My father wasn’t much of anything, kind of vaguely agnostic, anti-Church for the most part. My mother was a lapsed Catholic who went through periods of wanting to go back, though she also hated a lot of what the Church was. My religious upbringing, as a result, was patchwork, to say the least.
I barely knew any Bible stories, for instance, but knew Jesus was supposed to be a Good Guy. We watched all those old Rankin and Bass Christmas specials and I really liked the more overtly religious ones, like Nestor the Long-Earred Donkey, though I have to admit that Santa Claus is Coming To Town probably won out as my favorite. In school I’d draw pictures like some kids do, where you’d show Heaven at the top, and some stick figure God sitting on a throne. We didn’t eat meat on Christmas Eve or Good Friday. Church, though, was nonexistent for the first part of my life. I wasn’t even baptized (my sister, the older sibling, was, though. I guess I represent my family’s final slide into Hell).
In short, religion was mostly a series of disconnected tropes and rituals that held little meaning for me or my sister, or at least not the meaning they were probably supposed to have.
In later years, there were some church-going experiments, mostly a matter of my mother (and sister, too, I think?) deciding to go to midnight mass and the like. There were a lot of books, too, very liberal stuff — Matthew Fox, etc. In high school, my major rebellion against my father was to start dating an Evangelical girl and go to her church. After that short stint, we had a right ol’ religious revival in my family, sans father, checking out a couple of Catholic Churches. It didn’t last long. Mostly, I think, because a lot of the churchy stuff, such as it was, was mostly a rebellion against my father, the enemy in the house by that point, me and mom and my sister united against him.
He was Science, an engineer, reading Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke. But I read those guys, too, it was one of the few connecting points we had. I was more my father’s son than I cared to admit at the time, and that probably fueled a lot of choices, from the half-hearted religious exploration to choosing social sciences and humanities over hard science, despite my interest in astronomy and space travel. Religion wasn’t a matter of feeling God or finding answers. It was a way of being where he wasn’t.
The fact is that, despite years of wanting it to be true, I never really felt like it was true. Never really, truly felt it, in my heart. Never heard a voice I interpreted as “God,” never felt a “presence” or anything like that. I wanted to, at times, but never actually felt it. And religion, as a whole, makes me very ambivalent. I’m drawn to colorful mythological stories, I love some of the more noble aspects, and at the same time it leaves me cold, or invokes out right hostility.
