The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I later converted to Catholicism. When I had just split from my kinda-husband (long story, but I'm thankful for the annulment) and had to have an incomplete miscarriage medically completed to save my life, I needed my religious community more than I ever had before. My priest said that a hysterectomy to remove the body part that had failed would have been acceptable (I was 22!), but my abortion wasn't, and I was excommunicated as a baby-killer.

 
Wow.  Just...wow.

(((Stephy)))

1.) What is your relationship to the faith (or lack of faith, if you were raised in a non-practicing or atheist/agnostic household) you were brought up in?

Was raised vaguely Christian.  Never worked for me, had a polite breakup.  (Discovered a few weeks ago that the pastor at the church I used to attend passed a few years ago and am sort of mourning the man, quietly.)

2.) How did you feel about the predominant religion(s) that were around you when you were growing up?

I frankly didn't notice they existed.  Talking overtly about religion was tacky and I wasn't culturally literate enough to recognise things like "You know, a crucifix on the wall of the living room probably means something".  I felt sorry for the Catholic school kids (right next to my school) because they were stuck with nothing but blacktop for their playground and they gave the impression of sadly jumproping and playing four-square in their prim little uniforms while we sort of boiled out in a disorganised mob for recess....

The first question:
1.) What is your relationship to the faith (or lack of faith, if you were raised in a non-practicing or atheist/agnostic household) you were brought up in?

I usually have to answer this question by saying "I need to start with my great-grandfather."

Short version: my mother's side of the family is half-Jewish and half-Catholic (her parents being the respective meeting point of the two.) They were refugees from Vienna starting when she was very small (she was born in 36) and ended up in Northern Ireland, where she was raised religiously Catholic, but with a really large helping of Jewish attitude about most things other than direct religion.

My father was brought up Church of England. He converted to Catholicism to marry my mother, they emigrated to the US, had two kids (my siblings), left the Catholic Church pre-Vatican II (something my mother has since said she regrets), and by the time I came along, were Episcopalian.

I was raised Episcopalian until around when I was 11, my parents started being dissatisfied with a church that was more focused on social goals than religious ones, and looked at returning to Catholicism. We all went through the RCIA program (the process by which people become Catholic - it's a year or more of classes and related stuff), and then I went on to do regular confirmation classes with my grade year.

I was a very active Catholic through the two years of boarding school, and through college, though by the time I got to the end of college, I also had a number of disagreements with specific Catholic teachings.

That said, I think that there's a lot of stuff Catholicism does *right* when it tries - I've tended to hang out in the more social-justice sides of the faith and practice, and the more theologically nuanced ones, and there are a lot of amazing people doing a lot of amazing things.

My mother's now a lay sister in a religious order, and they do some great things about education, immigrant support, and literacy that would fall through social service gaps, for example. And I think that a lot of people forget that for all it *is* a religion with a single head, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of different implementations of what individual congregations or groups focus on, even with a standardised liturgy and leadership.

(I also think there's a lot of stuff where Catholicism as an institution is flawed, or I wish it would get with the 20th century, never mind the 21st. But groups are made up of people, and individual people make stupid decisions, or occasionally do horrible things, and this is not an automatic flaw of the larger group.)

2.) How did you feel about the predominant religion(s) that were around you when you were growing up?

I grew up in a suburb of Boston which was at the time pretty much made up one part of academics (who tended to be not-very-religious with a few outliers, like my father) and one part of long-time Irish, Italian, and some Polish Catholic families, and the two didn't overlap as much as you'd think. (Mom kept getting into conversations with people at parties with the academic types who were surprised she actually cared about the religious parts.)

On the other hand, no one thought twice about people coming into school with ashes on their head, because a substantial portion of the school body was Catholic, or of scheduling meetings around holy days of obligation services for things like Girl Scouts or whatever.

When I went to boarding school, I was distinctly in a minority, both for being Catholic and for being actively religious at all. (This was one of the very historically WASPy boarding schools, which actually has in its original charter that you don't admit Catholics. We actually had a fascinating discussion session with the Jewish student group at one point about various experiences.)

Anyway, I had *far* more pushback about my religious life there than any other time in my life (including since becoming Pagan) - being teased for having ashes on Ash Wednesday, having to explain every time that I'd been at mass and I'd put in my name to be excused from [whatever] for holy days of obligation that overlapped other things, and so on. It was a remarkable lot of fussing for something that had been fairly straightforward the rest of my life.

College was - for all it was an equally WASPy school originally - mostly much easier.

Yeah, I know this has probably been done a million times before, but I didn't see any recent threads, and I had a slight twist on the issue I wanted to bring up as well.

The first question:
1.) What is your relationship to the faith (or lack of faith, if you were raised in a non-practicing or atheist/agnostic household) you were brought up in?

I was brought up in an Episcopal church (Protestant and, simply, the American form of Anglican).  We did Sunday school every Sunday, and my brothers and I were in church choir.  We attended church until, well, we moved out of my parents' house.

Interestingly enough, we were Episcopal because my mother was Methodist and my father Lutheran, and they wanted a path they could follow together and in which they could raise their children that wouldn't favor one or the other.

My maternal grandmother was evangelical, of a sort.  I heard her speak in tongues when I was three and we were trying to drive up a very icy hill.  (Apparently, I then yelled, "Do it again, Grandma!  Do it again!")  When I was older, I used to joke that when she prayed and said "Dear Lord..." God would say, "What can I do for you, Dot?"

I don't practice Christianity any more, but I have no issues with it.  My issues are with individual (or groups of) people.

The second question probably isn't going to be applicable to everyone, but it's one I'd like to ask about:
2.) How did you feel about the predominant religion(s) that were around you when you were growing up?

I didn't.  I had friends of multiple religions and, when possible, I went to church/temple/meeting/mosque with them.  I can count the number of bad experiences on one hand - I felt completely out of place and odd and judged when I went to an LDS service with a friend, and likewise when I went to an evangelical youth group meeting where other teens were breaking down into tears all around me and begging to be saved...

/butts in

They're weird.  I went to one too, and tbh my feelings about it are still profoundly mixed.  I think it's a great idea for the younger grades, but not really the older ones.  Their ideas are really good, but the execution can be kind of awkward.  

I don't know how typical the school I went to was of Waldorf schools as a whole, but they had a tendency to be kind of . . . random, I guess?  Like, they had really strict rules about certain things (no images over 1 inch on clothing), but didn't have any actual disciplinary process if you broke them.  

I liked their emphasis on a more holistic kind of learning, but it started to get frustrating when it made the school feel kind of cut off from the real world.  You know, like, "I'm twelve years old and I have friends who are having sex, but people are still trying to tell me I need to be insulated from the rampant consumerism represented by pictures on clothes."  I think they needed desperately to find a way to give older kids more independence / more connection to the real world.

 
All of this. That's why I opted out of the Waldorf high school they all tried to push us into...

All of this. That's why I opted out of the Waldorf high school they all tried to push us into...

 
Okay, out of curiosity, I have to ask: did yours ever give you an explanation of what the deal with the images on clothes actually was?  

Because at my school they gave us this incredibly bizarre slippery slope argument that basically went, "Well, if we allowed a picture of a flower, we would have to allow someone to come to school in a shirt with porn on it.  Because they're both pictures."

Okay, out of curiosity, I have to ask: did yours ever give you an explanation of what the deal with the images on clothes actually was?  

Because at my school they gave us this incredibly bizarre slippery slope argument that basically went, "Well, if we allowed a picture of a flower, we would have to allow someone to come to school in a shirt with porn on it.  Because they're both pictures."

 
No, they never did. I think it had something to do with media exposure. After you got to middle school they would allow it, so I'm not quite sure...

But yeah, your slippery slope sounds pretty weird...

Yeah, I know this has probably been done a million times before, but I didn't see any recent threads, and I had a slight twist on the issue I wanted to bring up as well.

The first question:
1.) What is your relationship to the faith (or lack of faith, if you were raised in a non-practicing or atheist/agnostic household) you were brought up in?

The second question probably isn't going to be applicable to everyone, but it's one I'd like to ask about:
2.) How did you feel about the predominant religion(s) that were around you when you were growing up?

 

I was raised predominatly Catholic but after my mom was excommunicated for remarrying, not so much. We did go to church periodically,  I needed more. I tried everything Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist (northern Baptist) and so on.

I found paganism after high school once I was in college. Actually a 7th Day Adventist college. I was even in the church choir.  I found religion, just not a Christian one. I have no animosity towards any Christian faiths. In fact I sometimes go to Mass with my friend Barbara.

Phouka