Losing My Religion {it happened on a sunday} Day 7

That's me in the corner

That's me in the spotlight

Losing my religion

Trying to keep up with you

And I don't know if I can do it

Oh no, I've said too much

I haven't said enough

In the 90's, I discovered alternative rock music and I fell in love.  Until we moved to Ohio, I had only ever listened to the Christian music my parents preferred.  My first concert was Amy Grant.  I can remember doing dramatic interpretive dance in the living room to my dad's Carmen tapes.  I was vaguely aware of Michael Jackson and Madonna; after all, I attended public school and there's only so much bubble a kid can exist in.  But I was certain that Steven Curtis Chapman and Sandy Patti were bigger deals in the music world than The King of Pop and The Material Girl.

NKOTB puzzle, t-shirts...we were obsessed

Our move took us away from an area with a Christian radio station.  Couple that with my parents' decision to get cable, and I became transfixed by MTV and VH1, brand-new to me at the age of 12.  (Interesting side note:  Music seemed to be the only area of pop culture my parents were concerned with.  We watched TV shows and movies that were occasionally too mature for us and read whatever books we liked.)  My best friend through middle school and high school, and college and adulthood too (love you Melissa!) was a total audiophile, and she spent much of our friendship educating me on all the music I had missed.

At the time I began to hear it on the radio, I felt grateful to the REM song "Losing My Religion".  On first listen, it was as shocking as the day that boy said "crap" outside of church.  Losing one's religion?  Was that even possible?  If so, surely it was a straight road from there to eternal damnation.  But the more I began to question and doubt my beliefs, the more that song offered hope that someone else had felt the way I did.

There were many things that affected my feelings about church and religion.  Hypocrisy was a big one.  We listened to sermons about how Jesus said to love one another, but from my point of view, I couldn't point to many examples of people actually living that way.  There were too many rules about the external and it seemed to me that no one really cared about the internal.  And why is that?  If our hearts and souls are invisible and inside us, then why do we care how someone dresses on Sunday morning?  Why were we fighting so hard to keep prayer in schools while turning a blind eye to bullying, some of it perpetrated by the students wearing cross necklaces and WWJD bracelets?  Why was abortion wrong and capital punishment right?  If church was a community of believers, then why did I feel so lonely there?

Something else shook my confidence in the infallibility of church.  As a teenager, I sat in services and listened to our male pastor.  Our choir was directed by our Music Minister, also a man.  Then there was the Youth Pastor, the Children's Pastor, the ushers and elders, even the Sunday School teachers once we hit middle school were all men (only if a husband-wife team taught together or we got divided by gender did I get to have a female teacher).  And yet, as I looked around my church, I saw smart women, capable women, hard-working women.  I saw women given secretarial roles and shuttled to the nursery or the kitchen, because apparently being in possession of a vagina limits your abilities at church to cooking, typing, and changing diapers.  

Yet at school I had a woman principal and female teachers leading and performing their duties to the same level of excellence as their male counterparts.  I saw women elected to Congress and serving as Supreme Court justices and climbing the ladders of corporate America.  I watched my own mother rise early every day and work hard at her job before coming home to make dinner and read the Little House on the Prairie books to my sister and me before bed.  Why were women passed over again and again to teach and lead and give a voice to key decisions?  I was directed to 1 Timothy 2:11, where Paul explicitly says he does not allow women to teach, as the basis for this church-sanctioned discrimination.  In practice, though, I could never quite get on board.  Especially when I saw teenage boys passing Communion and collecting offering, looking awkward with their ill-fitting blazers and sudden religious authority.  As their peer, I knew first-hand what immature idiots they were (being an immature idiot myself).  And I could not believe that it was better in the eyes of the church, in the eyes of God, that these boys should be placed in positions of authority over mature, intelligent, God-fearing women.

It happened on a Sunday morning, as I sat in a sanctuary feeling disgusted with all of it, tired of trying to do the mental gymnastics to believe, sick of the hypocrisy and hating myself for being associated with it, that I made a choice.  This was not my religion.  This was no longer something I could claim to have faith in.  There were many small moments that led up to the big one.  I held strong feminist beliefs, but couldn't call myself the F word that was almost as bad as the first F word.  I didn't want to get married or have children, and briefly wished I was Catholic so at least I could become a nun without becoming suspect.  I wanted travel and adventure instead of dogma and duplicity.  I was beginning to think that my intellect might be greater than God's ability, and I'd be better off forging my own path going forward.

It took years, a decade or more perhaps, to realize that losing my religion was not something to regard as a failure or a source of guilt.  I had to lose the toxic practices and beliefs that had somehow gotten wrapped around God to wipe the slate clean.  Only then could I build something based on my own experiences and discover what real faith is.

*Imagine my disappointment recently when I discovered the song is really just about someone who is at the end of his rope and not a sacrilegious ode to abandoning the faith tradition of one's youth.

I Didn't Get Baptized {it happened on a sunday} Day 6

The summer before sixth grade, my family moved.  A new state meant a new school, a new church, and a new loneliness that I wasn't really equipped to handle.  We landed at a Nazarene church again, and I was instructed on the catechism as part of my Sunday School class.  Quick vocabulary lesson:  catechism is derived from the Greek "to teach orally" and consists of a question-answer format to teach children or adult converts religious doctrine.  Spending a year of Sunday mornings learning catechism was almost worse than the year of Sunday mornings I spent listening to my teacher cry/read excerpts from Chicken Soup for the Soul.  Almost.

The grand finale of catechism, possibly the entire point to teaching it, was for each 6th grade student to get baptized.  Baptism is the religious practice of using water as a metaphor for the cleansing of one's soul through profession of faith in Jesus.  Some churches sprinkle, some do a full-body dunk.  The hard core people take you out to a river or lake in 40 degree temperatures and see just how committed you are to this way of life.  Most churches have designated "Baptism Sundays" so the baptismal font doesn't have to get filled each week and the pastor doesn't have to worry about ruining his three-piece suit in his efforts to save souls.  And honestly, it felt like the biggest selling point to why we should all get baptized at the end of 6th grade was convenience.  The water's ready, the pastor is wearing swim trunks under his white robe, just get it over with.  Which has never been a good enough reason for me to do anything.  

I also have some issues with authority.  I'd like to say it's just my feisty, independent nature, but in this case, I know it had a specific origin.  My parents left our previous church, the last one we attended in Texas, six weeks before we moved.  Things had gotten so bad, spiritual and legal corruption was going down, that they walked out the doors knowing they would be gone soon anyway.  They couldn't stay any longer, knowing what they now knew.  This unsettling knowledge had been revealed over the course of meetings and conversations that my parents were part of, because they were part of the church leadership.  My dad was on a board, maybe deacons or elders or something.  My mom was a Sunday School teacher and part of the choir.

They left the church damaged and disillusioned, vowing to never again be in such a position.  And the solution was simple.  They didn't have to abandon church, they just had to avoid church membership.  It's been over 20 years, and my parents haven't "belonged" to another church since.  They have passed up nominations to serve in leadership roles and abdicated the right to vote on important church decisions (like selecting a new pastor or changing a rule).  As a child, I was very skilled at listening without making noise, and I think I overheard many things I wasn't meant to.  My sister and I would occasionally have intel briefings, filling each other in on parts of conversations we'd listened to and piecing together what was going on in the grown up stratosphere.  I don't know if I was supposed to hear these things about our former pastor and the decision my parents had made.  Maybe they wanted us to know, maybe they were unaware that we knew.  Either way, their choice affected my own choices.  I would avoid the pain they'd experienced altogether.  I would never become a member at a church, and if it meant I could skip reciting catechism and getting baptized because everyone else was doing it, then so much the better.

Baptism Sunday came, and my entire class got dunked one after another while I sat in a pew near the back with my parents.  I felt no regret that day for the choice I'd made, and I still feel that I did what was right for me.  I would encourage parents and mentors and Sunday School teachers to give children choices as they are growing up, especially when it comes to something as deeply personal as baptism, and honor the decision once it is made.  It would have felt like a betrayal to be forced to partake in a sacrament I wasn't ready for and didn't see the need for in my life.  As I entered my teenage years, church culture and practices were already becoming challenging and confusing and had I not been allowed to sit out that Sunday and the others that followed, I would have been out the door that much sooner.  It wasn't the right time for me.  If baptism is an outward sign of an inward reality, then my choice to skip it also reflected a growing inner reality that I was going to have to face sooner or later.

Cussing {it happened on a sunday} Day 5

It was Sunday afternoon, and, as usual, the grown ups were still inside the air-conditioned church.  My sister and I had gone outside in the Texas sun with our friend, a boy who I thought might have a crush on my sister.  By now we had changed churches once more, this time to one called Free Will Baptist.  If you are wondering about what set apart these different denominations we attended, and whether other conferences of Baptists are being denied their free will (thus the need for our church to advertise this distinction), I recommend you Google it.  I am not now, nor have I ever been, interested in the minutiae of doctrine.  It just doesn't seem important whether a church believes in predestination or the ordination of women or the use of electric guitars in Sunday worship.

Anyway.  We stood on the sidewalk outside the church building, having some ridiculous conversation or something, when our friend noticed something on his shirt.  "What's this crap?" he asked, picking at the spot.  Cue my dramatic inhalation, the telltale sign of disapproval.  He looked confused.  "What?"

"You just cussed," I told him in a whisper.

"No I didn't," he argued back.

"Yes you did!" The big, bossy voice replaced the whisper.  "C-R-A-P is a cuss word!  You shouldn't be saying that!"

He and my sister looked at each other and burst out laughing.  They went on to insist that I was mistaken, that one could say crap or crud or dang or (my dad's personal catch phrase) dag nab it all!  I was horrified at their cavalier attitude towards words of such clear impropriety and marched right back inside the church to avoid the lightning bolts that were sure to rain down from heaven on those profane children.

Well, my sister managed to escape the merited punishment for her sin that day, but still I remained convinced that cussing was bad and I wasn't going to do it.  Even when kids at school started using those 7 words that you couldn't say on TV (not in the 80's anyway, not if you were on network broadcasting).  And while I eventually softened my stance on words like crap and dang, and even the more risque pissed, there was something about those other words, those Swear Words.  I just couldn't bring myself to say them out loud, with the exception of a college English class when I was asked to read a few pages of the Handmaid's Tale to the class.  Everything was going fine until Offred knelt between the knees of the Commander's wife and suddenly, oh my goodness, it was the F word, right there on the page, and I said it as quickly as I could but to this day I can still feel the burn of my cheeks to have that word cross my lips.

As a child, the adults around me, mostly people from our church, tried to impress upon me that these words were not good words, that if one wanted to be a Christian, then there were certain behaviors that were off limits.  It has taken many years and quite a bit of thoughtful introspection to realize that much of what I learned in my foundational years was how to act like a Christian rather than how to be a Christian.

We are all born into a culture, a tradition, a way of life that instructs us as we grow up.  Some are born to parents who instill rules at an early age, who have high expectations of their children's good behavior.  Some children are born to shoplifters and drug addicts and emotionally abusive people.  Those children grow up learning a different set of rules, that it's okay to take things without paying and sometimes the grown ups will lay on the couch unresponsive and maybe they really are worthless human beings.  We won't know any different, in fact we can't know any different, until we get older.  This is why teenagers rebel.  This is why young adults move out of their parents' houses.  This is why holidays can be tense or awkward.  Because sometimes we discover a different way of life, a more palatable set of rules, and we choose something other than what our parents chose.

This is why it is sometimes hard for me to distinguish between the specific way that my parents chose to raise me and what makes someone a Christian.  Later, during my own religious rebellion, one of the only things I held onto from my childhood was this inability to swear.  But if I had sworn off God and abandoned many of the practices of Christianity, then why did this thing stick?  Because it had nothing to do with God, and everything to do with how my parents taught me to live.  I couldn't turn it off like I did with the mandatory church attendance, because by the time I was 18, it was just a part of who I was.  I'm just not someone who swears, and honestly, my life would probably be easier if I did.  But it also means that I had to stop making a judgment every time someone else said something I considered to be "cussing."  It turns out that not only can you be a Christian who sometimes says the F word, but you can teach Sunday school and be the head pastor and serve as a missionary overseas.  This one thing doesn't negate Jesus on the cross, dying for our sins.

Now, I just want to address one area where some might find fault with my logic.  The Bible addresses our speech in verses like this from Ephesians 4:29, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only that which is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." (NIV)  This verse and others like it are used to illustrate the point, God doesn't like people who swear.  Except it doesn't say "Thou shalt not repeat a George Carlin routine" or "Don't let C-R-A-P come out of your mouth".  It says unwholesome talk, or, in other versions, abusive language or corrupt communication or hateful words.  Now, absolutely, the man yelling the word c@%t at me across a parking lot a few years ago was engaging in hateful words.  His talk could not be described as building me up or benefitting anyone (like my young children) who was listening.  But is it just a few words God has a problem with?  Or is it a whole array of "unwholesome talk" like gossip, lying, slander, and bragging?  Could someone be verbally abusive without ever "cussing"?

As Jen Hatmaker puts it in her brilliant book of essays, For the Love, "good behavior won't guarantee anything.  If they [children raised in church] don't love Jesus and people, it matters zero if they remain virgins and don't say the F word.  We must shepherd their hearts, not just their hemlines."  Far too often, I was encouraged to merely whisper gossip, to not get caught telling a lie, but Sweet Jesus don't ever say those couple bad words, because then you're risking your salvation.  I would call BS on that line of thinking, if I ever said such bad words.

Portrait of Jesus {it happened on a sunday} Day 4

When I was in elementary school, my family switched churches.  It was something that would continue to happen every few years, precipitated by some sort of divisive policy or personal affront.  We began to spend our Sundays at a Nazarene church, and I would only later realize, due to our brief time there, that my parents were using it as a place to hide out and rest before finding a community they genuinely liked.

This church was different from the last.  The smells of wooden pews and musty carpets were replaced by air fresheners and fresh paint.  There was a modern-looking auditorium in place of a stained-glass sanctuary.  And what stands out in my memory so many years later is the portrait hanging in the hall where we lined up to use the bathroom during Sunday School.

I can't remember if someone told me it was a picture of Jesus or if I somehow intuited it, but it was the first time I'd seen a visual representation of the man who told Zaccheus to come out of his tree, who walked on water, who died so we could have candy on Easter.  And it blew my poor literal 7 year old mind.

There were so many questions.  If Jesus lived thousands of years ago, did that mean the portrait was thousands of years old?  If so, how did our church acquire it?  Who painted it?  How had it been preserved for so long?  And, even more disconcerting, if it wasn't thousands of years old, if the Son of God hadn't spent part of his time on earth posing for oil paintings, then how did the artist know what he looked like?  How could we be sure that was Jesus?

I can remember staring so hard at the painting each week, hoping to gain some insight.  I hoped that I could solve the great mysteries that this artwork initiated.  Instead, it joined a growing list of things that confused me about church.  Why did we call Communion "the blood of Jesus"?  Imagine my surprise the first Sunday I was allowed to partake of the sacrament, holding the tiny plastic cup and hearing the pastor announce what we were all about to drink!  My eyes popped open, despite the solemn prayer that was coming from the front of the room.  I checked the grown ups' faces, freaking out that none of them seemed even the least bit concerned that we were apparently part of a vampiric cult.  This produced more questions.  The human body only contains so much blood, right?  And Jesus has been gone for a long, long time.  So where did this blood come from?  I couldn't wait for the prayer to conclude, I had to know right away what was in this cup, and so I drank it with a tentative sip and exclaimed, "OH!  It's just grape juice!"  Why didn't the pastor just say that?

It was probably about 10 years after I first saw the Jesus portrait that I learned a few things.  One, that artists create likenesses, that in painting historic figures for whom there is no recorded image they will often use their friends, family, even themselves as the model.  This is certainly what had happened in the image that my youth group friends referred to as "Swedish Jesus".  He looked so European and suave, like someone on his way to pick up Haagen Daaz wearing a thick cable knit sweater.

Medical artist Richard Neave drew this
image of Jesus based on forensic
anthropological research

I also learned the general physical characteristics of different racial groups, that hair texture and nose shape and skin color varied across a huge spectrum among human beings, and the Jesus born in Bethlehem under the authority of the Roman Empire probably looked more like the guys flying planes into buildings on September 11th than the man smiling benevolently outside my church's bathrooms.

All my previous questions were replaced by one pretty big concern.  Since the Bible tells us that Jesus is the physical representation of an invisible God, that those who saw Jesus in the flesh saw the glory of God revealed, why did Christian churches in the Western world (and maybe just the USA) choose to display portraits that were so obviously made in their own image, instead of the image of God?  If God created each of us, red, yellow, black, and white, and we were precious in his sight, then why were we so uncomfortable looking at a Jewish guy from the Middle East when we went to worship him?

Unlike my previous questions, whose answers had eluded me for years, this one seemed pretty obvious.  All I had to do was look around the auditorium, or sanctuary, or sancti-nasium (yes, that's a thing) on a Sunday morning to realize that very few people, if any at all, were painted with a darker shade of skin pigment than Sun-Kissed Honey.  The white men and women who made up the churches of my youth, and, sadly, still make up the churches I've been to as an adult, weren't interested in cultural diversity or ethnic accuracy.

Why is this?  Why in North America is Sunday the most segregated day of the week?  Why haven't we figured out how to integrate black and white and Latino and Asian and everything in between?  Why have we allowed the cultural institution of race to infiltrate our spiritual institution?  And what are we doing today, this very Sunday, to correct it?

**I feel the need to add that the second image from medical artist Richard Neave lends more truth to the prophecy from Isaiah 53: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."  If Jesus looked like the white dude in a crowd of Israelites, I'm pretty sure they would have found his appearance both surprising and note-worthy.

Expectations {it happened on a sunday} Day 3

My first memory of Sunday occurred in the Free Methodist church of my early childhood.  We arrived as a family, my sister and I often dressed in matching or coordinating dresses, complete with slips, panty hose, matching barrettes, and the itchy lace collars I still have nightmares about.  Not exactly comfortable clothes to wear in the Texas heat.

To me, the church seemed like a giant playground, with its many staircases and bright red carpet, the stained glass windows casting kaleidoscopes across the wooden pews.  But the expectation, from a very young age, was that I would sit quietly with my parents, sing the words to the hymns that were played and listen attentively whenever the pastor spoke.  I longed to return to the nursery classrooms down the hall, with their open windows and smiling teachers, toys and crayons and games that let us move around.

So I sat in the hard pew with the seams of my dress irritating my skin, and I thought up a plan.  I could leave the sanctuary for one of two reasons: to get a drink of water or use the restroom.  I whispered to my dad that I needed to go, and he nodded his assent while continuing to follow the pastor's sermon.  Delighted, I skipped down the aisle and passed the bathrooms, entering the nursery in less than a minute.  My old teachers welcomed me in, serving animal crackers on an unfolded napkin and inviting me to join the younger children in their play.

Freedom!  If I had to itch and sweat, at least I could move and make noise and play with other kids.  I don't know how long I got to enjoy my breakout, but I do remember the frowning face of my dad appearing in the door, and his insistence that I return to the sanctuary with my family.  I followed him out with the clear mindset that this was not over, not by a long shot.

Now, here's where my childish memories fail me.  I was never very good at noting the passage of time, or marking days and weeks.  I don't know how often I pulled this sneak out routine, if it was several times on one Sunday, or if it was done week after week.  I do know that I tried it more than once, and every time I sat in the sanctuary, I tried to imagine what was happening down the hall.  I wanted to stay there, to play and sing songs about Father Abraham and Noah and the arky-arky.  But there was an expectation that I had reached an age where stillness, listening, and learning were to be prized over movement and fun.

What I remember most, almost three decades later, are the smiles of the nursery volunteers.  People who were happy to see me, happy to clap out rhythms and pass out snacks, to comfort babies who cried and give tired parents an hour to worship with other adults.  I remember feeling happy in that room, the sun shining brightly on Sunday mornings.

Sunday's Child {it happened on a sunday} Day 2

The first Sunday of significance in my life was the very first day.  Let there be light...and I entered the world on a Sunday afternoon.  According to the old poem, this set me to be "bonny and blithe and good and gay".  I think my mom was just glad to have the long labor over, but my dad was already planning to break a record and take me to Sunday evening church; at just over an hour old, I would surely be the youngest person to ever attend service in a Free Methodist church.

Since my parents had opted for a home birth, he was free to take me out of the house and drive down the road to our church.  Although my mom was undoubtedly resting and not likely part of the decision process, it seems that he chose instead to allow me rest as well, and stayed home to care for what had just become a family of four.

But this beginning, though I was unaware of any of it at the time, set me on my journey.  My parents' first thought after delivering me safely into the world was to take me to church, to introduce me to their friends, and their religion.  It's not surprising then, that God and church and people would continue to hold significance to me throughout my life.  Children see the world as it is framed by their parents, and mine held church at the center of it all.

Sunday fashion circa 1982

Introduction {it happened on a sunday} Day 1

"By the seventh day, God had finished the work he'd been doing, so on the seventh day, He rested from all His work.  Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy."  Genesis 2:2-3

For thousands of years, Jews have celebrated the Sabbath, stopping their work as the sun sets on Friday and resting all day Saturday.  They follow the example of the Creator, who took a day each week to pause, to stop, to enjoy what He'd made.  Somewhere along the way, the Christians came along and claimed Sundays as the holy Sabbath day, rewriting the Creation story to fit a new system of belief.

In thinking about the encounters and experiences and people who have impacted my faith journey, it struck me that a number of significant moments occurred on Sundays.  Not only is Sunday the day of the week that Christians around the world gather for communal worship, it is also the day Jesus rose from the dead and offered the free gift of salvation to the world.  So it is both personal and universal, and seems like the perfect day to anchor this blog series.

Over the next 31 days, I'll share stories from my past and the moments that have contributed to who I am today.  I'm excited to put together this collection of memories, and a little nervous to reveal something so intensely personal and special to the world.  My hope is that each person reading my blog this month will do so with openness and love.  My ultimate desire is not to change your mind, but to encourage you to reflect on your own life, your own beliefs, and consider what has contributed to where you find yourself today.

Thanks for visiting!