Bears Goes to Church

So...just a warning, this will likely be a very long and tangential post.  I've got a lot of thoughts on the subject that are rattling around in a very disorganized brain so anything could happen.

Bears has been going to church with his Papa and Diddum (grandma) for months now and it's been going very well but it's brought up some questions from some of my friends so I thought I'd take this opportunity to clarify where Ryan and I are coming from as parents.  Now I should start by admitting no one has openly questioned me so these questioning friends I'm referring to are a bit on the...hypothetical side.  But I contend that they're still people and I'm not one to judge someone's merits simply based off of their actual, confirmed existence. So my hope is that this will offer a bit of clarification.

First off, let's assume that Ryan and I are trying to be good parents and therefore attempt to exclusively expose Bears to things that are, well, good for him. This being the case, one would assume that since we're arranging for Bears to go to church every week that we think this has real value for him.  And if we think that, how do we justify staying at home ourselves?  Is it laziness?  While I do neglect a great many things in order to have some glorious couch-luxuriating time, the answer (at least in this instance) is a bit more complicated.

When my mom first asked me if she could take Bears to church, I wasn't in the least surprised. The LDS faith is a huge part of who she and my dad are and the idea of not allowing them to share that with Bears seems almost unthinkable.  Plus, my parents are some pretty awesome people and I want the boys to know them as well as possible.  And to fully know my parents means to know the church as well; they are inextricable.

The reason that I don't go to church myself is both simple and extremely complicated.  The simple answer is that, at this point in time at least, I don't have faith.  At least, not in the supernatural sense.  I vividly remember the time when I started losing it: I was 16 years old when I started realizing that certain religious beliefs seemed to be incongruent with reality.  At the same time, I felt a fierce loyalty to my beliefs and that abandoning them simply because they didn't seem to correlate with my budding understanding of reality would be a kind of betrayal; not only to myself, but more importantly, to my family. It was around this time when I was asked to give a talk church and I decided to base it on a talk by Russel M. Nelson because it reinforced what I thought I should try to do.  It was titled, "Endure and Be Lifted Up." This quote embodies the gist of it:

Applied to my analogy, we are first to get “on the boat” with Him. Then we are to stay with Him. And if we don’t get “out of the boat” before we should, we shall reach His kingdom, where we will be lifted up to eternal life.

Reading over that talk again after all these years is extremely emotional for me. It's come to symbolize one of the last vestiges of my childhood. I so very much wanted to stay on the boat for it's own sake.  But as time went by, grasping for faith became like grasping at thin air.  No matter how much I wanted to be holding something tangible in my hands, I just...wasn't.  This was the beginning of a very dark time for me.  I continued to go to church and go through all the motions but what once was a beautiful and meaningful experience became tedious and alienating.  Over a year went by and I was asked to give another talk.  I don't even remember what I talked about; only that it went terribly.  I felt like an impostor.  A fake.  I was sure that everyone in the chapel was able to see me for the faithless fraud I was.  I stuttered my way through the talk, never taking my eyes off the paper I was referencing, and practically ran back to my seat.  That was the last talk I ever gave in church. From then on, I only attended church when forced to.  I know that, as hard as this time was for me, it had to be just as awful for my parents.

I didn't know how to live a faithless life. All the coping skills I had been taught for dealing with hard times were faith-based.  Around when I was 19 or so, I went to an LDS conference.  One of the speakers said something along the lines of, "a child who is raised in the light can never be happy in the dark." That line was like a punch to the gut and I very much feared that it had some truth to it. I grappled for years with guilt over abandoning my faith while doubting whether my life could even have meaning in this harsh reality outside religion.  Even as I was losing my faith, I tried to cling to at least the hope of an afterlife.  It took me a long time to realize that this was actually exacerbating my pain over the subject, rather than relieving it.  The only comparison that I can think of is of a mother who's child has been missing for many years.  Logic tells her that her child is almost certainly gone but she so very much wants for her child to be alive that she chooses to believe that they're still out there.  And in so doing, she denies herself the ability to grieve, heal, and move on in her life. Facing what I consider to be the sobering reality of mortality allows me to grieve over the impermanence of my life and that of my loved ones. My hope is that in this acceptance, I can see life for the truly precious, brief, improbable, and miraculous thing that it is. That said, if I somehow received compelling reason to believe that the religion I grew up with is true,  I would feel the same way that my hypothetical mother would at finding out that her child is, against all odds, alive. Euphoric.

This is where explaining my point of view gets a bit...tricky.  One might think that my acknowledging that I wish it were all true would be the first step in gaining back the faith of my childhood. However, aside from wishing, I still stand outside the LDS faith as an explanation of reality.  That is, at this point in time, at least, I don't consider it to be a realistic possibility.  Bringing back the analogy of the mother again, let's say that she never sees her child again but instead of either hoping or letting go, she decides to build up an entirely new reality in which her child is back at home with her.  She goes through the same daily rituals that she would as if her child were really there with her until she's thoroughly convinced that she has, in fact, been reunited with her child. As tempting as the idea of wrapping myself up in a very beautiful theology so tightly that it effectively becomes truth, something holds me back.

The problem is that IF there is no divine inspiration, then the only thing that allows us to discern right from wrong is our own judicious use of intellect and empathy. And it is when this comes into conflict with religious doctrine that it becomes an issue.  If one thinks that their beliefs are divinely-inspired, they can console themselves with the idea that God has a much better moral perspective of things.  But what if it's nothing but layer upon layer of psychological mind games that we play on ourselves? Do we not have an obligation to ensure that our individual beliefs have no impact on our laws and things we deem to be human rights?  That's the whole idea behind the separation of church and state but I contend that when your entire sense of reality and morality is based off of religion, there can be no real separation. That, right there, is the reason I can't go back to church.  At the risk of sounding hopelessly naive, we all have the ability to impact society through small ripple effects and I feel a sense of moral obligation to be as honest with myself as possible.  I've got no clue as to the ultimate truth of things but it seems very important to base judgments and decisions on the little I do know rather than a plethora of things I hope are true but have no practical way of confirming.

So.  Bears and church. I don't go because I feel like it would only confuse and cheapen things for him.  My lack of faith prevents me from being able to participate in most things (sacrament, callings, testimony meeting, just to name a few) and my having to explain why I'm not doing certain things would do more to undermine the experience rather than add to it. Also, the fact that we don't go with him means that he isn't being brought up to believe that the church is an absolute truth to be taken for granted, but rather one of many explanations as to the nature of existence.  This, to me, is an important distinction.  If Bears and Biscuits decide as adults that the LDS faith provides them with more happiness and meaning in their lives, I will be very happy for them.  Mostly because I can feel confident that it wasn't just a result of indoctrination but simply from exposure. Regardless of what Bears and Biscuits ultimately subscribe to in an effort to make sense of their existence, going to church will not only give them more time with Papa and Diddums but will connect them more viscerally to their own heritage.  Even though we've got differences in beliefs, we can all agree that we love the boys to pieces and are each getting a chance to do our best by them. Some might call it a confusing upbringing; I call it well-rounded.   And we're all pretty awesome.  So there's that.

And that's why Bears goes to church.