(written several years ago)
I grew up in an era when the churches on Sundays were full of believers. Easter meant new clothes and white shoes, getting picture cards of Jesus in Sunday School and singing while the sunlight streamed through stained glass windows. I took the Easter story to heart, as I did the Christmas story and everything in between, and I thought the whole world pretty much did the same.
In my teens I began to question. I struggled to keep believing and sought reassurance everywhere for my growing doubts. I read The Robe and The Big Fisherman. I tried going to different churches. Nobody else seemed much concerned about the questions that troubled me. My parents and friends seemed puzzled when I asked them what they thought. And after a lifetime of Sunday School and church, I wasn’t ready to give up the beauty and safety of it all,
The first year my husband and I were married, we sponsored the youth group in our church. I remember helping the teenagers put on an Easter sunrise service and breakfast for the congregation. One by one, the kids stood up at the lectern in front of the sanctuary and read the Easter story from the Bible, or their poems or meditations, and led the singing. Then everyone went to the church basement, where some of the parents were cooking bacon and eggs, and I had decorated the white paper table covers with little nests of colored coconut and jellybeans.
But we had to move away, and my doubts continued. In our first home away from our home town I read A Man Called Peter and Mr. Jones, Meet the Master and The Prayers of Peter Marshall and was deeply and desperately moved. That was the April my husband got drafted. It was peacetime, but serving time in the military was still the obligation of every young man unless he had a deferment for college or family reasons.
When he was sent overseas a few months later, I moved to the city, got a job, haunted the library, and read and read and read. I read things I had never heard of before, things I would have been reading in college had my life gone in that direction. I read, and learned, and thought, and realized.
Then it was spring and Easter time again, and my husband came home, and soon we started our family. When we began going to church, and I sought an adult form of my childhood beliefs there and couldn’t find it, my faith finished falling apart.
For awhile, I lived with the bleakness of not believing in anything. My intellectual integrity would not allow me to deny all that I had learned. Too many wise writers had convinced me that religion consisted of myths humanity had created to explain the world and make it bearable. There was no God, no afterlife, nobody looking out for us or paying any attention to us at all. I had to acknowledge and accept this.
But I had small children, and I distinctly remember the night I was watching them in the bathtub and suddenly knew, knew, that all those writers were wrong. There was just more to it than that. Love was real, and none of the wise writers had explained it away. It didn’t mean that all my childhood beliefs were true, but it did mean that there was something more than that bleak darkness. And it meant that I had learned something, within myself, that nobody had taught me and nobody could take away.
When they were old enough, I took my small daughters to Sunday school. I have snapshots taken of them in their pastel Easter dresses, their white shoes and little white flower-trimmed hats. My younger brother was in college then, majoring in religious studies. He steered me to new books and ideas, among them John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God, which offered new interpretations for people like me who had grown up with the old beliefs and now could no longer stand by them. Something called the “new theology” was burgeoning in those tumultuous days of the sixties, and before long it was reflected in a new curriculum set forth for the denomination I belonged to. I found hope in these new materials, and for a long time I stuck it out in the church.
But the “new theology” and the new curriculum were soundly criticized and rejected by the congregation of the church I attended. There was bitter controversy over the issues of the day: Vietnam, poverty, civil rights. By the time our third child was old enough to start Sunday School, I was so appalled at the way the church was going, and the nonsense I heard children being told, that I decided my children were better off staying away than having to unlearn all of that someday.
So we drifted away from the church. Easter became a pleasant, pagan festival of egg coloring and Easter baskets, presents and candy, just as Christmas seemed to unhook itself from its connections with the Christ child, even though it retained its meaning as a time of peace and good will. There was never any guilt. If anything, there was relief at being freed of the hypocrisy and sentimentality that religious occasions demanded.
My husband died, much too young. The children grew up and one by one left home. My parents died. One Easter my state of mind was such that renting the Monty Python satire of Christianity, The Life of Brian, and watching it by myself seemed the perfect observance of the day.
But my source of joy, strength, comfort and fulfillment has never failed me, and that is the people I love and who love me. My daughters have stayed close, to me and to each other, as they have married and had children of their own, the grandchildren who delight me beyond words.
I don’t need the church, don’t miss it and can’t pretend I do. But I do need my family, the caring, the connection in mind and heart, the gatherings, the beloved traditions and rituals, the shared familiarity and pride and humor, that confirm the truth I learned so long ago watching my children in the bathtub: love is the only thing that matters. I do need my religion.