Thoughts on Religion for the Grands

 At night when I’m going to sleep or coming into consciousness from sleep, I often think of something that fills me with an aching nostalgia or I think of someone or a time that I miss terribly.  Often I will come awake suddenly with a wrenching awareness that I will cease to be one day. I have always been this way for as long back as I can remember.

It is also in the middle of the night that I feel the urge to get down in words some of my thoughts for my sons and grandchildren. I regret that I have virtually nothing written by my mother or my aunt that gives me some insight into their inner world, their views, hopes, fears etc.   And so this is for my sons, Matthew, Christopher and Andrew and my five beautiful granddaughters, Ema, Lila, Mairi, Alice, Elodie and others who may come along later.

I am going to try to put in words my views on religion.  As you girls reach adulthood, I may not be around and it is only probably well into adulthood that you may develop a questing interest in the belief system that you’ve taken in as children.  When you have children of your own, you may give it some thought as well.  You need to understand that I share these thoughts, not to persuade you to think as I do, but merely to give you a window into the life of your ‘ancestor’.  Oh dear I’ve become an ancestor-to-be!!!

Until I was 17 and left home for college in 1962, three women raised (reared) me.  They were my own Mother Constance Dyson, my Aunt Wilda Harper (my Mother’s youngest sister.) and Jackie Williams, an older friend of both my mother and my aunt.  All three influenced me in many and varied ways, but for now I will only address religion.

To my knowledge my mother never gave a thought to religion, whether there was a God, etc.   My mother did agree when she married my father to have me raised as a Catholic. But that was I’m sure to expedite the marriage so that the ceremony could happen within the blessing of the church and satisfy my paternal grandparents. My maternal grandfather was alive, but he wasn’t at the ceremony and I don’t believe cared much one way or the other who my mother married or what religion they might be raised in. My aunt referred to herself as an agnostic and never went to church.  Jackie was a staunch Texas Southern Baptist and that was primarily where I received what religious training I have.   When I lived with her for several years in primary school and one year in junior high, I always went to Sunday School and church.  I was a member of the Girls Auxiliary.  We read the Bible, memorized verses and I could recite the books of the Bible. The first five of the Old and the New Testament still roll off the tongue even though I’ve not given a thought to them in decades.  I learned lots of hymns,  sat in hot, stuffy churches fanning myself with a cardboard fan usually advertising a funeral home. The smell of damp, talced bodies, the taste of Mogen David 'wine', the voice of a preacher calling us to be saved, the subtle feeling that I'm being judged and must work to be better--all  this evokes the religious experience of my youth.

 I remember being baptized at 12 or 13 I think.  In the Baptist church you walk down into a sort of concrete pool with a glass side that allows the congregation to see.  The pastor holds you by the back of the neck as you hold your nose.  He pushes you all the way under saying…(Here I should note that I just searched the Internet to discover a description of this ceremony and oddly could not find one.).  Alas, I don’t remember the words.

I remember a time when I was 13 and felt strongly that my mother was going to go to Hell if she did not get baptized.  So because she wanted, I think, to allay my fears, she was baptized.  I’m sure she held no belief that she was somehow saving herself from the eternal  fires of damnation.  

One of the odd, in my opinion, tenets of the Southern Baptist church (or at least I was taught this.) was that once you declared your belief in Jesus Christ, the son of God, you could go out and engage in the most awful behaviors from lying and cheating to maiming and murdering and still make it to Heaven.  I never quite got that!!  As I grew into adolescence these sorts of thoughts came to me often.    As I studied the universe, I could not figure out the location of Heaven and Hell.  It certainly wasn’t somewhere beneath the surface of the planet or suspended above us in space or at least there was no evidence of this.  I grew skeptical more and more of explanations like, “ Well it’s there you just can’t see it.  Have faith.”

For years I tried to let go of my need to believe and to know through evidence, experiment, observation, logic, reason.  People around me would lose a child and say it was God’s will and I never understood why God would take the child.  Or they would pray to God that the child would live and if through the efforts of doctors, nurses, medicine etc., the child lived, it was God’s will that he lived.  If an airplane went down and only one person survived, that person might say it’s God’s will that I survived because I believe, or because there is purpose for my life, but all the others on the plane were expendable presumably.  I never understood why millions upon millions of people on the planet who had never heard of Jesus or who believed in other gods/ goddesses or no gods were condemned to burn through all eternity in Hell.  Scholars seemed to twist themselves into pretzels trying to rationalize an omniscient God with all the horror that goes on in our world.  A soaking rain that will grow plants is God’s will, but so is the searing drought that turns fields to dust.  So all these thoughts and countless others swirled about in me and I mostly ignored it all and paid lip service to a belief in God just to avoid upsetting family members of faith, supervisors of my work, friends of faith…

When I married your father/grandfather, we tried to go to church a bit for the sake of the children mostly.  At Wood Forest Methodist Church in Houston we volunteered to teach an adult Sunday School class.  He was working on his PhD at Rice University in Central European History. I was teaching English and French at a local junior high.  We had ordered study materials developed by the Methodist church on the New Testament.  It promised to be a great experience of learning about how the New Testament came about, who wrote it, when, contexts, influences etc.  On the third Sunday the class told us they wanted a more charismatic experience  This experience finally drove home to me how alienated I was from the whole idea of religion.  At that time in my life I hungered for knowledge about religion.  I think without realizing it I was trying to reconcile my growing skepticism with all the lessons from my youth.  I left the church never to return.

Several years later on July 19, 1977 we arrived in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Andrew was born a few short weeks later on August 9.  A lesson I took away from my 5 years there was the importance of the separation of Church and State.  In KSA there was no separation.  There was only one religion- Islam- and to practice another was against the law.  All behaviors were influenced by the Koran and centuries of custom developed  through the practice of Islam.  Like Christianity and Judaism, indeed practically every religion on earth, the system of beliefs was spread by the sword-- that is to say through violence.  Just before we left KSA, a young girl, 12 I believe, was impregnated by her Uncle.  She was executed by family members for bringing dishonor to the family.  I was sickened by this.  The notion that she was the perpetrator of dishonor, that dishonor as defined by custom influenced by Islam carried a punishment by death was to me unconscionable.  The word honor unfortunately has come to leave a bitter taste in my mouth.  When the rationale of restoring honor is used to take the  lives of the innocent—how can honor be an honorable word?  And how can a person call themselves a being of faith, of faith in a 'peaceful' religion and yet call such despicable acts honorable?

Some people like to say that it was not slavery but economic differences that caused the American Civil War.  There are those who likewise say it is not religion that brings upheaval, death, and destruction to the Middle East, to Europe in earlier centuries but other factors.  I dare say the reasons for killing one another are always varied.  But religion is so often at the core either as a precipitating/trigger flashpoint or because one group of adherents in the ascendancy uses their position to hold the adherents of other beliefs down until they can no longer lead productive lives and explode in rebellion.

I've noticed through the years that most of us seem to be incapable of showing an interest in the  belief system of others without attacking it or trying to get the Other to become the Not Other.  Example, there are those in my circle, who practically every time they speak with me, try to Save me.  They tell me their conversion story as if their experience will somehow become mine and I will accept Jesus as my savior and thus be spared the fires of Hell.  It’s interesting to note that during the course of my entire life, I have NEVER had a person of faith ask me what I believe.  Not without some prompting which I usually don't bother to do.

I suppose I am, at this point in my life, by definition, both an agnostic and an atheist, if that is possible.  I’ve come to understand that I can believe only if I can see evidence of something.  Without evidence I can speculate certainly and wonder if ( I wonder if constantly.).  And generally I believe that the major religions of the world, through certain leaders, thinkers, and practitioners, have served man well. I would be a fool if for one moment, just because I am not a person of faith, I thought that religion was not important. It underpins, in America, so much of our thinking, our actions, our laws, our social structures.

I believe there was a time in the past where humanity needed religion to keep at bay its host of fears of the unknown.  Declare something known and have that known articulated by someone with influence and authority and fears are quelled and a religion is launched.  But countless people were also put to the sword for holding beliefs counter to the local authorities. Galileo comes to mind, but there were thousands upon thousands of the faceless and nameless killed by Christians alone and we haven’t gotten to other religions.

All I want, my darlings, is to believe what I wish to believe and let everyone else do the same as long as those beliefs don’t bring harm to folks either within or outside of any given group.  Ah!... and there is the rub in our rapidly shrinking world.  For a girl of 8 to be married off to a grown man and forced to have intercourse with him is to me unalterably wrong.  When an Afghan Army officer chains a young boy to his bed frame so that he is available for sex, that is to me unalterably wrong.  But when the world was far flung as in the 19^th century, I would not have even known of such customs in all likelihood, but today through the Internet, every arc of the world practically is in our laps moment to moment.  So to practice one’s beliefs in isolation is more and more difficult.  And to live in harmony we and others must learn to rethink our closely held beliefs, to find accommodation  that keeps the center from disintegrating.  But of course there are those lines in the sand where accommodation amounts to betrayal of self.

In America, and all you grandchildren are half American, we have seen here and abroad a resurgence of a kind of fundamentalism of religious thought that is narrow, without tolerance, defiant of science and anything that smacks of the intellect, a turning inward excluding all those who are different.  We’ve become ugly, angry, and violent and this has spilled over into our politics where despite the fact that separation of Church and State is enshrined in our Constitution we find more and more that people of fringe religious practice and thought are walking the halls of Congress holding the nation hostage to their religious beliefs and political viewpoints.  

One of the  interesting aspects of a lifetime of evolving views on religion is to recognize and accept the incongruity of being an atheist and still being moved deeply by sacred music or the soaring architecture of a Gothic cathedral.  And therein lies a complex of emotions that almost defies description--a sense of wonder, of joy, of uplifting of the spirit, the escape from the bonds of the flesh, a connection to an ancient past, but also a deep sense of loss, of betrayal, of sadness that beliefs once held are no more.  Now I must find new ways to keep my center in balance.  I turn to Nature, to friends, to Art and the selfless acts of countless fellow beings who keep hope alive that eventually the human race will find its way.

My darling grand children and future descendants you must find your own way in this world with a foundation established by your loving and very smart parents.  Nana hopes that you will find your way to a set of beliefs that allows you to walk through the world with grace, confidence, compassion, tolerance, curiosity, and joy.  Further I hope that you will learn to ask others what they believe, listen with an open heart and ask them questions that are free of underlying agendas.   Then if they do not reciprocate, ask them gently with a ghost of a smile, “Would you like to know what I believe?”  And tell them where you are in this thinking/believing moment of your life’s journey.   I so love you girls (and there may yet be a grandson or great grandson in the offing) and one of my few regrets in life is that I will not be around to offer you a cup of ginger tea, sit back in expectation and ask each of  you to share your own story.

Thinking of you and Imagining you in this Moment,

Nana  aka Patricia Gail Burroughs Mangham  4:15 PM September 28, 2015

Attach the Meaning

I've been cleaning my office. Eek What a job!  But it is fun to come across old letters-- one that is 70 years old written a few weeks before I was born, a post card from a son, 20 years or so old, (the postcard that is) little bits of the past rising through the clutter. A few moments ago the piece attached to this post fluttered to the floor. It was one of my earliest attempts at writing and was published in the newspaper in Brattleboro Vermont where we lived before moving to Prescott in 1997. I hope it touches you as much as it did me as I wrote it...

My Long Journey with The Grapes of Wrath

I’ve just been informed that I’m to portray Ma Joad in Prescott Center for the Arts’ upcoming production of THE GRAPES OF WRATH.  John Steinbeck’s book had a seminal effect on me when I read it in my early teens.  It asked of me that I step outside myself and really see a wider world, one that I could only visit through the covers of a book.

At the end of the novel the Joad family has met with disaster after fleeing the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to go to the promised land of California.   Rose of Sharon's baby is still born, the rains come and they move to higher ground and shelter, where Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon discover a man too sick from starvation to eat solid food. And so Rose of Sharon offers him the milk from her breast. That image shocked me as a teen--the baring of a breast, the offering of it not to an infant but to a grown person, a stranger and finally a man.  How stripped of our trappings of civilized society must we be to commit such an act!  How desperate must our starved body be to overcome the usual dictates of the mind.   In time I understood some of the levels of meaning in the image--the sacrifice of convention for survival, the basic human need to replace loss with renewal and the sometimes surprising and ultimately inspiring act to extend our humanity to include the stranger, the Other.  So it may well be John Steinbeck provided my earliest inspiration to look beyond the universe of the Self.

It’s interesting to note that reading the play in preparation for the audition was my inspiration to focus on The Immigrant Experience for The Artist’s Path 2016 Festival.  I realized that these good people driven out of their homes by Mother Nature, a failing economy and sometimes ruthless bankers were immigrants.  While not moving to another country they were seeking a new life in a land very different from the plains of Oklahoma.  Steinbeck wrote:  “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects].”   Later when finished with the book, he said, “I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

Wickipedia offers the following summation:

Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's influence: "The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel – in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms – of 20th century American Literature.  The Grapes of Wrath is referred to as a Great American Novel.

          

The book was noted for Steinbeck's passionate depiction of the plight of the poor, and many of his  contemporaries attacked his social and political views. Bryan Cordyack writes, "Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist and a socialist  from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. They denounced the book as a 'pack of lies' and labeled it 'communist propaganda.  Some accused Steinbeck of exaggerating camp conditions to make a political point. Steinbeck had visited the camps well before publication of the novel and argued their inhumane nature destroyed the settlers' spirit.

I cannot help but note the parallels between the collapse of the economy in 1929 and our more recent Recession of 2008.  Many folks including this writer have not recovered from the effects of this most recent financial debacle.

But literary and political criticism aside, the book and the play give us an opportunity to celebrate the resilience and compassion of humanity.  I am grateful to be a part of this American icon.

Tickets at   http://pfaa.net/main-stage.html