HEIGH-HO, IT'S OFF TO CHURCH WE GO
FELIX CARROLL
Section: Unwind, Page: UW3
Times Union
Date: Sunday, February 7, 2010
For reasons that are equal parts practical, political, spiritual and personal, about three years ago, when "my beloved son in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17) turned 4-years old, I began dragging him to church on Sundays.
Yes, I had my doubts that first day. Particularly during the consecration, when the priest said the words "Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is My Body ..." All the talk of body and blood, soul and divinity, I wondered if expecting my boy to comprehend all this was like expecting him to understand the movie "Blade Runner."
Still, at the time, he knew more about Spider-Man than he did about God, and I felt guilty as a result. He could deliver a disturbingly detailed lecture on a fictional character like, say, Salacious Crumb, the Kowakian monkey-lizard in the motley court of Jabba the Hut, and yet he knew next to nothing about that nonfictional wild rebel from Nazareth who (word has it) changed the world.
That's not to say he was happy about attending church. He wasn't. Week after week, on Sunday morning, I'd comb his hair and spit-shine him, and pull him down the block in the direction of the pealing church bells, and he'd scowl at me as if to say, "Dad, when I get bigger, this is how it's going to go down: You and me. Behind the barn. Fisticuffs. Two hits. I hit you, and you hit the ground. Got it?"
But by the end of year one, he had barged his way through the stages of grief and had finally come to accept that Sunday mornings he would have to surrender control of his wardrobe and whereabouts.
Why church? Such a question would be unheard of a couple generations ago. And so maybe mutiny against the modern day is part of it. But it's not just because my parents forced my siblings and me to attend, and that their parents forced them and onward down the family line, stretching in a buoyant backstroke through the centuries. There are other reasons.
When I was coming of age in the 1980s, the most well-known faces of Christianity in our nation were televangelists who often spoke with venom, whose suits were expensive, whose homes were huge, who made wild and unfulfilled apocalyptic predictions, and who struck me as absolute lunatics.
It was they, and not archetypal youthful rebellion, who prompted me to run in the opposite direction, back through my Catholic upbringing and out the other side to the lonely, spiritual bottomlands where absolute truth could be tossed in the air and riddled with buckshot.
At the time, I was a greenhorn when it came to demagoguery. As I got older, I wasn't so easily discouraged. I became a father of a baby whom I'd rock to sleep. He became a growing boy whom I wished to rock awake. And what do I wish him to see?
I want him to see that the face of religion today isn't the political-hacks who talk about the "real" America. It isn't the Pharisees of cable news whose popularity and bank accounts are contingent upon stoking and exploiting political and religious polarity.
So, yeah, I drag my boy to church in an effort to inoculate him from the modern-day snake-oil salesmen, and for him to see the face of spirituality in the people who go about the world doing good for others, who do so quietly, who have one foot on Earth and one in eternity. People, in other words, who've got it together.
I take him to church because the following is indisputable: A spiritual life will protect him from the bad things that will surely happen in his life. The bad things won't be as devastating.
There are other reasons. How about this: Science, medicine and politics offer, at best, huge answers to small questions. Today, the biggest question -- why are we here? -- is all but ignored outside of the specially built edifices designed for such rumination -- our churches and synagogues (and a goodly number of Irish pubs).
In a passage from a book titled "Lectures in Orthodox Religious Education," by Sophie S. Koulomzin, the author writes: "If the child's environment is penetrated by a living spirit of faith and love, the child will discover it, just as it discovers parental love and security."
Besides, children are hard-wired for the miraculous, whether it's Spider-Man or the coolest of dudes from 2,000 years ago who befriended the outcasts, who distinguished the sinner (whom we are called to love) and the sin (which we are called to eschew). The older I get, the better that sounds to me.
And the older I get, the more I realize that joy is the twin brother of truth and the principal mark of maturity.
Does that mean my boy smiles each Sunday when we walk through the church doors? No. I haven't seen him smile yet. But what are you gonna do?
Posted for Pastor Isaksen
