Vigil

I don't know if it's the Easter weekend, seeing my declining grandmother over spring break, my upcoming wedding in the Lutheran church, my friend's daugher's baptism a few weeks ago, or just coincidence, but I've been thinking a lot about faith lately--what it means, what it is, how it's tied to identity in ways that I don't quite understand and can't quite articulate.

At breakfast this morning, my friend Lyndsay told us about a Bahá'í wedding she went to recently. Only one us really had heard of the Bahá'í faith before, so Lyndsay described it as best she knew. Here's how wikipedia explains it:

"The Bahá'í Faith is a monotheistic religion founded by Baha'u'llah in nineteenth-centuryPersia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind. Bahá'í teachings emphasize the underlying unity of the major world religions. Religious history is seen to have unfolded through a series of divine messengers, each of whom established a religion that was suited to the needs of the time and the capacity of the people. These messengers have included Krishna, Abraham, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad and others. Humanity is understood to be involved in a process of collective evolution, and the need of the present time is for the gradual establishment of peace, justice and unity on a global scale."

"Huh," I immediately said, "I think I'm Baha'i."

To which Lyndsay replied, "Yeah, I think we all are."

I'm not, of course, and we all aren't, of course...but its somewhere fitting into this fluid nature of religion and faith and spirituality that's been hitting me over the head lately.

I went to church with my mom last night for Good Friday. It was an impulsive decision--I certainly wasn't planning on going to church, despite the fact that my students were let out at noon yesterday for "staff development," which we all knew was secret, politically-correct district speak for "we're letting the kids out because Jesus is dying today." But Mom came over for dinner, and when she announced that she was leaving to go to church, I told her I'd go with her, surprising probably everyone at the table, including me.

I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic schools (save St. Olaf, which was--for my grandmother--painfully Lutheran), and have an instinctual love for the mass. I don't, however, believe in pretty much any of the teachings of Catholicism anymore, despite its deep roots in the foundation of my childhood. I prefer the Protestant notion of grace alone leading to salvation, of the symbolic nature of communion, of pluralism and acceptance preached from the pulpit rather than exclusivity and piousness.

But, there's still that part of me that loves the formality of the recitation of mass--the kneeling, the memorization of the words, the Nicene Creed about "light from light and true God from true God"--and there's still a part of me that absolutely wanted one of my grandmother's rosaries when my mom offered one to me before leaving Grandma's house. So, I thought I'd go to mass. See what was what, and if nothing else, get out of the house so Jim could work on his master's thesis.

The sad thing is that I left church last night reminded more of why I love attending the Lutheran Church now, than I was reminded of why I still feel so nostaligically tied to the Catholic one. Nothing felt right there, and when the priest laid down face first on the floor in front of the cross for five minutes of solemn silence--something I've seen priests do my whole life at Good Friday Mass--I couldn't help but think, "Alright, that's f-ing weird."

And yet, even in the midst of that realization, I wonder if when Jim and I have a child of our own, if I'll give in to the part of me that will inevitably quietly feel that I should baptize the kid in the Catholic church, too--to pay homage to the faith of my family members who went before, to cover all the bases, to make damn sure the kid knows that they come out of some foundation of Catholicism. I'm not sure why, particularly when I hope to raise the kid in the belief that no faith is better than another, that no faith has the handle on Truth, and that, yes, Great-Grandma's Catholic hologram picture of bleeding Jesus if you look at it this way and Mary, Queen of Heaven if you look at it that way, is weird.

So, here I am. Feeling pretty stuck--not necessarily lost in the midst of all of this, since I feel well grounded and not like I'm searching for a way, but definitely stuck between these different notions of faith and who I am and what it means.

Coincidentally, there was a great Op/Ed piece in the NY Times yesterday that talks about all of this--how faith sometimes turns into something that it isn't "supposed" to be, and how increasingly, people are more comfortable with their pluralistic view of faith than they are with the one and only one faith in which they were raised. It's definitely worth a read--it's obviously way better than my fumbling around here seeing as it's, you know, published in the Times.