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Religion in Your Family
Both of my parents are small-time Catholic authors. I’ve really only browsed through any of their work very briefly growing up, as most of it never really reached out to my own interests or approaches to religion. But recently I spotted a copy of my dad’s 1990 book on my brother’s shelf: Is Talking to God a Long-Distance Call?: How to Hear and Understand God’s Voice. This idea of communicating and experiencing the divine on a personal level is one I’m very interested in, so I thought I’d have a look.
Leafing through this book, I quickly re-discovered the roots of a lot of difficulties I had connecting with my parents’ religious outlook growing up. My dad writes, as early as page 5:
Catholics can be tempted to seek God’s will through occult practices, horoscopes, New Age and Eastern religions. Therein lie seductive temptations to get quick spiritual fixes or black-and-white immediate answers to your every question. Avoid these false ways of seeking the divine will. The search for fast, easy spiritual answers can leave you wide open to selfish desires and the wiles of the devil.
Weirdly enough, my parents and I have never really spoken about my own very public interest in such things. Sometimes I do ask them about their religious beliefs and experiences though. But beyond that, the most I’ve ever really heard by way of encouragement from my father was a recommendation that I keep doing what I’m doing. My family’s not very vocal about stuff like that, so I took that as a rather positive thing indicating that he could probably tell I was figuring something out in a way that I needed to, even if he might not himself really understand or appreciate it.
It’s funny though, reading over his words in book form, something written when I was only 10 years old, and realizing how very deeply I’d internalized these commandments over the years. It’s been a very long difficult road for me to untie the knots in my thinking that they passed onto me. I don’t really blame them for it, as I know a lot of people tend to do in circumstances like that. Instead, I actually appreciate that they gave me a strong base, and weren’t shy about what they believed in. Perhaps that has to do with my own relative fearlessness for talking and exploring with people what it is I believe in.
I don’t think my dad could be less right though with this whole bit about getting “easy answers” from non-Catholic spiritual traditions. I don’t think there’s any such thing as easy answers. If anything, studying many different areas and religious traditions shows you very keenly just how complicated the quest for answers can really be.
Another thing my dad says in that chapter:
“Of course God probably won’t speak through visions and voices in your daily prayer.”
Well, why not? No wonder people turn to the occult and to non-Christian traditions which promise or encourage such things. If there’s a possibility of receiving voices and visions like the prophets and Biblical figures of old, why shouldn’t people strive for that themselves, rather than relying on the Scriptures and the “treasury of the Church”? I’ve never really understood that whole issue.
In any event, this all brings up a good topic of discussion: religion in your family. From what I know of the people reading this site, we all come from very eclectic backgrounds spiritually. Are there others in your family who are on a similar path as you? Does anybody in your family strongly (or silently) disapprove of your studies and interests? How have you dealt with this conflict and how has it manifested in your life?
- Your Ideal Religion
- Religion Vs. Spirituality
- Return to traditional family values
- Books: Give Me That Online Religion
- Source of authority in religion
- Prev: La Santa Muerte
- Next: The Vatican Loves Science!
September 24th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
I never went to church growing up. My dad was a greaser-type highschool dropout, but said he actually liked the Catholic school they put him in. That’s not to say that he was ever particularly jazzed about the rituals and theology, and he never made us go.
My sister and I will never understand how he fell in love with my mom, a seventies pom-pom cheerleading-type. She was also raised catholic, but I heard my grandparents were kicked out of their local church because my grandmother expressed a desire to have an abortion during a confession. Don’t know how true that is - but the stereotypical guilt of catholicism definitly got passed on to me.
Though I’m a worrier, there was never any pressure on me religiously, which I’m sure for a lot of people sounds like a godsend. But I also never had anything to rebel against in that regard, so sometimes I wonder if that’s why I have such a difficulty in feeling firm in any belief system. I’ve never really had to defend my beliefs, so I don’t know what they are!
My dad loves the ideas presented in the Chariots of the Gods - if you were to ask him where we came from he’d probably just hash something out of that, laugh, leave it at that. Also, when I was younger my parents both read HolyBlood, HolyGrail and I think a lot of that got absorbed into me.
For a while my mom had tarot cards and she was pretty good at it cause she’s a great talker. We also had a ouija board which she threw away in the garbage can. (I took it out when she wasn’t looking, and a couple of weeks later put it on her bedroom pillow, which really freaked her out). Apparently, the portuguese side of my family has a history of being really superstitious. I feel like my mom and I are on a similar “journey” or whatever - there’s nothing really taboo in my fam and we talk a lot about Christianity and aliens and garbage like that.
My mom reads Tim’s blog more than my own.
September 24th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
my father was taught by the jesuits in the north-east of england and would have entered the priesthood had he not met my mother. my mother was anglican but practiced yoga and read spiritual works and pop psychology. i read “i`m o.k., you`re o.k. when i was 7 or 8 and learned to cycle my breathing and put a string up my nostril and out the other side by watching mum`s yoga.
i could never get my dad`s text-book repeated catholicism. the whole idea of the catholic deconstruction of the bible made little logical sense, given that my dad had drilled logic and semantics into me along with algebra and chemistry and physics.
sorry dad, you can`t have free will and guilt in the same package and get pissed when i freely choose not to be guilty over something i didn`t do.
then, of course dad began to demand that i go to church! wrong. in years of debates he hadn`t proven his point. now he expected me to sit and listen to strangely dressed men drone on about the same nonsense he had failed to convince me of in the first place.
then, when i was nineteen he tried to get the church to annul his second marriage. they refused, so he left the catholic church and hooked up with the church of the epiphany and got his divorce.
this guy buggered up his relationship with his oldest son over a belief and then, because of the divorce he baled on the whole thing. dumbass.
September 24th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
Hey, I was also raised Catholic! What’s up with that? It was a liberal parish where the nuns wore normal clothing and the priest lectured about nuclear disarmament, but still… I suspect that our ancestors influence us in subtle ways and ways not yet discovered by science. The people I get along best with ideologically tend to have been raised Catholic or in some intensely religious environment.
September 24th, 2005 at 5:25 pm
My parents were’nt particularly religious but I believed literally in Nordic mythology as a kid since my dad used to read to me every night from a book called D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods & Giants
They sent me to Catholic school when we lived in Canada (our family was nomainally protestant) mostly just so that I would be bilingual. That was from ages 5-9
I constantly CONSTANTLY butted heads with the nuns and got sent home/punished because I insisted on talking about the viking gods in school, then after that tried to convert all my little friends to the belief in aliens, ghosts, bigfoot, etc.
This was a really character-building experience for me. I got smacked and silenced and treated like a criminal because I didn’t / wouldn’t / couldn’t buy into the catholic worldview.
Gnosticism was in part a rebellion against that for me. now that I practice afro-carribean syncretism I do pray to and work with the saints which seems funny to me.
Off to my basement to burn some black candles against sister Mary Louise sadist! No, just kidding, hardship is sometimes something to be grateful for. In my own case it made me very curious and very stubborn.
I started off knowing what i DIDN’T want to be involved in, but I never doubted the existence of god or spirits or the idea that humans have souls and life has a purpose.
September 24th, 2005 at 5:36 pm
From what I hear Ouija boards actually are dangerous even for people who work with the dead on a regular basis. Shamans & witchdoctors use traditional rituals with built-in boundaries to communicate with them in a controlled way, these have been perfected through trial and error over hundreds if not thousand of years
ouija boards are just sort of like unlocking the security door of anaprtment building in a bad neighborhood so that any random crackhead/thug/hooker can wander on in and hang out for as long as they feel like it.
/off-topic tangent
September 24th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
my mum and her friends used to have a glass or two of sherry and play around with the ouija board until one day cranky old mrs. becksmith scared herself pissless because the planchette(wineglass) kept hopping off the table and into her lap. i was five and i can still see the whole thing happening like it was yesterday. spirits?, i don`t know. christians confusing and scaring themselves, definitely.
September 24th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
LOL. I have a friend who was playing with one with his friends at a slumber party as a kid. He manioulated it deliberately so when they asked “who are you?” he made the board say “E-L-D-I-A-B-L-O”. He said they practically shit themselves, he had to excuse himself and go into the garage to laugh about it, he really threw the fear of god into them bigtime
September 25th, 2005 at 12:13 am
Hmm, I was raised Presbyterian, but I never in truth followed it. I remember this one time at church, when I was 5 or 6, the preacher was giving a sermon on the Ten Commandments. I have no problem with them, they were common-sensical to me even back then, but when he got to the point when Moses came back and people were praying to idols, he went into a speech about not following false gods. I remember thinking to myself at that point “That’s dumb. All gods are one god really, so to call another god false is to call your own god false.”
I really have no idea where I got that idea from. My whole family is either Presbyterian or Episcopalian, and at that age, I had no contact with anyone else that believed anything else. Heck, I don’t think I’d even really heard of other gods then. Perhaps the Greek gods, but I don’t think so. But I still believed it was like that.
So far as I know, no one else in my family is on a different religious track. And as far as how they view mine, well there’s a good portion of my family that has told me to my face that I’m going to hell. I haven’t really let that get me down, though - this is the same portion that didn’t let my cousins play video games because they were evil. And they generally accept me anyway, so long as I don’t start talking religion.
Hmm, actually, come to think of it, my great-grandmother may have had some alternate religious views, but I never talked religion with her, so I can’t say for sure.