When I was in high school, I bought an record album called "The Wind Came Singing"; it's sort of a contemporary Christian/folk album (originally released in 1983), full of early-'80s sounds. I don't know if my affection for it comes from the inherent quality of the music, or from how it influenced a particularly impressionable moment of my time growing up. At any rate, one of the songs on that album is called "Welcome Home." Some of the words included: "You're at peace with yourself . . . and I'm so glad . . . Welcome Home . . . To a Love that has waited since before time began, to a Love that remains when everything else is gone."
I thought of this song as I was listening to "This American Life" Episode 379: "Return to the Scene of the Crime." Act Three of this episode was a meditation by Dan Savage on life, the death of his mother, and his very fraught relationship with the Roman Catholic Church: they labelled this act "Our Man of Perpetual Sorrow." In some ways it broke my heart, because it was such an honest grappling with the tension and love and loss of many modern thinking people's experience of organized religion.
We often leave the church of our youth in a burst of adolescent righteous anger at the failings, hypocrisies, inconsistencies and intermittent sheer inhumanity of organized religion. The vision of God and the Transcendent we are given as children falls away, or part of it becomes absurd, and we find ourselves questioning whether ANY of it can possibly be true. If we are gay (as is Dan Savage), the rigid blindness of what we are taught about traditional morality seems especially inhuman.
As a child, I often had the half-unconscious and inarticulate sense that my religious beliefs were all interrelated in a way that meant if one part is untrue, then the whole edifice must crumble. If (for example) the world were not created in 7 literal days, then one could not trust Genesis or the Bible for anything. Belief was something both all-encompassing and incredibly fragile.
At the same time -- and by contrast -- my childhood eyes saw -- or imagined they saw -- a world illuminated through the bright, clinical light of science. Progress was everywhere -- we used to die of diseases that are now just annoyances. Things like cholera and tuberculosis no longer touch anyone's lives (or anyone I knew, to be more accurate). We now understand how hygiene works (unlike the doctors at the time of the Civil War, who didn't even know to wash their hands between patients). My grandparents were born when buggies transported people to the train station: I was born when mankind had walked on the Moon. In ways both great and small, science had improved lives.
At some point in life, it became tempting to compare the messy, occasionally logically-inconsistent pre-industrial hodgepodges of half-understood mythology that fills traditional "religion," with the world of clean lab coats, bright lights, and solidly-empirically-provable advances enjoyed by the world through "science." Then popular culture tells us that there is a head-to-head struggle between "science" and "religion." And best-selling books by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens tell us that "religion" is always and everywhere a leach sucking the life from true human progress.
In that context, it can seem a relief to say goodbye to the frustratingly intangible, and sometimes dehumanizing, struggles that come from engaging with traditional "religion." . . . Dan Savage related how his disengagement from formal Roman Catholicism came during high school -- he was a freshman at a parochial school that prepared young men for the priesthood, but chose to graduate from a public high school without a hint of religion.
His engagement with Roman Catholicism lay dormant for the next 30-some years. When it returned, it returned powerfully. . . . As Dan Savage's mother lay dying, something brought a certain comfort, a certain dignity to the transition from life to death. It was the priest giving the dying mother her last rites, and the familiar sounds of the prayers repeated from childhood memories. . . . ( In my own life, I saw my own grandmother lean over and kiss the cooling forehead of my grandfather on his deathbed: "Goodbye dear, I'll see you in the Morning," she said.) Ritual and religion brought peace and order to the last moments of life.
When Dan Savage returned to his regular life, he was changed. He found himself drawn into cool, empty (and traditional) Catholic churches. Something was drawing him into a place he hadn't been for many years . . . And yet voices he identified as "reason" and "progress" told him that what he was feeling was neither rational nor healthy. . . . Why, why, backslide (it seems to be saying) into the writhing pit of pre-rational mythology from which modern science had rescued us?
That's where Dan Savage's story for this American Life ended -- with him suspended between a need for something he felt through the Sacraments, yet a mind told that this need with unhealthy and not in tune with modern progress. (Or that's how I heard his final statements.)
[To be fair, he also talked about the wildly-unhelpful things done in the Catholic Church in the name of sexuality, and how that sort of thing keeps him unengaged as well. That is a different topic I am not addressing in this writing. . . . And I don't want to minimize the damage religion has perpetrated. One observation from the book "Faith, Reason, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" by Terry Eagleton in regard to this point -- "the cruelties and stupidities that the Irish church has perpetuated do not prevent me from recalling how, without it, generations of my own ancestors would have gone unschooled, unnursed, unconsoled, and unburied."]
What makes me mourn, and what made me think of that old song, was the sense of loss that seemed (in my perception) to shadow Dan Savage -- a loss of the ability to see the religion in which he had grown up as a potentially important source of valid consolation for rational adults. . . . Somewhere I sometimes feel we've gotten the idea that valid consolation can come only from the sources that my childhood mind saw as the brightly-lit world of empirical science. Anything else is (one sometimes feels) wishful thinking.
Yet I do not think we need to be caught between a weak, unsatisfying (yet intellectually valid) consolation via "science" versus a strong, yet invalid, consolation via "religion." In my life, I have felt that I need to refocus both religion and science, so that I can come out with something true to both, not in conflict, and able to provide the sort of consolation that makes human life rich and enjoyable. This involves several interrelated observations (still tentative, but leading towards a synthesis that satisfies me).
(1) Initially, and most importantly, neither empirical observation (what we commonly call "science") nor self-revelations from the Transcendent (what we commonly call "religion") holds a monopoly on how we grapple with truth -- instead both elements provide richer materials to help me connect with something Transcendent.
(2) Spirituality in its purest form is a realization that we as humans are interconnected with our world, other living things, a greater purpose, and something Transcendent -- religion is the language we use to put this inarticulate observation into concrete terms that can affect our ordinary life.
[For example, Spirituality says: "We are all connected as humans." Religion translate this observation into something more tangible: "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?" (Isaiah 58:6-7 NRSV).]
(3) The religion with which I was raised provides my "mother tongue" as I explore spirituality -- provides form and structure against which my struggle for connectedness and truth play out. This doesn't mean I can't learn and can't appreciate other languages, but it does give me a place from which to explore. As easy as it might be to alienate myself from my mother tongue (with its imperfections), I am growing to believe my task as I "grow up" is to make this "mother tongue" my own, and to adapt it to reflect the experiences I've had and the lives with which I've interacted.
(4) But even as the world is full of languages which all describe a reality that transcends them, so I must realize that my religious "mother tongue" is itself a description of something bigger and more real and more complex than anything one single religion could embrace. And by studying other "tongues," I can learn more about Transcendent Reality that religion is struggling to describe.
This being the case, I would like to say to Dan Savage -- don't let the Church alienate you from your own Mother Tongue -- Roman Catholicism is as much your own possession as it is the possession of the Pope and the bishops.
Own your spirituality: Own that language that you were taught in your childhood religion.
Take that language away from its jailers. Combine it with life experience, with "science," and with everything that you are, until it can help you back to the Transcendent. Don't foreclose an avenue through which you can enrich and deepen your own experience because some narrow-minded clergy have acted and continue to act without humanity, or because some (but clearly not all) of the forms of religion from childhood no longer make sense. Because . . .
I believe with all my heart that there is a Love that has waited since before time began, a Love that will remain when everything else is gone . . . And that Love comes to us in our post-religious, scientific world as fully as it ever did before -- Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.
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