The Mystery of Faith

My Buddhist mother and heathen father have only themselves, Tim Rice, and Andrew Lloyd Webber to blame for my adult conversion to Christianity, and the bringing of shame down on the family. Moving to the Bible Belt might have been a contributing factor — it could be something in the water down here — but the seed was planted long before the conditions got ripe.

Oh, but it was buried deep, deep down.

I've written before that my folks weren't exactly Ward and June Cleaver. But I don't want to give the impression that I grew up down on the ashram. It is true that plants in our house were hung with macrame and that incense burned from time to time. My dad had a full beard and long hair, and my mother wore a lot of flimsy Indian cotton wraparounds. But if you had his chin and her amazing brown legs, you would too. If they weren't the "normal" people I sometimes wished they would be (Mom tried to serve quiche lorraine at one of my sister's birthday parties; on Saturday mornings, my friends would sometimes be treated to my Dad stumbling blearily past, stark naked, on the way to the bathroom), they weren't dope-smoking hippies either. Dad taught at the university. Mom was on the PTA. For the most part, they worked and lived and operated in their own unconventional manner within the bounds of convention.

All families drift along, or row against, currents whose headwaters begin far behind them. Few influences held sway in our home like the 1950s Irish-Roman-Catholicism — that uniquely deranged reading of Christianity — in which my parents were raised. My Dad's family was more orthodox than most. One year, he and his siblings were literally paraded down Main St. on a float whilst praying the Rosary in front of a cardboard fireplace— as the model family that prays together. A friend of mine here in Arkansas who came from a similarily oppressive religious upbringing once told me that the force of velocity it takes to escape fundamentalism is so great, most people who do so can never adjust their course to consider any other form of religion.

This perfectly describes my father. But he didn't really escape, because he spent the rest of his life reacting to religion. It was great for his writing. Not so great for the jams that faith can sometimes pull a body through. For my father, religion and dogma were the same thing, and neither one was for thinking people. My mother struggled for some years to reconcile Catholicism with her awakening feminism, but eventually threw in the towel (she didn't become a Buddhist until about ten years ago). At the same time, I had been baptized Roman Catholic and I went to Catholic school by virtue of Newfoundland's now-defunct denominationally segregated public education system. I went to Mass and said the prayers and could recite them right along with my parent's rebuttals. It would be fair to describe my religious upbringing as ambivalent. Schizoid also comes to mind.

I once mentioned that I had converted from "intellectual fundamentalism". What I mean by that is that I consider it another form of dogma to suppose that human intellect has all the answers. I mean that secular culture is often as uncomfortable and anxious about not having black and white answers as the religious fundamentalists are. They just look to different sources to provide the absolutes. I was listening to Julia Sweeney (also a recovering Catholic) on a radio interview on her recent book, "Letting Go of God," and I heard a poignant tone in the way she spoke of relying solely on scientific reasoning to take her to some sort of bedrock of belief. There was relief in it. As if, at last, she could know what was what.

I find this line of thinking to be ultra-religious in negative, and the people who cherish it don't seem to realize they sound every bit as evangelical as the religious people at the opposite extreme. They seem to have a zealous need to prosetylize, and literalist assumptions about what people like me are finding in traditional religion. When the religious right claims they speak for all Christians, secularists accept it unquestioningly. I can say this because I was like that for so long. Whenever I met educated, intelligent, like-minded people who were actively involved with religion, I really thought they were brainwashed somehow. Or maybe psychologically deficient. I mean, there had to be something wrong with them for them to believe that stuff.

Like I had my act all altogether. Around the time my first marriage was ending, I was having terrible anxiety attacks, so I signed up for a course in meditation to see if I couldn't figure out how to breathe again. It was taught by a Buddhist, and it was so helpful, I became curious about Buddhism, which is not Deistic. Then I heard two things that changed my life. One was a suggestion from the Dalai Lama, to Westerners, that they not be too quick to abandon their own spiritual heritage. Change the bathwater, not the baby. Huh.

Then I heard a tape by a comparative religion teacher here in Arkansas, Jay McDaniels, who pointed out that most of us tend to compare apples and oranges when we look at other religions. We judge the one we find attractive by its teachings, and the one we are critical of, by how it is manifested. Everybody screws it up in practice, he pointed out. We're humans. That doesn't mean we should quit trying. Double huh.

I realized then, that I had been as absolutist and narrow-minded as the most dogmatic and unquestioning holy roller when it came to looking at Christianity. I assumed if someone entered a church or read the bible they were signing on to a literal understanding of scripture and catechism, either willfully or ignorantly. I saw that I was willing to give a generous margin of error and interpretation for just about any other religious tradition than my own, and that I probably at least owed it a second look.

It was several more years before I would act on that realization, but one Sunday morning I got myself and my infant firstborn dressed and walked nervously into an Episcopal church. It had all the smells and bells I remembered from Catholic mass, but it seemed lighter and brighter. A woman priest served with her male counterpart at the altar. After the service, they greeted me without pressure. I came back the next week, and the next, and then signed up for the newcomer's class to see if I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with these people. About five weeks into the class, I raised my hand and said I had a confession to make.

"You all are really nice people. And I love the service, and the Cathedral. I think this class is fascinating. But I just think I need to tell you, before I go any further, I don't know if I can buy into the Jesus thing."

Ed, who has since baptized my three children, grinned. "Welcome to the Episcopal Church," he said. "Next question?"

Those crafty Episcopalians have continued to suck me in in this tricksy, believe-what-you-want-to-believe fashion. I go through variable phases of participation. Some years I am all in, like the years I taught Sunday school class for adults (Topics: Gay civil rights, The Artist's Way, and a track-by-track exegesis of Jesus Christ Superstar, Original Studio Recording). Other times, like this year, I hang back on the fringe, needing to reclaim the outsider's perspective for a time.

I haven't been to church once during the whole season of Lent this year, and I have to tell you, it has me feeling out of step with Easter. It seems superficial to celebrate the rebirth of something if you haven't gotten consciously in touch with letting go of it. In years that I have participated in Lent, Easter feels so much more joyous when it comes. The champagne and chocolate and flowers make so much more sense after forty days of voluntary simplicity.

One year, I was led by my dreams (and a whole lot of Jungian psychology and social anthropology that would bore you to tears) to wear my long hair pinned up or tied back as a Lenten discipline. It sounds stupid, but it was a real sacrafice for me. My hair is a big prop in my persona, so going without was incredibly instructive. Oh, and did I ever glory in letting it tumble down my back on Easter. I was a hair-tossing and twirling menace.

The church calendar, like any human-made measure of time, is just an overlay. It is especially effective when it lines up with seasonal cycles, like how Advent moves us through the darkest time of year, and Easter coincides with spring, but you know, you can just jump in any old place and it still counts. So at the eleventh hour, I decided to jump aboard the Lenten caboose, and try and get in touch with the season.

My husband knows what that means. And he is making plans to evacuate. Because what it means is that our house will be the site of the Jesus Christ Superstar festival for the next 48 hours. Because that seed I mentioned at the beginning? That one that got planted so long ago, and so deep down, and took all those years to germinate?

It came in an leather-embossed double album set. The canonical, original, studio recording, released before the Broadway show. All others are cheap, possibly harmful, imitations. I have it on cd. I have it on the iPod. I have both versions of the film on dvd (the first is a seventies period piece, but still effective; the more recent one is excellent, except for Jesus, who has the pipes, but is otherwise lacklustre - see it for the french actor who plays Judas).

Now you know. Now you see.

I still don't know if I can buy into the whole "Jesus thing." I don't think Jesus himself would buy it. But when I listen to this music, I feel things. I get goosebumps. I cry. My heart soars, crashes, soars again. I identify with every lyric. When Judas - whose story the opera really is - smolders with frustration, so does my inner reactionary. When Pontius Pilate sings, "What do you mean by that? That is not an answer!", the cool rationalist in me is frustrated also. When Jesus rails against God's infuriating inscrutability in the Garden of Gethsemane and when he cries for his "poor Jerusalem", I feel that despair and sense of being cut-off. When Mary Magdalene wails that she doesn't know how to love him...sing it, sister.

I get all of it in some way that my know-it-all brain doesn't.

There is an affirmation in the Episcopal liturgy called the Mystery of Faith:

Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.

You can substitute "God" or "Faith" or "Love" or "Hope" for "Christ" if it will help you see what I mean. At any given moment, my truth dwells in one of those three statements. I am continually cycling through them. I never arrive at a full stop. I can never say, "this is where I get off. Nothing more to see."

This is the mystery of faith. The more answers I find, the more mystery there is. My truth is true for me. My mother's is true for her. And Julia Sweeney's is true for her. None of them cancel each other out. If I could be absolutely certain of anything, it would be that the real truth is much bigger than all of it put together.

Happy Easter, wherever you are in your mystery, whatever your truth.

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This fabulous Salon.com essay on Julene Snyder's similar obsession with JCS will illuminate everything. Quote: "'Oh. My God.' My whisper echoed through the theater, prompting shushes from disapproving adults around me. I didn't care. All I knew was that Jesus Christ Our Lord was a total fox."