Early Remembrances of Religion

I don’t remember the exact moment how or when religion got introduced into my life. I was aware of my older brother and sister going to Mass on Sunday at the children’s Mass at 9:00 A.M...

I would be going to mass every Sunday when I entered the first grade. School at six was more of a concern to me than the church thing.

My mother did the 6 A.M. mass and then came home to start cooking breakfast. In those days you had to fast from Saturday midnight from both food and water if you wanted to receive Communion. Brushing your teeth was a no-no etc. Rituals had their demands.

I did go to church with my mother in the first grade. Mandatory attendance for school children did not start until the second grade.

The people going to mass at 6A.M. were working class who had to go to work on Sunday. No Saturday evening masses back then. The attendees were working people or other mothers who would go home to tend to household duties.

My memory of the first grade was that there was something like 103 students in the class. That rounded down to about 99 after the first week and more or less stayed at that number. The old wood and cast iron desks were bolted together and sometimes you got to sit three in a row. God forbid you got sick and stayed out a day or two. Not only did you lose your desk and seating arrangements but you were likely to lose your pencils, books and boxes of cardboard letters and numbers.

I’ve told people that I started in first grade with 99 kids and graduated in eighth grade with 66 children. I don’t think that they believe me. More about Catholic education in another article.

I didn’t have a clue what was going on when I first attended services in first grade with my mother. There was Father Dougherty who taught at a high school but was in residence at the rectory and helped in the warehouse factory schedule of the 6.7.8.9.10.11 and 12:15 masses. Father Dougherty empathized with people who were going to be late for work on Sunday because they felt an obligation to attend. He would race through the mass in something like fifteen to twenty minutes. No sermon and diction that sounded like it was fueled by five cups of coffee.

The nuns in first grade started the religion thing with topics about angels, saints, Jesus, the Blessed Mother, the devil, Protestants and Communists.

In second grade you memorized a lot of boilerplate Catechism and received Holy Communion. I never liked the stepping into a dark space of a confessional and waiting to talk to the small screen and priest beyond. This fear touched something primal within.

Confirmation was more of the same with questions and answers but this time a bishop got to rub some sacred oil on your forehead and you got to wear a red robe, symbolic of the blood of martyrs for the faith.

I was an altar boy and got to see things at a closer range than the congregation. I did accept what was ever handed to me in the text of faith and never questioned anything.

There was high school and in freshman religion class they made you carry around a bible the size of a cigar box. The reading of the bible was in keeping with the PR freshly put out by church management and conforming to the mission statements of Vatican II etc.

I am certain that the awkward size of the bible and the physical pain in carrying it every day to class had to do with the deal or price offered by the publishing company. I doubt that the size of the book discouraged anybody from reading it. Of course there is the old joke about “you’ve never read the bible, you’re a catholic”. It was something I would hear many years later and understand.

After high school, I stopped attending church. It would be something like fifteen years before I started to read the bible and after I read it, something remarkable happened. I had always thought that the New Testament would explain everything. I expected that the gaps in the Catholic religion thing would be filled in and explained in black and white. I expected a boost to my spirituality among other things.

What happened after I read the New Testament from cover to cover was that I realized that I was no longer a catholic. I had become more or less Protestant.

The Sacred and the Secular

There is that standard term ”the sacred and the profane”. Sacred of course means the church. Everything else is the profane.

The term is no doubt centuries old and goes back to when the church was equal to or greater than the local civil authority or king. The aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire left many gaps and many niche opportunities for those willing to fill those gaps. Many of the basic civil institutions of western and European countries started first as church entities.

Profane as a word or description has picked up much too much negative connotation over these recent centuries.

For the sake of anything you might read here, I am using or will be using the word secular in place of the word profane, to mean the common man or woman’s world outside of any religious organizations.

Secular of course and of late has a nasty connotation especially in conjunction with the use of the word humanism. That is another article.

I live in a secular world. The USA is a market economy and goes non stop 24/7, twenty four hours a day and seven days a week in case you have never seen or totally understood that new cliché of communication.

So many things culturally are changing today. The fast pace of life has taken over the way we live in this secular world.

As a child, and half a century ago, my local neighborhood was immersed in the traditional nineteenth and early twentieth century predominate Christian culture. That meant that six days per week commerce was conducted. On Sunday, the Sabbath, stores did not open. The origin of the term “blue laws” in Pennsylvania applied to moral conduct codes and legislated by the state assembly.

Open a store on Sunday and get fined or arrested. In our neighborhood that was true but we played a little bit of a local variance of the law thing. Since orthodox Jews were closed on Saturday, their Sabbath, these grocers opened their stores from nine A.M. to one P.M. on Sunday and sold mostly milk and bread. My father would be buying milk on the way home from church from the Jewish Deli for my baby sister.

Over the years in larger urban centers, these local blue laws began to be ignored or legislated out of existence.

The stage was set for supermarkets and malls to do business seven days a week.

This commerce thing did not immediately weaken the religious thing. The tradition of not shopping on Sunday or keeping a quiet stay at home Sabbath lingered on depending on local regions.

Speaking to somebody recently who grew up in rural Georgia, the collapse of the no shopping on Sunday tradition budged a little when the local K-Mart opened from 12 to 4 on Sundays in the early eighties.

All this coincided with the expanding suburban mall culture, with the local indoor fountain area or food court in the local mall becoming the equivalent of the traditional American town square.

Many factors pulled the American culture away from the traditional sacred culture of the past.

Secularism did not happen as some evil satanic campaign to rob the sacredness from Sunday. It just happened.

So when I hear the strong political voice of American evangelicalism and their faint hope to go back to some sort of rural farm sacred Sunday kind of place, I have to concede that the dream sounds great. Shut down the Malls, our new 21st Century Cathedrals of Commerce on Sunday? I don’t think so.

It is a secular world and we are very much a part of it.

A Cultural Christian

Cafeteria Catholics - Free - All You Can Eat - The Grace of God

I have spent many, many years in the pursuit of what might be called spirituality.

Along the journey I have examined my religious upbringing among other things. In this corner of the universe I wish to share my thoughts about many things sacred and or profane, where I have been, am and possibly going to.

We are entering a new world. Technology and culture are merging and sometimes clashing on a global level. The adage that all politics is local seems more true than ever.

Some of us have our feet in the old world of paper, pencils, manual typewriters and traditional western logic. The younger generation is playing with virtual and abstract ways of seeing things.

Perception is in many ways reality now more than ever before. I try to sort out the things of everyday life, work, play, leisure and without knowing it I am being transported along with the rest of humanity to the future.

This new land, this new global culture, is a strange and perhaps for some a mysterious place. I think about the European discovery of America in 1492. Some of us are explorers and some of us are left behind to read about the accounts of exploration.

As a practicing but non-church going Christian, I could be labeled as a Cultural Christian. Rather than fight pundit style journalism and Madison Avenue labels, I do not resist the title.

I was taken aback by the use of a similar term "Cultural Catholic" in the New York Times in connection with the recent visit of the Bishop of Rome to that fair city.

These days, labels besides being labels, connote what the speaker of labels want them to do - to put you down somehow.

Having started my life journey with twelve years of Roman Catholic education, I was mildly insulted by the term "Cultural Catholic" having seen it in black and white for the first time. This put me on the Internet to do further research.

Other put down labels from the church hierarchy are terms like "recovering Catholic" or "cafeteria Catholic" to label people who dare to disagree with management or who have merely fallen away or been swept away in the new global culture.

I might have found these Catholic labels insulting if I was still a full or partial, "lapsed" member of that particular Christian sect.

Jesus said to turn the other cheek. This I do here. Always Jesus. Always.

Because so much of me is rooted in the R.C. tradition, my present Christianity has not label. Rather than put wasted effort into establishing a new sect, I accept what I am - a Cultural Christian.