried to cobble together some semblance of faith. My ex husband wasn't any use, he was as much as athiest as I was, and wasn't at all supportive of my forays into faith. I talked about it with a few folks here and there, but overall -- I can't get my head around the fact that there is this guy called "God" with a white beard who watches over things. The Christian teachings -- and I turn to those first since I am nominally Christian -- do not make sense to me. I would pray, but I wasn't sure who to, and often ended up picturing favoured relations, passed away. I suppose I figured that at least I knew them, and maybe they would intervene for me. I studied art, the glorious expanses of oil and fresco, costing a king's ransom of wealth, that people would create in homage to a God that I didn't believe in. I would study them as a scientist would -- composition, expense, rationale for such an investment of time and energy and community wealth -- without ever considering the meaning that they had to those who gazed on them. I think now the most compelling question of all is, in the face of materialism that seems to say that we humans only act in the interests of our mammalian heritage -- what purpose did those expensive mosaics have, then? Certainly religion itself has no purpose, from a materialist view. But at the same time -- we have done this for hundreds of years. Thousands. If it has no purpose -- why would generations of humans have given their worldly goods, at personal survival cost, to create such masterpieces of art?
Three and a half years ago, I sat in a church in southern Portugal in front of one of the most delightful statues of the Virgin Mary that I've ever seen. I felt a strong urge to pray, and I did, praying for something I'd been wishing for for years: Please, Mother Mary, send me a child.
Two months later I was pregnant.
Oh, sure, my materialist upbringing said -- well, duh. You did all the mammalian things to get a child and you didn't do all the modern things to avoid a child, and uh ... what exactly were you expecting? But it still felt more like a miracle than anything else. I prayed again, for the baby to live, to grow, to thrive, and promised in return that I would -- gasp! -- visit a church and say thank you if that happened. That I would try and make sure that my child believed in something other than his mammalian heritage, as I had grown up believing.
And soon after The Boy arrived, I travelled to the nearby Catholic Church -- the place where, after all, they will have a similar statue of Mary -- and gave thanks to her for sending me my beautiful son. I read more about faith; I wrote down prayers to Mary and would say them on occasion. But life got busy, and when my son was sick, it was of course to science that I turned. When he has a kidney infection, praying is not the cure; antibiotics are.
Some kind of faith, in something, however wavering and ill informed, has followed me most of my life. Some kind of connection, some kind of hope and faith and feeling of belief. Sometimes it is God. Sometimes it is a more pagan connection to earth. Sometimes it is a feeling of having a guardian angel watching over me.
Except for now.
For the past year or so, my sense of faith has been absent. Sometimes, with it, my sense of hope. And I feel it like a sickness, deep within me. I need this sense of faith, need it like food and water, and having never been instilled with it as a child, I have no idea where to find it. I cannot easily rejoin a church community, or pray, or visit a temple, or read a holy book. I don't know where to find my faith, and I'm floundering a little, in life. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm not sleeping well. I'm overly tired and worried. I'm distracted. And it comes down to faith. Not just faith in God, but faith in me and what I'm doing and who I am and who I will be.
I miss it. So I'm searching.
I think later this week I'll go visit that church again. Maybe it's time to try this religion thing for real.
