Religious Buffet
Below is an article a co-worker of mine wrote several years ago talking about her journey of seeing if what she calls the "church" is true and fulfilling. She gave me permission to share this with you. The only disclaimer is that I have never heard her say that Christ is all you need for heaven. She is a Catholic and may feel that the "church" has a part of eternal salvation. In our conversations, she is , in my opinion, still seeking. The article is a point of view that we need to see if we are to understand what society may think is a 9 lane highway to heaven. Thank you.
The Religious Buffet
By Sarah Albertini-Bond
“Any boys who have made their First Communion and would like to be an altar boy please see Monsignor Conrad after Mass.”
Sitting in the pew of St. Matthias, the church I attended with my parents, I had an epiphany: I’ve just made my First Communion. I can be an altar boy.
It wasn’t until after Mass, when my parents and I were standing outside talking with Monsignor Conrad that the reality of the situation became clear. “Sarah, you can’t be an altar boy,” Monsignor Conrad said.
Undeterred, I stood as straight as I could and announced, “I could be an altar girl, then.”
My parents said nothing at this point but I do remember them touching me -- as if to brace me for what they would know would come.
“No, you can’t be an altar girl,” Monsignor Conrad told me. “There is no such thing as an altar girl.”
“But why not?” I asked.
“Because girls aren’t allowed to be altar servers.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
Msgr. Conrad had the reputation of being one of the nicest priests and looking back on it I could tell he was sad at having to disappoint me. “You might think it’s stupid, or silly, but that’s the way things are and it’s not going to change soon,” he said. “The Church doesn’t change, at least not that much.”
I grew up in a Catholic family. Social events were rooted in religious events -- Christmas, Easter, weddings, baptisms, and funerals. There was always a logical progression to our observations of these events -- first would come Mass, and then would come the gathering afterwards at either a hall or someone’s home. You never went to one event -- Mass or the party -- without going to the other. It was just somehow expected in my family that the celebrating of the spiritual would coincide with the celebrating of the secular. In home, my family kept a statue of St. Francis of Assisi in the front vestibule along with some holy water; St. Joseph guarded the back yard; and a crucifix watched over the living room. Saints were invoked regularly -- if something was lost, my grandmother would walk around the house praying, “St. Anthony, St. Anthony something’s been lost and must be found.” If we couldn’t immediately identify a saint for a cause, my mother dragged her Book of the Saints out to look it up. My father kept a cross in his armoire and looked at it everyday as he got out his clothes for the day.
I attended Catholic school from kindergarten through college. I’ve never had a school year and not taken a theology class. It was always very clear to me that the development of the mind, via classes in mathematics, science, literature, and history, were just as important as the development of my soul, via my theological instruction. In grammar school we got guilt trips for not doing our homework as well as not sitting still in church. In high school, cliques were as much as about wearing the right lipstick as it was assisting the nuns with Mass. By the time I started college the fact that my dorm was next to the church didn’t faze me like it did my roommate.
However, by the end of my college days I felt a restlessness in my soul. I kept wondering if this was all there was to my spiritually -- dipping my hand into a holy water, making a sign of the cross, sitting through an hour-long Mass and leaving until the next week.
In the years since that conversation with Monsignor Conrad, the message of the Catholic Church being an unyielding organization and that I had to accept my place, or lack thereof, was a message that I felt was reinforced. By the time I hit my early twenties, I realized that my own philosophies about life and faith were becoming quite different than that of the Catholic Church’s. I did not understand, for example, why the nuns who ran my high school, were not allowed to say Mass. Their insights into faith helped me tremendously, and their devotion to God was in my mind unparallel. In spite of that, because of their gender, they were relegated to only being allowed to set up Mass but never celebrate it. I could not understand, additionally, why people in my family who had long and loving relationships with a partner and with God could not get married, because the person that they loved was of the same sex that they were. However, all I felt like I was hearing from my Church’s hierarchy was that if I wanted to be a “good” Catholic then I had to do what the Church decreed. The Catholic Church, from what I experienced, seemed to be fulfilling Msgr. Conrad’s words -- it did not change, or what change there was I disagreed with.
So I signed up for some spiritual counseling and was assigned to a man who was studying to be a Jesuit. Every week I went to visit him to discuss my spiritual longings. The sessions were long, and draining on me emotionally, because for the first time in my life I had to explain my faith rather than be a receptacle for teachings about the faith. During one of my sessions I came up with an analogy that explained how I felt. It’s like all my life I’ve only had one thing to eat. It used to taste good, but it’s all I’ve eaten so I don’t know anymore. I can’t taste what I’m eating -- I just fill my mouth with the food. I know it’s nourishing but it’s not fulfilling me. Then I see this big buffet off to the side but I’m being told, “No, be happy with what food you’ve been given."
My counselor about jumped off the couch when he heard me say that. “That’s it! You need to go to the buffet. Sarah, go to the big buffet that you see.”
I remember sitting in my chair, feeling as rooted down as my counselor felt freed. “You do realize that my bland meal is a metaphor for Catholicism and the buffet is other religions.”
“I know,” my counselor said, “and I want you to put down Catholicism and try out the other religions you see.” I must have looked disbelieving because he continued on, “You need to try the rest of the buffet. But I think in the end you’ll come back to Catholicism -- you’ll find it’s the most filling.”
I never officially left the Catholic Church; I never took that step to join another religion. I simply stopped going to Mass and no longer identified myself as a Catholic. Sunday mornings were no longer consumed with making sure that I made it to the holy water in time to make the sign of the cross. In the meantime I ran right to the religious buffet will little aim. I divided my time between reading about religious beliefs and attending services.
I sat in Jewish temples and listened to rabbis say the same words that I had heard all my life -- talking about Abraham, Moses, the Psalms, the major and minor prophets -- but with an intensity that came from a historical link that I had never experienced before. In most, if not all, of the Masses I had attended in my lifetime, readings from our Old Testament were mostly treated as a platform for supporting the New Testament, and as such had seemingly less importance. However, when sitting in a temple, all I heard were readings from the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, the focus then was only on these readings and as such I found myself studying them more intently. Additionally listening to rabbis expound on these accounts, by supplementing their points of view with the teachings of other rabbis that were thousands of years old, put for me the very questions of God that I had been struggling with in a larger historical context because I realized that I was thinking about the same thing that people had been pondering for thousands of years. I listened to wise men with the souls of poets speak about the beauty of submission to Allah. I danced and sang with an abandon during a revival. I learned the difficulty and joy of staying still in silent meditation at a Buddhist center. Talking with Quakers about the meaning of employing religious beliefs for social activism gave me much to think about during their silent meeting. Wiccans I met eloquently linked my feminist philosophies and environmental beliefs with spiritual practices. Atheists happily debated with me whether it was possible to be morally good and not believe in God.
I went far and wide. I went into any religious house that would have me. I read just about any book and website that I could find. People who I talked with about religion had to put a halt to marathon-long conversations about the meaning of faith and religion to a person as well to a society because I exhausted them with my questions. But most importantly I spent a long time soul searching.
I never doubted that there was a God. At one point I wished I could have -- it would have been far easier for me to deny God. To deny that God existed and that religion was nothing more than a product of cultural and sociological heritage would have made my life easy, and I wanted things to be easy. It would have solved things neatly -- I could then not have to worry about disobeying dogma since I would no longer believe in a God and church.
But I couldn’t. To deny God, to deny His love and power in my life would be as difficult as denying myself breathing. Just as surely breathing I knew there was a God. What was left was trying to figure out the best way to acknowledge God.
I didn’t think that God cared what name I called Him. What mattered here was what I believed -- what religion best expressed my views of God’s relationship with me.
I loved the history that went with Judaism. But if I were to acknowledge that history is a part of my faith then I believed that Jesus came down from Heaven to save me. That Jesus, a Jewish man, walked amongst other humans and linked a shared history with a future of acting out to care for those less fortunate and standing up in the face of those in authority who would have had him do otherwise. The ultimate reflection of His teachings he gave us in His final days of Human life. In caring for those less fortunate than Him, Jesus died, not for crimes that He committed but for the sins of all, and then rose from the dead days later -- that was someone I believed in.
So my acknowledging of God and his son, Jesus, pointed me in the direction of Christianity. And if I were to continue to think about history then I had to stay with Catholicism -- it was the oldest religion within Christianity. Catholicism had endured throughout history for a reason, but in my mind I wasn’t sure if that was enough of a reason for me to continue believing in it. The question I asked myself was -- was there another denomination that I felt was more inclusive -- inclusive enough for me to fit in.
That’s where I hit a stumbling block. I couldn’t figure it out. History pointed me to Catholicism. My own personal philosophies and intellectual leanings pointed me to the more liberal Christian denominations. For a while I tried doing both -- one week of Catholicism and then one week of Christianity. That arrangement, while sounding practical, left me more confused. I railed inside against the priests who stood in the pulpit and told the congregation that Catholicism was nothing more than a blind acceptance of dogma and catechism with little room for questions. I felt despair the next week when I felt that religion had been boiled down to nothing more a series of logical steps with little passion.
Sitting in the pew of St. Aloysius Gonzaga in Washington, D.C., I stared up at the altar after Mass. This was one of my Catholic weeks, and I had found the Jesuit church that I was in to be as close as I would want my Catholic experience to be. Yet, I knew that Catholicism was more than what was in these four walls. The Pope and the rest of the hierarchy within the Catholic Church reminded of how very different I was from what the teachings of what a Catholic should be.
I felt myself becoming more and more irate by the second. Finally I had hit my boiling point. I got angry with God, asking Him what kind of God He was that he created such divisions in people. Not only in me, but also worldwide. The war I felt in myself was nothing compared to the religious fighting that consumed people across the globe. Who was He to demand that His people tear themselves apart all so we could worship Him?
If prayer is meant to be a conversation with God, I can’t honestly say that was what I was trying to accomplish. My soul was screaming, anguished with my dilemma. Exhausted I sat in the church, staring up at the altar, mute with sorrow as tears trailed down my face.
Despite my anger, or perhaps because of the pain that it caused me, I experienced a small part of the divine that afternoon in St. Aloysius. I felt the Holy Spirit moving in my soul and with that a flash of insight. Then there was peace as I felt the joy of surrendering to something greater than I. God doesn’t demand that we tear ourselves apart -- we do that to each other. We, in our attempt to understand He who is greater than all of us, assigned labels and divisions. And in spite of this, in spite of the fighting and labels, God has faith in us.
Faith isn’t a blind adherence to dogma and catechism. Faith isn’t a logical progression through facts and figures. Faith is love. Love is a profound movement in the soul that defies logic. Love does not imply agreement or like, although those help. Love is the act of belonging completely to another; complete trust and adoration of one who completes you while you aspire to be better than you were before because of that person.
I don’t agree with the Catholic Church on many social issues. I think women are just as a capable to lead mass and that sexual orientation has nothing to do with serving God. I believe a respect for the Earth, a gift from God, is fundamental to giving thanks to God. I believe that people have as much right to decide what is good for them in their personal lives, who and how they should love, and it would not weaken their devotion to God.
But there was much to love. I loved the history. I loved the mystery that was incorporated into the faith, that to be a Catholic was not just a purely logical decision. I felt humbled standing in the shadows of saints and using them as guides to being imperfect but still loving God. I loved that part of being a Catholic was not only having faith but also performing good works.
I found the wisdom of using history as a guide from Judaism. I found peace when I finally understood the beauty of submitting one’s self to God just as the Muslims I had met told me. There was a joy in my soul when I could express myself merrily before my God much like I had at a revival. And I knew that patience was rewarded when I allowed myself to quiet down and open my soul for meditation and for that I could thank the Buddhists. My atheist friends were right -- God didn’t give me the authority of being moral; but with God I could find a path that makes it easier for me to live what I believe is an ethical life.
Faith is love. I don’t always like and agree with everything I hear at Church. And the Catholic Church, as an institution, doesn’t always like what I do. But the Church and I need each other -- without each other we are incomplete and with each other we inspire the other to do better while reaching out to the other.
I have faith in the Catholic Church -- not only for what it is now but also for what I hope it will be. And I believe the Church feels much the same about me.
A few months after my experience at St. Aloysius, my mother called me on the phone. “Sarah, I have to tell you something you’ve always wanted is happening. But I’m sorry, it’s too late for you,” she told me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“St. Matthias is allowing altar girls,” my mother said.
Yes, it was too late for me to actually be an altar server at St. Matthias. However, perhaps finding my place in the church wouldn’t be as difficult as I’d thought. Things can change; it’s just a matter of time, and having faith.
