My brief encounter with the Baptists didn't make a Baptist, but it did show me that attending church was possible. Now, to find a church that fit my taste.
My next door neighbors were Catholic. Actually, the mother was. The father converted to Catholicism I suspect because he knew it was more trouble than it was worth not to. Their children were kinda sorta Catholic. The older daughter was mostly interested in pissing off her mother, and church being her mother's thing, she broke all the rules as a point of honor. The younger daughter went along with it, especially since the swag was so nice. She was Catholic in the way that most white Americans are, a family habit, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving. When she married, her mother made sure it was to a good Catholic boy with a big church wedding in a Southern belle-esque dress made by Mom. I think after that, the Catholic dragon-mother could draw a quavering breath and die having accomplished her essential life's work of organizing the perfect Catholic wedding.
The mother spoke sweetly and lovingly of her faith. Pictures of Jesus and Mary, with their tender hearts exposed, had pride of place in the spotless mobile home. I was invited to attend church one fine day, and while there, asked the priest what was necessary to join the church.
He gave me a look of utter consternation. In orthodox Judaism, a rabbi has a duty to make three vigorous attempts to dissuade anyone who seeks conversion. I think this priest had the same mandate, because he informed me of the many obstacles to membership, and concluded with, "Do your parents know about this?"
I was too embarrassed to tell my parents about this fiasco. There was no way they were going to attend that many meetings with the priest, bring me to catechism, and sign off on the arduous process of me becoming a Catholic, a faith that my mother considered as alien as Mars and my father considered a silly superstition of his youth. So I signed off on the idea of being Catholic, though I liked the stateliness of it, the claims to ecclesiastical authority, the authenticity of the first church, the one the others came from.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Country Life
My mother had had it with the barrio. She gave my father an ultimatum, and we moved to the 'burbs.
These were not the 'burbs of clean, cookie cutter houses, at least not completely. Those are the planned development suburbs. We moved to the exurbs, rightly speaking, what used to be rural. Developers had built some subdivisions, but there were swaths of land with either nothing on them, or small, rural homes or mobiles. We moved into a small house a man had built for himself and his family that had odd dimensions and crooked stuff, a house that was an admirable first effort at building a house by a person who never had and never would again. I got the unfinished attic, with nothing between me and the ground but some boards so flimsily applied to the framing that I could have easily fallen out of the house. My father had it jacked up three feet and had us shoveling dirt underneath for a quarter a load. That's how my ambitious, athletic sister got her allowance. I merely skipped lunch and used my lunch money for my own affairs.
I had reached puberty, the time when young people strive to do something. As I mentioned before, my longings went in the direction of religion, and I began to look around for some kind of instruction. This being the rural southeast, there was a church on about every other corner: an Assembly of God, a Pentacostal church, several Baptist churches, a Methodist church. The biggest, most luxurious church in our town was called the First Baptist Church, situated near the corner of a farm-to-market road and the highway, walking distance from Dairy Queen. This was the first church I attended as a youth.
I had all but forgotten the bible school mandate to find a church. What I found was that on Sunday morning, a church bus drove throughout out neighborhood picking up whatever kid wanted to get on it. One day I got on the church bus and went to church.
It was a nice, big church, with nice pews and a lot of people. There were a lot of lights and windows, so it was bright inside. The preacher gave a noisy but kind-hearted sermon, at the conclusion of which he asked if anyone wanted to be saved. I was the first one up. I'm not sure I wanted to be saved so much as I wanted to belong to something in this new town, but saved I was. They all welcomed me into the church and took my picture, which hung on the bulletin board for some weeks. I was wearing a dark paisley dress with a large white pointy collar and had my long hair pulled back in a ponytail. I looked not so much happy as eager.
I think I might have gone back twice. Other than talking about Jesus, the church didn't seem to *do* anything. Today I would say that it lacked a sense of cohesion. In the 1970s, the culture wars had not heated up to the extent that the Baptist church was punching social issues--that has a lot of energy, and cohesion, though of a kind I am glad I got to avoid. In the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Church was mostly a large, nice church of the Southern variety. After church, we ate fried chicken after church, drank iced tea, and gossiped about the townspeople. It was mostly just a Sunday go to meeting social event.
I was too Hispanic and too educated to feel that comfortable at the First Baptist Church. My friends from school who were in this church were the pillars of society, the solid, reliable sorts, people who were acquaintances but with whom I did not have any real connection.
It just wasn't for me.
These were not the 'burbs of clean, cookie cutter houses, at least not completely. Those are the planned development suburbs. We moved to the exurbs, rightly speaking, what used to be rural. Developers had built some subdivisions, but there were swaths of land with either nothing on them, or small, rural homes or mobiles. We moved into a small house a man had built for himself and his family that had odd dimensions and crooked stuff, a house that was an admirable first effort at building a house by a person who never had and never would again. I got the unfinished attic, with nothing between me and the ground but some boards so flimsily applied to the framing that I could have easily fallen out of the house. My father had it jacked up three feet and had us shoveling dirt underneath for a quarter a load. That's how my ambitious, athletic sister got her allowance. I merely skipped lunch and used my lunch money for my own affairs.
I had reached puberty, the time when young people strive to do something. As I mentioned before, my longings went in the direction of religion, and I began to look around for some kind of instruction. This being the rural southeast, there was a church on about every other corner: an Assembly of God, a Pentacostal church, several Baptist churches, a Methodist church. The biggest, most luxurious church in our town was called the First Baptist Church, situated near the corner of a farm-to-market road and the highway, walking distance from Dairy Queen. This was the first church I attended as a youth.
I had all but forgotten the bible school mandate to find a church. What I found was that on Sunday morning, a church bus drove throughout out neighborhood picking up whatever kid wanted to get on it. One day I got on the church bus and went to church.
It was a nice, big church, with nice pews and a lot of people. There were a lot of lights and windows, so it was bright inside. The preacher gave a noisy but kind-hearted sermon, at the conclusion of which he asked if anyone wanted to be saved. I was the first one up. I'm not sure I wanted to be saved so much as I wanted to belong to something in this new town, but saved I was. They all welcomed me into the church and took my picture, which hung on the bulletin board for some weeks. I was wearing a dark paisley dress with a large white pointy collar and had my long hair pulled back in a ponytail. I looked not so much happy as eager.
I think I might have gone back twice. Other than talking about Jesus, the church didn't seem to *do* anything. Today I would say that it lacked a sense of cohesion. In the 1970s, the culture wars had not heated up to the extent that the Baptist church was punching social issues--that has a lot of energy, and cohesion, though of a kind I am glad I got to avoid. In the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Church was mostly a large, nice church of the Southern variety. After church, we ate fried chicken after church, drank iced tea, and gossiped about the townspeople. It was mostly just a Sunday go to meeting social event.
I was too Hispanic and too educated to feel that comfortable at the First Baptist Church. My friends from school who were in this church were the pillars of society, the solid, reliable sorts, people who were acquaintances but with whom I did not have any real connection.
It just wasn't for me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)