Family- where spirituality, sacredness & home belong.
Sacredness here will not include any mention of organized religion. I’ve spent too much time in my life participating in organized religion to ever want to be associated with it ever again. However, as I’ve aged and more importantly as I became a parent I am coming around to the idea of the importance of sacred spaces, mindfulness, and participating in connected space with others.
I grew up nominally religious, which included church on Sundays. Now I was in middle America, in one of the fly-over states. Now-a-days my home state has become unrecognizable in the wave of conservatism that has swept rural America. As I watch it from afar, I am aghast at how crazy it seems. My childhood trips to church did not seem to include the vigor, religious fervor, or adulation of a particular political figure.
It was more a societal thing; my immediate family went to church to meet up with my maternal grandparents on Sunday morning. Us kids would romp around in Sunday school until we got old enough to sit in the pulpit. Sunday school classes were filled with your run-of-the-mill middle America Presbyterian teachings. We talked about Old Testament stories, often white-washed of all the divine-ordered slaughtering that accompanied the storyline. New Testament stories seemed warm and welcoming with a white-washed Jesus smiling benevolently down at us.
I can’t really recall any aspect of Sunday school sticking out to me, but I can remember sitting in the sanctuary during the service, laying down with my head on my father’s lap staring up at the ribbed-dome ceiling. There were ceiling fans that lazily spun around, but I can remember being memorized by the repeating patterns in the wood. Or trying to count the individual boards from one side of the ceiling to another.
Growing up we spend most Sundays in the old sanctuary. A quiet, reserved place with towering ceilings, stained glass, and red velvet cushioned pews. Lunch followed with the grandparents at a local deli. Religion never meant more than Sunday mornings. But as I grew up, my teenage angst evolved into a fundamentalist approach to Christianity fueled by a emotional conversion experience and a conservative Wesleyan Church.
Thankfully this extreme dogmatism ended with the death of my maternal grandmother and general adulthood. By the time she passed away I had traveled the world, living in Western Europe, the far East, and central Europe. I left my hometown as quick as I could ad not only met different type of people (which is easy to do when you leave a small town) but spent time in different countries. Some who had no formal religion. Some others who were a completely different religion than I had ever experienced.
As I entered my mid twenties, I was a fierce atheist. But now as I enter my early forties (when did that happen?) I am gentle atheist. I recognize that I don’t know anything really, which really solidified after my stint in Academia where of all things to study, I studied religion. I also became a parent in the past three years which has completely turned my life upside down. So stay tuned for more not-religious, but maybe spiritual musings from a gentle atheist who now recognizes the value that organized religion can play in a life, especially a new parent.
Komodo Dragons & Family
Have I mentioned that I am a new parent? It seems wild to me that I created a person. That person now is almost three years old. How is it possible that me, with all my life stories, and mishaps created someone so new? My little one is so new, even at almost three years old. They are just starting to talk, can now express wants/desires ( I need!!) and is also finding their place in our little family.
One sidenote- I will not be posting any picture of them or reveal their gender. I will always refer to them in the third person. Why? Because I want to keep their life private from the crazy online world. So if that bothers you, too bad. They are more important.
Back to the cute stories… my little one has recently taken to reading books before bedtime. There’s one in particular that we read every single night. It’s called, “Borris Gets a Lizzard”. It’s about a wild boar “Boris” and his family. In this particular book, Boris daydreams of getting a Komodo Dragon and gets into all the shenanigans trying to bring one home. I have now read it a total of 29384738 times. But my little one loves it, so we keep reading it at bedtime.
One this that has caught my attention is that 1) my LO (little one) is fascinated with buses (which I already knew) and 2) they are interested in how Boris’ family represents our own. Now I realize that talking about family make-up can turn political in a split second. Especially in my home country who is a day away from deciding who the next president will be. One choice is a decorated person who is currently the vice president of the country. The next is a convicted felon with a makeup problem. I guess you now know which way I lean politically. Anyways, our particular family looks from the outside as a nice and neat hetero-oriented family. And that’s how I’ll keep it looking in this post. Our family also mirrors Boris’ family in the book. My LO keeps pointing out that Boris has a mamma and a baba just like themselves. There’s a particular page where Boris’ family is sitting down to dinner (while discussing Komodo Dragons) and my LO keeps pointing out that there is a mamma, a baba and Boris. Just like our own family.
It’s cute, and it happens every night. But I think there is something deeper at play. It seems like my little one is figuring out their space in our family. Yes, we have a mamma, yes, we have a baba, and yes, we have a LO just like Boris’ family.
It always seems like a profound moment when my LO points out Boris’ family. For them and for me. Mainly because I’ve never really had a family that I can count on, never had a family that I really liked. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I fell into religion so hard, because it was a place where I finally felt like I could belong. But I’m hoping that for my kiddo, that they don’t experience the painful self-doubt that I did while growing up. And that they grow up with a secure sense of belonging.