EASTER. It’s the big save-the-date of the liturgical calendar. The end of Lent, the rising of Christ, it even trumps Christmas with its holy importance – at least in the eyes of the clergy (though small children may argue).
A modern Easter is a hodgepodge of symbolism: eggs, chocolate, death, rebirth – all are themes we peg to the Christian interpretation, though these are lifted from earlier stories. Ishtar was hung on a stake and resurrected. Horus did his own version. Even the name Easter is an evolution of the pagan festival Eostre (you can thank that one for the bunnies).
This pick’ n’mix of traditions is emblematic of my own relationship with religion. This Easter, I celebrated with my family, something that even a few years previously would have been unthinkable.
In my early twenties, I’d denounced all religion as not only hokum, but as a global threat. This was thanks to my burgeoning desire to poke holes in patriarchal establishments and top-down rule. Even my schooling, at a tiny, nurturing Catholic primary school took on a menacing tone. Now though, there’s nothing Machiavellian in a teacher who looks like Father Ted, wears a bum-bag and spends his afternoon recycling the village’s cans.
At 15, my RE teacher asked me to read at an important mass, and I’d agreed, as always. But in the days that followed, this simple act of delivering gospel teaching sat heavy in my stomach. In an act of uncharacteristic boldness, I told my teacher that I couldn’t do it in good conscience because I was questioning my faith. It was the first time I’d said it aloud. And it was doubly hard as she was my favourite, and I couldn’t conceive of disappointing her. To my relief, we had a frank, rather grown-up discussion about the strength in addressing your own doubts. Ultimately, this permission to question and my own dissatisfaction with the answers Christianity offered took me away from God.
Being raised in the church and then going cold turkey is a hard thing to explain to those who haven’t experienced it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want God to exist. There was no gleeful shedding of a past life, or indulgence in newly okayed hedonism. I felt like a baby bird prodded out of the nest I’d outgrown.
It deeply saddened me to no longer feel supported by an invisible friend. It was like scratching off scab, and exposing your new skin to the elements when it’s not quite ready. All I could feel was a need to plug the spiritual dyke that sprung a leak.
I didn’t want to leave the church, but my inability to reconcile ideas, thoughts and feelings forced my hand. I didn’t believe in heaven or hell, or mortal sin, or that condoms were evil, or that we should all take moral instruction from a man who lives in a palace. Add to this my growing love of science, and it just didn’t add up to faith – at least in the shape that I’d inherited it.
As many a young adult who has ideas bigger than themselves, I started to read. In an attempt to scratch my spiritual itch, I looked to first to other religions, indulging in light flirtation with Mormonism, Krishna Consciousness and Zen Buddhism, to no end. I moved on to the philosophy ancients, then to more contemporary voices like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and, for a while, they sated my questioning. This ratifying of my burgeoning rejection coincided with becoming a parent, and, suddenly, I had a new set of ideas and values to steer that ship. A system that was anathema to my own upbringing, and so by present thinking better.
It was at a time when most of my friends and I had gone to university and seen a world much bigger than our own turf. With the expanding of minds, there was fertile soil for new ideas to germinate. Among us, it had become faddy to dismiss all religion, and shout anyone down who thought differently. I felt unstoppable. Smart and transgressive. But in hindsight I was just another idiot with an idea and a mouth. It took seeing this self-important a-religious vanity in action to jolt me back to my senses. That flavour of intellectualised sanctimony looks pretty gaudy on a child’s lips.
“We believe in science, not religion. God doesn’t exist.”
There’s a new tone when this spills out of a naïve mouth. A particularly unpalatable one when uttered to her Muslim best friend who’s just brought you leftovers from her family’s Eid celebration.
I’d gotten it wrong. Way wrong. A cardinal parenting sin.
Was that certitude any better than dogmatic Christianity? In teaching my children to question the world around them, I’d ill-equipped them for religious conversation. There was an absence of grace. I’d forgotten they needed empathy and humility to navigate the world around them, and was mortified by my egregious omission.
So it was back to soul-searching. Did I want to be that person? The one who thinks her own interpretation of the world was better than anyone else’s? No. That was the same questioning that made me reject Catholicism in the first place.
Though it pained me to say it, I felt lost again. I didn’t like the qualities staunch atheism amplified in me, though I wanted it more for my mind than my heart. There was nothing gentle in my disbelief, and I’d passed this on. On reflection, I liked Catholic-me far better than atheist-me, so where did that leave me? It left me with questions, something time has taught me isn’t a barrier to leading a meaningful life.
I recently saw images of the Calais jungle flattened by balaclava-clad troops. In the name of French secularism – läicité – they trampled a church and a mosque, and I cringed. The thoughtlessness of it snapped a string in my heart. Here, where people had fled everything, and had nothing, they had built their sanctuaries. In the name of progression, they were flattened without a second thought. It was the perfect collision of politics and religion in one small act. The message it sends troubles me.
I now know that I can’t raise political free-thinkers without passing on religious literacy. So many of our conflicts in life stem from the two crashing into one another. So I’m talking to my kids about Jesus. Not as a divine manifestation of the son of God, but as someone who showed compassion and love.
I’m also talking to them about the Buddha. About Allah, Krishna, Yahweh, Ganesh and many more, because they need a holistic understanding of their cultural landscape. We can’t ignore religion simply because it’s not ours.
In much the same way that Easter has expanded earlier traditions, that’s what’s happened with spirituality in our house too. Instead of blanket rejection, I’ve learned to look back on my upbringing, find the positivity in it and pass it on without chaining it to dogma. To some it might be a crude butchering of faith, but it works for us. In parenting, that’s often all you can hope for.
No, I haven’t found Jesus again (he’s rather good at hiding), but I have found my own sense of peace.
On his deathbed, Carl Jung said: “I don’t believe in God, but I know him.” I used to puzzle over that paradox, but now I finally understand what he means.
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