Sunday mornings. Everyone at my house dreaded them, except my mother. I abhorred going to church. I would have preferred to play a few rounds of soccer baseball with the neighbourhood kids in the empty field next to my house. But for my mother, going to church meant comfort. When she was growing up, it was a place she could go to see friends, escape an unsafe household and find solace in a spiritual, loving and consistent father figure. With nothing else to do on Sundays, because all of the shops were closed and with sports being the only thing allowed on the radio, the staunch Presbyterian church of the 1950s became a happy and safe constant, offering my mother what she was missing at home.
In my opinion, at the tender age of six, sweeping the house, washing all of the dirty dishes by hand or cleaning my room by myself would have been a decent way to spend a Sunday if going to church was the only other option on the table. And anything would have been better than putting on my scratchy, red dress with the frilly white neck that choked me, and my too-small leotards that were much shorter than my legs. These were the elements of my Sunday best. When I yanked the leotards up to my waist, there was an enormous gap between the fabric at the crotch of them and the location on my body they were designed to conform to. With my greatest effort, I was able to get the bum of the leotards up to mid-thigh, at best. Because they were so small, I remained in a perpetual wrestling match with them for the entirety of their wear on Sunday mornings. They were too slippery for sitting on varnished hardwood pews and they failed to keep my legs warm in colder months. They were a magnet to gusts of cold air, creating a wind-tunnel effect up my dress.
Don’t get me started on the patent leather shoes that cost so much I wore them long after my toes curled under. Because I was the third child in my family, new clothing items usually came to me when someone else outgrew them. But I was the first person to wear the black shoes, and their importance was drilled into me. I struggled to line up the seams on the toes of my leotards in the right way to keep them from rubbing angrily between the tight shoes and my skin.
And I was convinced the inconceivably uncomfortable pews had been constructed with sinister intention. As a teenager, I determined that the patriarchy had designed them specifically to keep us awake and listening to the minister rather than slipping into the comfort of our own thoughts.
“Why do I have to go? I don’t want to,” I groaned.
“Because I said so, now get in the car.” Mom wore her sensible and robust heels and her navy-blue chiffon dress that only came out for special occasions. Her permed, salt and pepper hair had been picked by comb into a soft helmet and her bright pink lipstick had been applied to perfection. In her purse were a smattering of tissues that she’d used previously to blot her lips. Whenever there was something to wipe from my face, one of those perfumey tissues would emerge, be spat upon and rubbed indignantly over the dirt. The smell of those pink-smudged tissues was the scent of my mother: determined, warm and confident.
“Why doesn’t dad have to go?”
“Just get in the car.”
This exchange repeated itself, with minor alterations, every week.
Dad was never forced to go to church. He was permitted to stay home and spend his Sunday mornings as he chose; perhaps he couldn’t yet find a place for himself in my mother’s religion. As a child, the unfairness of his freedom was infuriating.
During parts of my life I found some acceptance for the rhythm of the church’s mechanisms–the pensive chanting in unison, and the gathering of community after the services–but most of the time I was bored of what I considered the mundane ritual of it all.
As a teen, I became frustrated with the use of the word “man” and the pronoun “he” in the readings and the hymns. Like my father, it was hard for me to find myself in my mother’s religion. One time, during Sunday service I sat enduring the inflexible pews and after a monotonous message illustrating our failures as humans, we were asked to rise as a congregation to sing Psalm 10together. When we got to the part of the hymn that said, “Do you hear it when the poor man cries?”, I defiantly altered the wording to say, “Do you hear it when the poor people cry?”. I glanced around to see if anyone in the seats near me had noticed. Since they hadn’t, I decided that I’d gotten away with it once, which meant I could do it again. I had identified a new power.
At another Sunday morning service, when we were reciting the Lord’s Prayer, I determined that there was a possibility my mother’s god could be female, and so I chose to recite the prayer with the appropriate adjustment.
“Our Mother who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
Again, I peeked around to see if anyone had noticed my modification to the prayer. My mother was up in the choir, where she sat every Sunday, so she had not caught on. No one near me was the wiser and I had succeeded in getting away with it once more. From that moment forward, it was settled; if I was going to be forced to endure church, then I was going to experience the practice in a way that I could tolerate. My lone protest was not just for me, my revolt was for all the women in the world who wanted to find their place in the hymns and the passages that had neglected them, and I was resolute that they should be able to.
In my experimental university years I thought I had found God in the way my mother had wanted me to, and I started attending church services on my own with some kids I’d known from my Presbyterian days. However, the more I learned, the less tolerant of the teachings I became. I determined that I could know my own god, in my own way, in my own time.
When I raised my children, they weren’t forced to go to church. I cautiously experimented by pushing beyond the boundaries of expectation–of my mother, past generations and religion itself–and extended my consciousness of possibilities by offering my children a choice. I did enforce the eating of vegetables, going to bed at prescribed times, and limitations on screens though. So one day they too may write about their own dissension with parental restraint. Or perhaps they may express disappointment that they weren’t given opportunities to witness organized religion.
It was not unusual to field questions about faith from my children while they were visiting their grandparents, especially when they witnessed the rift between their grandmother and me on some Sunday mornings. One Good Friday I was in the bathroom washing up when I overheard an exchange between my four-year-old son and his grandmother.
“Why are you dressed up Grandma?”
“It’s Good Friday Sweetheart and I’m getting ready for church.”
“Why are you going to church on Friday?” Despite his limited understanding of the Christian faith, he did know that the regular ceremonies she attended took place on Sundays.
“Well, Good Friday is the day Christ died, so we go to church to learn about that.”
“Oh.”
I could hear his little brain turning like a hamster wheel in his head. I knew what he’d been exposed to within the Christian faith, but we had never had the “Good Friday” chat. Curious and amused, I remained silent in the bathroom and continued to listen in. I imagined my son looking concerned and confused about Christ’s death and could hear my mother working hard to rectify the situation.
“Oh it’s okay dear, because on Easter Sunday Christ rose from the dead, so it’s going to be alright.”
Her explanation had left him with more questions than answers. “Grandma, what’s ‘rose from the dead’ mean?”
“That means ‘come back to life’ dear.”
“Oh.”
More silence. In the moments of the pause, I reflected on my perhaps-perceived-by-some failures as a parent to pass on our family’s religion to my own children. Did I fail, or protect them? Did it matter? These were new steps I was taking into the unknown.
“I’ll see you when I get back from church.” My mother had known not to include me or the children in the invitation to her religious ceremonies. I believe that she understood and respected, or at least attempted to, my choices as a parent. Or, perhaps, she’d grown tired of asking.
“Okay, bye Grandma.”
I finished up in the bathroom and made my way out to the living room where my three children were playing with an old Sesame Street dollhouse that had once been mine. Showing the wear and tear of my own childhood, it was still a treat for them to engage with.
“Grandma went to church,” my son reported.
“Okay,” I answered.
“Yeah, her friend died.”
I forced down a giggle.
“But don’t you worry Mommy, he’s coming back to life on Sunday.”
My heart was tickled by this sweet conclusion of a four-year-old attempting to understand his grandmother’s faith. I grinned and talked him through his innocent misunderstanding of one of the most important observances of the religion to which his grandmother had committed her life.
Things have changed a lot in the last 70 years. In contrast to my mother’s time as a child, stores are now open on Sundays, people have learned to consider how they want to practice their faith, and friends can connect socially in ways other than church services. Where does that place me and my contemporaries on the spectrum of faith and religion? We’ve become interpreters of one generation to another, attempting to be the link–or perhaps the barrier–between the stories of our ancestors that we may not believe in, and the questioning minds of the next iteration within our families.
I am a part of the generation that has lived experience in both worlds: the one of repetitious religious practices and the one unrestrained by their limitations. I understand both realities and am perhaps the inventor of the latter, within my own family at least. I straddle the divide between Sunday mornings full of conformity, discomfort and defiance and Sunday mornings spent cozying up to a warm cup of coffee, my computer and my words. It’s here that I’ve found my own religion–in the stories of my life, the contemplative musings of what ifs and the quiet conversations I have, when I want to, with my own god.