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For Those Who Can No Longer Believe
Like Willa Cather's characters Jim Burden and �ntonia, many of us who were reared by religiously observant parents in homes where grace was said at every meal and prayers at bedside every night have a "precious, incommunicable past" founded on "early accidents of fortune."
In terms of belief and practice, we tend now to travel light, having offloaded some of the baggage of our religious past while not leaving it entirely behind. Intellectually, we can no longer believe as once we did, but we cannot and really do not want to have done with our particular traditions.
Despite my evolution from a Protestant neo-orthodoxy to an agnostic secular humanism, I still hum the hymn tunes I knew so well in my childhood and recite their texts to the point of driving people around me to distraction. I know the canon of the mass word for word, the texts of many psalms and passages from Old and New Testament that are as familiar to me as the weekly grocery list.
I still go to church. Every week. I still receive communion. Put my pledge envelope in the offering basket. Exchange the sign of peace with fellow parishioners who have become part of my life.
As far away from being able to affirm belief in creeds that are, respectively, 1,800 and 1,690 years old, I cannot speak them aloud as others around me do.
I do not buy into the theology of the blood atonement for my sins or those of the world, but I can and do sing the ancient texts that recall that theology. I love the music, but I am pretty sure that no Lamb of any God has had or will have mercy on me.
I do not look for the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, though given the profundity of my love for my wife, children and grandchildren I would be happily content to live in their presence forever -- and in that of my long-gone parents as well.
A person who knows of my concomitant interest in secular humanist Judaism and what he called "old-fashioned church" asked me not so long ago what the hell I thought I was doing. I told him I was raised and formed in the latter and attracted in my middle age to the former, and, as a matter of fact, had come to see that they are cut of the same cloth.
Asked to defend what he took to be an entirely absurd stand, I pointed out the obvious, viz. that Judaism of any sort has its roots in the same ancient scriptures as do the various iterations of Christianity and in the theology that emerged from the scriptural texts.
While I was quick to point out that the theology is an abstraction and, at best, a relic, I said that the scriptural texts abide as priceless evidence of how people from 2,000 to 3,000 years ago -- and maybe more -- struggled with hopes, aspirations, disappointments, failures and calamities, all the while seeking meaning in all of them. And sometimes came close to being successful in that endeavor.
I told him that I refuse to accept the idea that I cannot be a Gentile Jew and an agnostic Christian at the same time. I am that very thing.
The first identification, since it is sought in a secular humanist community, does not require me to espouse conventional belief in God. The second officially expects me to embrace the entirety of the Nicene proposition, but since a good many of those with whom I go to church -- including several priests -- come no nearer to such an embrace than I, there is no reason for me to vacate my pew.
Some of my friends who are secular humanist Jews celebrate the high holidays in much the same way their parents and grandparents celebrated them, even using the ancient texts because they call to mind the tradition from which they came and long-ago years when those now dead were among them.
For six months of the year, I go to church where a number of my older relatives, some now long gone, were members. I can recall many a christening, first communion, confirmation, wedding and funeral I attended there as a youth -- never dreaming that it would become a home to me in my later years.
Even though today it offers a more contemporary liturgy than I remember from the days of the formidable Father O'Brien, it is still St. James, and the ghosts of those I loved and who loved me move among the living in a wonderfully egalitarian way.
My affinity with the religion there is far, far beyond belief. In fact, it has nothing to do with belief in the literal understanding of the word -- unless belief is resident in the community that has accepted me just as those of the Jewish temple have accepted me.
It is a continuing search for connectedness that must needs go far beyond prescribed catechisms and to a continuing remembrance of who I am because of who my elders were and what it means to be who I am today.
St. Paul, at once the Pharisee and the Apostle, was on to something important when he dictated these words to his scribe: "There is neither Jew nor Greek ... but all are one."
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