A Holiday Truce

I'm standing in the middle of the upstairs landing, feet planted and arms crossed. I'm staring down my mother, well-dressed and made up in the lipstick and pearl earrings she only ever wears on Sundays and holidays. We're running late this week -- we're running late every week -- and all she wants is for me to get my shoes on and get moving. My brother and sister are already in the car, ready to get the weekly ritual over with -- a short drive up the hill to the cathedral, and then it's sit, stand, sing, sit, stand, wait in queue, chew wafer, sit, stand, sing, and back home again in an hour. We have done this every week for as long as I can remember.

But I've decided I'm not getting in the car. I've decided this is an Important Issue.

This is the moment I tell my mother we're not members of the same religion anymore.

My transfer to a Jesuit high school a year-and-a-half prior, as it turns out, has taken its toll on my piety. I've been studying scripture and doctrine in Theology class, and have found it all deeply troubling. Look at all these big words I'm using! I've done my homework for this one. I am on a roll.

I'm not Catholic anymore, I say. No, no: I am a Deist.

Deism is the belief that God exists, but has no direct influence on the world. It's a dead religious movement from the late renaissance that I found on Wikipedia. It's not exactly a huge step from being Catholic anyway. But it still feels like an important step to me (only partly because everything feels Important at sixteen.) Mostly I'm somewhat startled by how it feels to declare, with a witness, that I'm something other than Catholic.

Until this point, my mother has been assuming my raving has just been excuses, covering for the desire to skip out of an obligation. Her children trying to duck out of Sunday mass is a matter of routine. My declaration of apostasy is met with an eye-roll at first, but as I keep insisting -- and she realizes that I mean it -- she hesitates. Her eyes harden.

She tells me they'll be back in an hour, and she turns and goes down the stairs. I hear the front door shut, and I have the house to myself.

Piety

The first 16 years of my life I generally think of as belonging to a person who, while certainly bearing some resemblance to me, was profoundly different and separate. This other iteration of myself was -- perhaps more than anything else -- Catholic. He had been raised to equate piety with moral character, and to believe that life in the absence of faith was hollow and meaningless. He believed he was being monitored at all times by an actively present and mostly-benevolent God, and that his behaviour was being evaluated on a set of cosmic rules. Very often he would envision a cosmic tally in which all of his transgressions against these rules were permanently recorded.

He thought very often about the mind-swallowingly huge notion of eternal torment.

But because I spent most of my young life in secular settings, this theological anxiety spent most of its time below the surface. Few of my friends gave much if any thought to religion. It was getting transferred to a Jesuit high school that brought my beliefs out into the open.

Once, after one of the many church services that dotted our school curriculum, a friend (confessing that he himself was not a believer) asked me if I was religious.

"Sure," I said.

"Very religious?"

"I mean, I'm not, like... a zealot," I replied, unsure of what he meant exactly.

My friend gave me a puzzled look that I hadn't been able to place at the time. Years later I realize how contradictory my answer had been with his observed reality.

Isms

Deism doesn't last long. After another month or two, it works its way down to Agnosticism, followed by Atheism, and finally a slide into out-and-out Nihilism and Antitheism for a bit.

Isms, isms, isms. I did love my isms.

At home, my gradual slide away from faith is an era of vicious arguments and bitter Christmas Eves.

My mother is a passionate debater, and I, at this point, am overflowing with the righteous rhetoric of a disillusioned teenager, hopped up on idealism and second opinion bias. Everything is Important to me, and I must take a stand. Questions concerning the nature of the universe are at stake, and I, on the couch in the living room at two in the morning through an argument with my mother, am confident I can neatly resolve them.

My father doesn't worry himself with those sorts of issues, though I suspect he did when he was younger. Depression, I'm told, runs in the family. But nowadays the only thing he takes seriously is his job (and, possibly, his bicycle.) The rest of the world is fodder for a punch line. My father is the one who taught me sarcasm.

I can only remember him engaging in these debates once, finding me glowering under a tree along the boulevard down the street after I'd stormed out of the house. His advice (when my mother wasn't listening) was "It might not be true -- but if it is, what have you got to lose?"

My father was raised Lutheran, a Protestant sect, and this is apparent in his work ethic. He converted to Catholicism when he met my mother. But he never practiced in the same way my mother does. He always went to Mass, yes, knelt, sang, ate bread, drank wine. To him, I surmised, religion was a simple set of rules to follow, with his wife's contentment as their end.

His advice -- the hedging of theological bets -- was no good for me. I was only interested in the truth; determining my beliefs based on pragmatism would undercut their integrity. Religion, to me, had became a dirty word, representing superstition and malignant dogma, standing opposed to a new set of virtues like Logic and Reason and Secular Humanism.

To my mother, however, Religion meant other things. It was an indicator of moral fibre -- she attributed the decline of modern society to a decline in faith. In her children, she saw religiousness as an indicator of her success as a mother; it was an integral element of our family as she saw it, the bedrock on which all our other merits stood. She had been raised Catholic, as had been her mother and father. She couldn't imagine life without it.

She would spar with me for hours, to tears and back, trying to convince me that the Church is a fundamentally good institution superficially mired in human error, an essential delivery system of morality to successive generations; that it's the Church she went to as a girl, the Church she thinks of when she thinks of her mother and her father and her four sisters and four brothers.

I didn't budge. I cited inquisitions and crusades and gay marriage and all the other obvious counters.

We were talking about two very different churches. The bitter Christmases continued.

Intuition

One day I am called into the living room, where my brother and mother are seated on the couch.

"Your brother has something he'd like to tell you,"

"I'm gay," my brother reports.

I'm proud not to bat an eye. "I thought so," I reply.

My mother finds this reaction touching. She asks me how I knew.

I cite "brotherly intuition" or something. The real reason is that he did not notice me standing behind him when he was looking at male underwear models on the internet.

Peace

There is no pressure to go to mass anymore on Sundays. Some years we go on Christmas, but my mother never forgets to add a disclaimer about "flawed institutions." She'd never agreed with the Church's stance on homosexuality, of course, and there had never been any question that she would accept it in her children.

What my brother did was force the issue. As my mother put it, she "couldn't keep taking him to a place to be told there was something wrong with him." She had to choose between her son and her faith, and she chose her son. I'll always respect her for this.

My atheist fervour burned itself out sometime after I left for college -- like the flip of a switch, running in philosophical circles lost its appeal, and I realized that regardless of who was right about certain cosmic details, my life was pretty much going to go on as it always had.

But my mother and I still have long discussions of religion, when I see her. She keeps one eye on the Church, like an old friend she's drifted apart from, but she's no longer bound to it like she once was. She's dabbling in Eastern thought now -- introduced to it by my brother -- and she's come to embrace meditation and self-awareness, as well as a new perspective on the Western mindset in which she was raised. She and I still disagree on some things, of course, but what we do agree is that the healthiest worldview -- as near as we can tell -- lies somewhere in the middle.