I was raised
Catholic, but tended to let Christian Doctrine go in one ear and out the other.
For many years, as a young adult, I gave little thought to religion at all. A
childhood friend had died in a mountain-climbing accident at age eighteen, the
first death that really mattered to me. Because I was out working on my dad’s
commercial fishing boat on the day of the funeral, I couldn’t’ attend. I didn’t
behold a corpse until I was twenty, a former football teammate of mine, killed
while driving at high speed along a lake. It wasn’t until Paula was pregnant
with our first child did I think much about going to church. We made a point to
baptize our son in a timely manner, as a kind of spiritual insurance policy. Eventually,
we moved to another Episcopal church, this one within walking distance of our
home.
For years, my attendance was sporadic. Back when I
was working full-time, Sunday morning was
my time for writing. I would get up fairly early, and sometimes write for four
or even five hours. I envied writers and other artists who had a spouse who was
the primary breadwinner. And, then, suddenly, I got my wish: I wouldn’t have to
work. It came at the price of Alzheimer’s.
My disease is known for eroding one’s powers of concentration.
And that is one of the reasons why I aim to attend church weekly. I seek
structure in my days, even on Sunday. I rarely find the correct hymn in time to
join the rest of the congregation, and tend to fall behind in reciting the
liturgy. In those moments, I just mumble along, usually a bit behind the rest
of the congregation. I often gaze into the church’s nave, with its massive,
darkly stained timbers, built in the nineteenth century. The nave is especially
striking when sunbeams illuminate the motes.
For decades, journalists have highlighted the political
power of the “religious right.” One of my early assignments for my college
newspaper was to cover a rally by Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral
Majority, a vaguely Orwellian turn of phrase: not a majority, and a dubiously
selective morality. This was in early 1981, just a couple months after Ronald Reagan
was inaugurated. Falwell quipped, “In the Bible, it was Adam and Eve, not Adam
and Steve.” His audience tittered.
Much less often do you hear about a “religious left,” but there
has been such a thing since the decades leading up to the Civil War. Quakers
have practiced non-violence for centuries. I somehow managed to avoid reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin until this spring, and
I found it eye-opening. There is a reason why Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel has
outsold every other book except the Bible. Her novel depicts the horrors of
slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War as no other book has. And, most
sadly, even after Martin Luther King’s historic accomplishments, even after
eight years of a black president—perhaps because
of a black president—the “Black Lives Matter” movement is vitally needed.
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