on Religion

I wasn’t raised in a church; my family was, I think, nominally Christian. This meant that we were occasionally told not to use Jesus’ name as an exclamation of surprise or displeasure (a rare kind of censure) and that at Christmas, we were read the story of Christ’s birth and reminded by my mother that there was more to the holiday season than gifts (which always seemed to make sense to me). My first girlfriend, in the 10th grade (late bloomer, yes I was), was a Southern Baptist. This was irrelevant at the time; so naive I was, I thought this would have little to do with out relationship until I realized that I was expected to attend church with her family, at least once in a while. So I went, a total of 3 times. Each time I was offended by something (and this was before I even began to have my current ‘liberal’ opinions and justifications I have developed over the last few years). In particular, I recall some exceedingly ignorant and offensive comments about Muslims and Buddhists. So, I never really got into the whole ‘Baptist’ scene in my hometown. A little later on, I became quite good friends with a Catholic, a rare and exotic species of which I think there are about 7 (perhaps 9 or 10) in Sumter, SC. I went to mass with her one time, a few days after September 11. I came to college unattached to any creed, orthodoxy, or church. Very quickly, I fell into the whole ‘I’m in college and religion is a myth, a patriarchal institution of control which developed as a tool to control a restive population and enforce rigid sexual codes which has largely been discredited by the critical revolutions of the mid 20th century and the sexual revolution of the 1960s’ mindset’–All of which I do think is kind of true.

The trouble with that was, I had some friends who were quite religious; in my head I’ve always called them the Catholic crew (you know who you are, I’m sure). They were, for the most part, sincere in their beliefs, not evangelical in their outlook, and lived lives remarkably similar to mine-sometimes surprisingly so. I was a little in awe, I’ll be honest, although sometimes it was displayed in unexpected ways. It was all these folks, in part, that led me to begin to re-examine the rather cavalier attitude I hadn’t even realized that I had developed toward any serious experience of spirituality or religion. For some personal reasons, I even started going to Catholic Mass at the local Cathedral; I realized I was finding meaning in places I’d never looked before, in the words of Christ and Christian writers. I discovered C. S. Lewis and Thomas Merton, as well as the words of Mark, John, Luke, and Matthew. Of course, I still had/have….issues with organized systems of religious thought; mostly I, personally, find them constrictive, and more focused on following rules than with the place where they began, in a communion with God/Jesus/Yahweh/, whatever the case may be.

Which, I suppose, is why I appreciate Thomas Merton; he approaches God and Christianity from another angle of personal involvement, one that stresses the sense of discovery and awareness of a being with and involved with God/Everything rather than subservient to his draconian rules given from on high. A question of emphasis, since he was, of course, a good Catholic. To me, however, he transcended the bounds of his faith, rather than becoming constricted by them; God is to be discovered by contemplation, not by blindly following strictures that might not make any sense at all, not by mindless obedience, but by introspection and a development of awareness and integration and a place in the universe that can’t be enforced by rules, but comes from the interior realization of truth.