Saints And Sinners In The Family

Labels can be helpful, sometimes not so much. We humans have a way of dividing in order to conquer. Even families can be split up by ideology. We need more openness and willingness to accept others as they are. Enthusiasm for one's own hobbyhorse(s) is no excuse for being overbearing.

 

My own family had been fractured from way back. I hardly know anyone in my family outside my immediate members. We were divided into various "saints" (cults, Catholics and various forms of Protestants, including my immediate family's Pentecostalism - which by nature of itself separated from even other more "worldly" forms of Christianity) and "sinners" (including harlots, drunks, several freethinkers, and a homosexual uncle).

 

The older I get the more keenly I feel the sense of loss. Damage of this type, once done, is extremely difficult to repair.

 

There could have been a real rift between my parents and me over my dabblings in unbelief. There could have been, had I been more outspoken with them. However, I tended to do no more than gently probe what I thought to be weaknesses in some of their more excessive religious tenets. Then we just loved each other anyway.

 

I can't help thinking that if Jesus was truly the model for the spiritual-minded in my family - and he was! - there should have more harmony and less friction. Jesus did not seem to want to fragment those trying to do the right thing ( "he who is not against you is for you," Luke 9;50), and certainly he did not seem to think himself above the sinners, because that was one of the "religious" knocks against him, that he "rubbed elbows" with them.
 

Yet here I stand at age 54 with family associations consisting of my elderly mother and my younger brother. The other members of my immediate family are dead now. The rest of my family are either dead or distant.

 

I'm glad that I have friends who are both believers of various sorts and unbelievers of various sorts. I'm glad that I have "sinners" who are my friends as well as "saints." I'm glad I cultivated the habit of looking beyond the labels. I guess I'm an unbelieving believer and certainly more of a sinner than a saint!

 

The older I get the less I care for extremism (or excessive enthusiasm).

 

It's not that I'm wild about people who lack some type of direction. I just think that people are more important than ideas, the human family is greater than it's various tribes.

Otis God Saved!

I don't know why this story is on my mind today as I finally get around to adding a new post to my dwindling blog. It occurred when I was in my mid-teens, fourteen or fifteen years old; I can't recall exactly.

My mother worked in one of the abundant at the time yarn factories in this area. That factory now sits empty and idle. One of the truck drivers for the company was a rough and tough fellow named Otis. He was a hard drinking, hard living "sinner" (as we called anyone who was not of the faith, but especially those who were particular vile). He was a huge man, not one to be trifled with, very vulgar in his speech and crude in his behavior. He also liked to good-naturedly "persecute" my mom for her old-fashioned and quite conservative Christian ways.

Many were the times my I listened as Mom updated us about Otis' latest antics. These stories were always quite entertaining to me, but probably they were intended as cautionary tales as well.

One hot summer day Mom came into the house after driving up after work and said to my stepfather and me: "You'll never guess what has happened."

Now here is the weird part (one of those things I can't explain but swear really happened), I blurted out without any aforethought whatsoever, "Otis got saved" (which is how we typically referred to a religious conversion into conservative Christianity).

My mom just looked at me all wide-eyed and asked how I knew that.

As I said, I can't explain it. I have no idea why that thought popped into my mind at that moment, when my mother could have been about to relate seemingly anything.  Otis getting religion certainly didn't seem a very likely thing to happen.

My mom would have said God spoke to my heart and revealed that to me. I would have said it, too, I suppose, because that was a part of our religious tradition. I don't exactly know how to account for it today. There have been many such notable examples of this kind of flash knowledge, especially in my younger years. Indeed, the more I got into rationalism after I left the faith, the less such things happened to me. And no wonder: it isn't rational apart from a spiritual context.

This I can say, afterwards I met Otis when I visited the church he had become a member of. Later I worked with him at the same factory where my mom worked and got to know him personally. It can truly be said that Otis was a changed man. "A new creature," as Christians would say. Gone was all the crudeness and roughness, and in its place was a meek, gentle giant of a man.

And his conversion lasted, too.

Otis found his peace.

Later I lost I mine. 

Remarkably Unoriginal

That is the way atheist Matthew Kneale characterizes the worldwide phenomenon of religious belief in his An Atheist's History Of Belief. Human beings have always had certain fears that religion gives answer to, or in effect, as Kneale puts it, for "keeping their worst nightmares at bay."

 

While there is much mileage in that vehicle, as something of a believer myself I doubt it is the whole trip. Personally, I find more instructive the idea of religious belief being an attempt to sate the soul's deepest desires. 

 

I have this notion that God is the Supreme Mind and that our human minds just naturally follow the thoughts of God, albeit very imperfectly. That - for me at least - accounts for our "remarkably unoriginal" systems of religious belief.

 

I've come around to seriously considering the instinctive way of knowing. The remarkable unoriginality of belief might be similar to the new born baby instinctively searching for its mother's breast, the sunflower's constant solar tracking to face the sun, perhaps in similar fashion to the way spiders learn to weave webs without benefit of a web-weaving school.

 

We humans are living beings who find ourselves in a living, evolving world. I like the concept of evolution. I believe religions evolve. They borrow from each other, mesh together, then grow extravagant branches off a tree with deep roots.

 

Religious believers also unfortunately have a habit of developing a tunnel vision which causes them to forget the tree and its roots. In my opinion that weakens the entire concept. It leads to exclusiveness. It distracts us from what I think is perhaps the strongest argument for religious belief: it is a natural instinct.

 

For that reason I find the history of unbelief much more interesting. 

The Church Of Aesop

When I was eight years old I was given a used children's book that was a wonderful collection of literature for young minds like mine. Being an avid reader for as long as I can remember, of course I almost "read the print off the pages" (as my dad used to kid me). 

 

My favorite portion was the illustrated collection of Aesop's favorites. I loved Aesop then and do still today, often referencing one of his tales when I want to make a point. I love stories that have a moral. And why not? I was reared on Jesus and his parables. Even today I still get a real kick out of certain of Jesus' stories.

 

But back to Aesop. Mind you, there is a bit of debate about the man - whether he really existed at all (although there are indeed brief references to him in ancient writings). Then also we don't have any of his original writings (assuming he did exist, of course). Students of Aesop's fables have not failed to notice that many of his tales exist in various versions all across the world, and so probably all could not have been original with him. And the fables themselves detail the most incredible accounts of things, talking animals, for instance.

 

Ah, but I still find great value in Aesop's little stories. They hold more than a bit of the sacred for me because I treasure wisdom. So details about who thought them up or when or if they have a true basis are totally beside the point for me.

 

Does this make me a mythic theologian?