Tuesday December 21, 2004 - Salvation

Tuesday December 21, 2004 - Salvation

My relationship with religion has been ambivalent, alternating between devotee and agnostic, the former in my youth, the latter for most of my adult life. My earliest recollection of religion was the Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Mississippi when I was a preschool youth. What I remembered most about the church was the singing. The place would ring with the voices of a congregation wanting to demonstrate their devotion by singing the praises of the Lord. My next recollection of church was in El Paso, Texas and now instead of a Baptist Church, I was regularly attending Our Lady of The Assumption Catholic Church at the corner of Byron Street and Truman Avenue. I spent a good deal of time at that church, taking religious instruction to receive my first Holy Communion and thereafter saying confession on Saturday and getting communion on Sunday. I was all of six or seven years old when I discovered Catholicism. It gave me a sense of peace knowing that all the sins I had committed during the week I could confess on Saturday and achieve a state of grace on Sunday after taking the body of Christ during communion. I felt spiritually clean and at peace with myself.

When the Army transferred my father and the rest of us—mom and my three sisters—to Puerto Rico, the first thing I did was find a Catholic Church close by where we lived. I had a special urgency in seeking out the church at the time, as I had begun to have nightmares from which I would awake terrified and filled with a great sense of foreboding and fear. The Church was my refuge from the horror and it seemed to work. I prayed earnestly and the dreams did not recur. Three years later the Army transferred my father to a military installation outside of Lawton, Oklahoma. Now twelve years old, my hormones were driving me crazy and I began to have nightmares again. There weren’t many Catholic Churches in Lawton and my only recourse was to join a Baptist Church within walking distance of our house. What a Catholic Church has that a Baptist Church lacks is a sense of ritual, which I immediately noticed and missed.

All the icons of a 1900-year old religion, the priest attired in his liturgical vestments and his alter boys dressed in white, hands clasped before them entering stage left onto a medieval setting: a massive cross bearing a crucified Christ in the center of the high ceiling wall flanked by a statue of the Virgin Mary on the right and a statue of John the Baptist on the left. In front was the raised alter with a small golden cabinet—resembling a peaked roof house—in the middle, a chalice filled with the hosts that would be dispensed during communion. The alter sat majestically behind a three foot high fence of smooth polished lightwood—walnut or some such—atop two semicircular layers each a stair step higher and half-again the radius of the lower. The lack of pageantry in the Baptist Church made it more difficult for a young boy to embrace.

The catholic church also had the capacity to comfort, this ages old ritual of sacrifice and redemption acted out each Sunday. I was now left to find solace in a religion that was strange to me, a religion that preached that we were all doomed to hell without a true commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. There was no mechanism of a private confession enumerating each transgression to a—for the most part—nonjudgmental priest. Instead, you had to come forward before the congregation as a whole, admit you were a sinner and beg forgiveness of the Lord. Each Sunday, I would sit and watch the pastor rail against the devil, painting a devastating picture of hellfire and brimstone and reminding all in the congregation that this fate awaited those who had not acknowledge the Lord and admitted they were a sinner.

Then the nightmares returned and I began to wrestle with demons that I had kept at bay through years of religious ritual. They were returning along with the dreams that left me frightened and apprehensive. I tried to confront these demons waking and reassuring myself that it was just a dream and not real. It was after a week of fighting these demons by myself that I succumbed to the fire-and-brimstone preacher and leapt up from my seat, acknowledged I was a sinner and asked for forgiveness. My sudden outburst took the preacher completely by surprise. He was into his routine of lambasting all the sinners and suddenly he had to confront one who wanted salvation. Bawling my eyes out, scared out of my wits, I stood emotionally naked in front of a congregation of strangers looking for peace. I found the peace I was looking for that day but it didn’t come from the church, it came from the realization that no one in that church could give me any help for the trouble I had. I was the only person that I could count on to come to my aid. I muddled through the rest of the service and stood beside the preacher as the congregation left church that day, each shaking my hand and giving me a blessing.

I didn’t stop going to church after that. I still enjoyed being in a place with lot of people all doing the same thing, but I stopped believing that the man standing before the assembled congregation had any more answers than I did. He believed in God but couldn’t prove it to himself or anyone else. He tried to help people, who came to him with their problems, but he wasn’t a psychologist or a physician, nor could he lighten the load of someone with a heavy grieving heart. Most were average people with all the baggage that the rest of us carry trying to do God’s work. Of all the priests that I have known, I can only think of one who I would classify as selfless. He did not do well in the Catholic Church but he was loved by all of his parishioners. I’ll talk about him another time.