God 101

My ancestors were Europeans and my understanding is that they came from Ireland, Wales, England and Bavaria. There is a logic that says among the Brits earlier relatives floated to the isles from the continent. Five hundred years ago, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, my ancestors were Catholics...for better or worse.

It's humorous to know that all those fundamentalists and Jehovah's Witnesses and Presbyterians are all descendants of friends of popes. The Masons and Brothers of the Orange Lodge have to live with the fact that many happy catholics preceded the argument that takes up too much of their time.

Before I knew that people picked on each other over differences in philosophical thought, God was a great and distant mystery. To me He was neutral and He looked after all the world. I hadn't yet learned about those competitions that got mean. Or about two armies that marched off to kill each other after separate clergymen had blessed them and told each side that their blessing meant that God was on their side. That's a consolation and for serious folks, it's an incentive. Who wants to go out there unprotected?

When folks get enthused, their pacts with God seem to get nastier. Holy wars, crusades, inquisitions and the slaughter of losers in wholesale is okay, if you win. History is kind to winners.

In my house there was no inclination to church-going. Grace was said at the dinner table when guests appeared. And when we went to bed, we children were prepared to say cute prayers: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I..." Die? What's this?

My relatives are into all sorts of religious identity; some have none. All of my ancestors were Church of England, Church of Ireland (the same thing) or Roman Catholic (if they came from Bavaria). Some got here before others. The C of E gang came before we were a country, the Baden-Baden Catholics before the Civil War and the Irish in the late eighteen-hundreds. In that case it was my great-grandfather whose bride died shortly after they arrived and he went back to Donegal for another. All of these predecessors became Episcopalians but their heirs drifted into various sects or married into the Roman fold.

The only church in the "known world" was Presbyterian. It was built on the site of Christian Ross's mansion a block from our house. It was a dump. Non-presbyterians like my parents dumped their kids off at their Vacation Bible School in the summers. It was there that we were read stories about David and Saul and Ruth and Esther and of Daniel making friends with lions and Jonah beating Pinocchio to the whale's belly and of three kids messing up Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. We were told of baby Moses floating in a paper boat in the bull-rushes and of Noah building his ark for a rainy day and of Delilah cutting Samson's hair and the Good Shepherd looking for a lost lamb.

It's breath-taking to tell how much we absorbed. We knew more stories than Jean Shepherd and Garrison Keeler rolled together. At age six we knew the biographies of more people than those the first six years of school would offer us of Washington and Betsy Ross and Franklin and Patrick Henry and Admiral Dewey. And Christopher Columbus.

We knew more about Palestine than Pennsylvania. We learned poetry. Our first hero of literature was David the shepherd boy and we memorized "The Lord is my shepherd..." before we could "pledge allegiance to the flag..."

My parents forgot their roots. They sent us to the Sunday Schools that other people had decided were good for their kids. First it was the Presbyterian dump that might have had a good vacation bible school but the Sunday School was in less romantic hands that viewed the Sabbath as Calvins' and Knox's invention. Two or three weeks at the Christian Science Church found Eddyism equally unattractive. The Lutherans, at the edge of the "known world," won out for a while. Mrs. Yost, our piano teacher, became our Sunday lay theologian as well. Saint Thomas was the patron of the German congregation but even he couldn't save it from the wider community suspicion that the Germans were Nazis.

In 1942 we left the Germans to fend for themselves and we were enrolled in the church where our ancestors and President Roosevelt were communicants. Almost immediately, as if to redeem earlier mistakes, my sister and I were put into confirmation class. The priest was determined to process about a hundred new members a year. My mom didn't share his enthusiasm and yanked me from courses in religion because in her wisdom I was thought to be too "young" to enjoy the benefits of God. My sister, older at ten, was allowed to continue and be confirmed with the chosen. It would be much later when I knelt before the bishop to receive the full graces of Holy Mother Church.