I grew up in the Catholic Church. In fact, I attended Catholic schools for twelve years where I was imbued with an excellent education as well as a strong sense of the beliefs of my religion. Somehow I realized that I needed to attend a college that would provide me with a more inclusive view of the world than the one that had sheltered me for the first seventeen years of my life. I turned down a number of acceptances and scholarships to Catholic universities around the country in favor of attending the University of Houston which offered a much larger and more diverse outlook on life. I felt the need to learn more about people of other faiths from other places and even those who had no faith at all. Somehow I understood that it was long past time for me to interact with more than just mostly Catholics like myself before going to work in the world at large.
I had grown up in a safe bubble with wonderfully loving people but without any real contrast to my own carefully protected beliefs. Only once had I encountered a challenge to my religion and ways of thinking. It happened with a girl from my neighborhood who asked me questions about my church with some incredibly different beliefs that I had never realized existed. Then she challenged me to test my faith by attending services at her church for contrast.
I never got that opportunity to widen my horizons because my mother’s reaction to the invitation was to ask the pastor of our congregation if it was admissible for me to visit another branch of Christianity. When he insisted that I must be protected from such an adventure lest I become confused, my mother promptly forbade me from even considering such a bold journey into another system of belief. Still, I wondered what would have been wrong with expanding my worldview in a fairly benign environment with my friend.
College introduced me to people of many cultures and spiritual points of view. It was an exciting time during which I encountered people from around the world who approached the spiritual aspects of being human in very different ways from my own. I began to realize both the similarities and differences between the individuals with whom I made contact. I saw that it seemed to be in our natures to seek answers to eternal questions in spiritual ways and sometimes to use logic and critical thinking to deny the very idea of God. I saw that some beliefs were rigid and others more open to considering alternative ways of living. I found both good and bad people within the same or similar belief systems. I became more open to the idea that none of us possess all of the answers but we all have a tendency to seek them.
Over time my mother became more open to differing ways of defining our individual philosophies about ethics and the rules that guided them. She seemed to realize that even among the microcosm of her family the spiritual evolution that had transpired to create life long Catholics, converts to other Christian sects, agnostics and atheists had left very good people within each group. She began to study eastern influenced religions to learn more about them. She opened her mind to the possibility that God very legitimately comes to each person in the form that best suits their situations in the world. She even saw that those who questioned the very existence of a higher being were often more spiritual and loving than those unwilling to accept that faith or lack of it is founded on our personal beliefs about our purposes in life.
My mother-in-law became my religious mentor in many ways as well. She had been raised in the Episcopal Church but converted to Catholicism after marrying my father-in-law who was a devout follower of that faith. She did so only after much study and many conversations with a priest willing to convey the tenets of the Catholic religion. To insure that she was converting with an open mind he introduced her to a treasure trove of brilliant dissertations on the universal search by humans to find answers to our eternal questions. By the time she officially became a Catholic she had read texts from Augustine and Aquinas as well as those from every corner and belief systems of the world. She had become a quasi religious expert capable of discussing everything from the origins of the Greek gods to the nihilism of Nietzsche.
On Sundays she and I held soirees together while the men watched sports in another room and the children played the games of youth. We sipped on tea and seriously discussed questions about the existence of a true God and what that being might represent for our lives. Those were heady times for me that made me more and more willing to understand those whose beliefs seemed to be so counter to mine. I was able to compare and contrast with a background of knowledge that helped me to realize that the search for answers about our human place in the world are universal. I learned how to respect the earnestness of our individual spiritual journeys.
Not long ago I was invited to the baptism of some of my mathematics students. I had been baptized as an infant so it was quite interesting to see the ceremony that requires the participants to actively pronounce and seal their beliefs in the act of accepting Jesus as their savior. It was active rather than passive as my own baptism had been. I found many commonalities between my church and theirs, but also distinct differences as well. It was profoundly wonderful to participate in a ceremony in which I saw my students on a spiritual journey that took a slightly different path than my own. It reminded me of what truly makes humans different from other creatures. We are the only ones looking for truths about who we are and how we should be. There is glory in that even if the answers we find are very different. Instead of pushing others to share our own feelings about a higher being we might do better to simply honor the decisions that our fellow humans have made and do our best to be open to the idea that maybe there really are alternative pathways to the same place. It would be a mistake to enforce one way of thinking on everyone. The variety of ideas is a good thing. Let’s leave it that way.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 