“To each, his own,” I often say when people ask me if I believe in God. As in, to each, his own god—god with a small “g,” not a capital one. My emphasis on the lowercase here in many ways mimics my intentions when I give that response—to trivialize, or secularize the notion of “god” and steer clear of a Conversation with a capital “C,” about Religion with a capital “R.” This is partly because this question is often posed to me on, say, a Friday night, in a bar or restaurant—times and places I hardly consider adequate or inviting for such a Conversation. “In vino veritas” may hold some truth, but let’s be honest; your vision of God after your third glass of wine is something neither I, nor He (bless him), want to hear about. The other reason behind my constant attempts to pull the conversation back down from the Heavens is that, truth be told, I don’t know much about Religion.
In my curious years when I would come home from school and ask my mother who this He was that I kept hearing more and more about, she always had (and has) the same response: “Darling, we grew up in a Communist country—religion was forbidden, the churches were locked up, I’m the wrong person to ask, I know nothing.” I have lately come to consider it “blasphemous” (in the secular sense), that churches were ever locked up, as my art history education has inspired in me a passionate aesthetic affinity for them. Nonetheless, I can’t help but imagine I will one day have a similar answer for my children: “Darling I was raised by parents who grew up in a Communist country and didn’t have any religious education to pass on to me, I’m the wrong person to ask, I know nothing.”
I may then proceed to tell them about the saints, the holy trinity, the sacrifice of Abraham, and other such snippets which I learned of from masters such as Velázquez, Bernini and Kierkegaard, but I would most likely then return to the safety of my parents’ black-and-white, no-religion, know-nothing upbringing, for mine would take slightly longer to divulge. While they grew up in a Communist nation, I spent the majority of my childhood in a Christian one— not only were the churches not locked up, they often made their way into your home. To this day, I remember vividly the moment in which I learned my “don’t talk to strangers lesson” for good—who could forget the caustic punishment I received the day I let two strangers into our home because they smiled at me when I opened the gate and asked if they could see my mom. Yes, they were Jehova’s witnesses, and needless to say, they all-too-soon witnessed the way out of our home the minute my mother laid eyes on them.
I assume the severity of the punishment was intended to dissuade me from ever letting any stranger in again, for strangers come in moulds much worse than messengers of God, I now know. And lord knows I learned my lesson; in fact I think I once forbade a friend of my mother’s entry because I didn’t know her—a stunt that got me in a whole new sort of trouble—what’s a child to do! But as much as those “messengers” were mere samples of strangers to be wholly mistrusted, there was also something specifically and inherently scary about them, about Jehova’s witnesses themselves. I still get goosebumps when I see them in the street now, in their readily recognizable two-boys-in-white-shirts-with-red-ties-on-bicycles format. I imagine these goosebumps are some sort of Freudian repercussion inspired by the vague childhood memory of the persistence they exercised in entering our home that day, the trouble my mother had in getting them to leave, and the slaying tags they pinned on her upon their reluctant departure, calling her blasphemous, profane, and everything else short of Satan. Poor woman could have gone up in flames! Not to mention, and this is the really disturbing part, the sick manipulation of an innocent six-year-old girl hardly critical enough for the rigorous role of gatekeeper—a stunt just as perfectly befitting a rapist, murderer, thief, or other criminal. So, while my parents were in their early years forced to look through the Marxist lens and consider religion an “opiate,” I was momentarily fashioned to consider it a crime.
Some twenty years later, similar “messengers” who hang around Hyde Park on Sundays still make me shudder—who knew leaflets could be so terrifying…or Sundays in the park, for that matter. But the terror is of a purely subconscious, associative sort—I’ve grown out of my six-year-old understanding of Religion as crime. Quite the contrary in fact, I’ve come to harbor a great admiration for it, and I have another fanatical “happy-clapper” type to thank for it. Some years ago when I graduated from university and took some time off to figure out what to do next, I spent some time traveling and along the way visited a childhood friend of mine. Sure enough, as had my own, her breasts had grown, her sense of style had changed, her naivete had turned to mild cynicism. Far from the silly girls who used to traipse around nightclubs in their mid-teens wearing skimpy-strapless-backless-loincloth nothings, coughing their way through their first cigarette, throwing up blue from too many try-it!-tastings of Sambuca, and kissing every boy that paid us a smidgen of attention, we had grown into mature, discerning, fully-clothed, Chablis-sipping, women. Our interaction was no less exciting than it once had been as we shared experiences and traced our transformations in front of the mirrors we had always been for each other. But there was one marked difference—while I had become “just” a woman, she had also become a woman of God.
All the uncertainties I had about my future, the signs I longed to find for the yellow-brick road I wanted paved before me, the gems I was trying to unearth that would adorn me into the woman I wanted to become—she had one brief and simple answer to: “God will show me the way.” I made lists and lists of pros and cons for different options and spent many a sleepless night rummaging through them in my mind, while she had a quiet candle-lit bubble bath, said her prayers, and fell soundly asleep upon the comforting pillow that tomorrow was in His hands. This! Coming from the girl whose footsteps you always unavoidably followed when you tried your first drink, drug or boy, the girl who had always been there and done that (or him), before you had. I hardly doubt God showed her that way. Who are you and what did you do to my friend?! In an attempt to find an answer to this question I convinced her to go out with me and relive one of our crazy Friday nights for old times’ sake. When we woke up the next day at noon, having gone to sleep blindingly drunk some six hours before, she was hardly the fun-loving, up-for-anything gal she had been a few hours, or years before—she was morbidly depressed, scornfully angry, wholly unrecognizable. “When I do that,” she began to explain, “when I get drunk, and act like an idiot, and go to sleep at dawn, I feel I have sinned in the eyes of God.” This time I had the brief and simple response, and lord knows it was hardly well received: “Honey, what you’re feeling is not a sin, its called a hangover.”
And that was when I coined my “to each, his own” response. I too, had a small measure of regret that “morning,” a feeling that I had “sinned,” but not in the eyes of God. I felt, as many of us do after a drunken night, that I had somehow betrayed my own moral, ethical, behavioral code, my own notions of right and wrong, my very own gospel. Not to mention that we had hardly done anything “sinful,” certainly compared to what we used to do—we had simply gone out and had a few drinks, gotten happy and lively, and gone home late—together, not with any boys. There hadn’t been any coughing, blue vomit, or liquids exchanged with any strangers. We had simply played exaggerated, roudy, drunken versions of ourselves—something I occasionally consider fun, and something I always recall fondly the following day. Yes, I may have spoken my mind or danced my dance with more vigor than I would have post-afternoon tea, but to say that last night’s persona was any less me, or that my behavior was in anyway sinful, is a blatant and unwarranted exaggeration.
We all have standards, codes, “things”—for lack of a better word—that we believe in and allow to guide us, to show us the way. To someone it might be fashion, Vogue is their bible, and wearing something that is last-season is “sinful.” To another it might be elitism—having a glass of headache-inducing-box-wine instead of a mature, oaky Bordeaux is not drinking, its straying. And to me, it is my upbringing—the values my parents painstakingly taught me to uphold, together with the standards I then added on my own. Like my friend who woke up that day believing she had sinned in the eyes of God, I often find myself morbidly disappointed that I have sinned in the eyes of my parents, and in the eyes of the me They Created. We can all have our “bibles,” our rights, our wrongs and our sins, without having God—we can all, and do all, have our own “gods.” I don’t mean to say that one shouldn’t believe in God or be religious, bless you if you do, I am subject to your eternal envy, but I must emphasize again, “to each, his own.”
[To be continued…]
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