Column: Savagemama

Is Motherhood Leading me to the Church Door? Really?

By Jennifer Savage, 4-13-07

The other day my southern Baptist grandmother asked me if my husband was an atheist. How was I supposed to answer that question? Yes, no. I don’t know. It’s more complicated than that? She asked it in the same tone she used when she said to me at our wedding, “You didn’t tell me he was a Yankee,” so I knew she wasn’t going to let it slide or let me wiggle out of it.

“No.” I said because I think it’s as close to the truth as any other answer. Then I changed the subject.

This question of religion and where we stand with it is always just under the surface for her. She trolls around looking for clues. She snooped until she found out that the person performing our wedding ceremony wasn’t actually a minister but merely someone appointed by the Universailist Unitarians to oversee such occasions. That didn’t, however, stop her from pulling him aside and asking him to end the ceremony with a prayer. When he did, Seth and I looked at each other puzzled. He didn’t tell us he was going to do that. Then a few months later, a sheepish grin spread wide across her face, she asked how I liked the prayer.

“Did you tell him to do that?” I asked. I should have known.

“I just thought we needed a little bit of the Lord in that ceremony,” she said. I guess the ten readings we’d spent months finding and tweaking weren’t spiritual enough for her. She needed an out right “bless this day that the Lord hath made.” And she got it.

At first I was a little irritated the officiate caved, but not for long. My grandmother, all 90 pounds of her, can be pretty persuasive.

So when she corners me about things religious I try to steer her in another direction.

“You been reading your bible?” she’ll ask.

“Not really. We’ve pretty much been reading The Baby Book by Dr. Sears. When did mama start crawling?” I’ll say.

“I really don’t remember but she slept through the night the first night we were home from the hospital,” she’ll say. “Should I send Seth some of my Sunday school books when I’m finished with them?”

She’s relentless, and at 78 she’s not missing a thing. She’s told me more than once, “I’m gonna convert him. You just watch.”

Luckily, Seth kind of likes the pursuit. He uses it as a way to move forward his own agenda. He’s convinced that if my grandmother had access to more information about world affairs that she would feel differently about our president, his choices and his war. So he takes her his old Harper’s magazines to balance out all the Fox News she watches.

She gives him a guide on how to read the Bible in one year, he gives her Noam Chomsky books. They both read and consider what the other offers up and they stay up late into the night talking. The first time this happened I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed but I was a little nervous to leave them alone. Then I realized they were both listening to each other and agreeing on lots of things. I went to bed, their banter muffled in the still night. In the morning, over coffee (something they readily agree on – neither could live without it) they joked they’d stayed up too late solving the world’s problems.

Lately, my grandmother seems extra interested in our spiritual path. I don’t pretend that she’s out to save my soul and saving Seth’s soul has been a little harder then she bargained for but Eliza’s soul is a different story.

As Easter approached this year she slipped sly comments into conversation before finally asking, “You gonna take that baby to church?”

And the strange thing was, I was actually considering it. I’m not taking a stab at redemption or becoming born again, I’ve just been thinking of taking my baby to church. The most all accepting, rainbow-flag flying, women are equal, nondenominational church I can find.

I grew up going to church. I think nearly everyone is the South does. When I was really young, my dad would dress me in a Sunday dress and a wool coat with velvet around the collar. He’d drive me across town my grandmother’s house and I would go with her to Sunday school. (Then I guess he went home and read the paper, I’m not really sure. As the son of a Baptist minister, he wasn’t exactly beating down the church doors.) I’d arrive with my hair in pigtails, my feet in tight patent leather. My grandmother would take my hair down, comb it with the long gray comb she still keeps in her purse. She’d part it on the side and pull one side back with a clip. I guess pigtails were a little flashy for the Baptist church. We did this for years until I moved with my dad and stepmother a few hours away.

When I was growing up in the South the question was never if you went to church but where and how you answered that question said a lot about you, your family and your Lord. 

There were three brands of religion in my small corner of the world: Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian. Generally speaking, Presbyterians thought they were a little better than Methodists, Methodists thought the same thing about Baptists, though none of them would ever admit that. Bless their hearts.

If you were Baptist, you had someone playing guitar and an overhead projector displaying song lyrics at both of your Sunday services. You might, say, bring boys to your dorm room in college, leaving the door open, of course, and sing songs praising Jesus until way into the morning. If you were Methodist, you went to church once a week and called it good. There were no sing alongs in college unless you count the sorority songs during rush. If you were Presbyterian, you went to church with the town manager, the mayor and the local congressman. You were a little more progressive than those who went to the other two churches in town and you went on a fantastic youth group ski trip every year that was infamous, notorious especially because I never got to go.

My grandmother went to the Baptist church because it was close to her house and when she had children at home, they could walk to it. But she still sees herself as Presbyterian and thinks sometimes the Baptist make a fuss over little things. She’s not evangelical and actually is quite progressive. She’s got a (mostly) live and let live outlook on religion, which she passed on to me, even though she likes to take Seth and I both to task trying to get a better idea of just what it is we believe.

During my teens I went to a Methodist church with my stepmother. Methodists don’t usually proselytize, they don’t visit those in the community they think need saving. They go to church, they tithe, they pray quietly. My stepmother was no different. She believed in the Lord but kept it to herself.

Somewhere along the way I left regular church going behind. My grandmother says I caught this apathy – what she calls liberalism—somewhere in college. She says I “caught it” in the same way she might say I’d caught an STD, one part disbelief, one part disgust. But even after I stopped going to church, which was an unceremonious trailing off over the years, I would still see people from my church community in town. I’d run into the man we used to sit beside on the second row and he’d ask how I was doing in college. Or the woman who always wanted me to date her son and she’d ask after my stepmother, my brother. When I’m visiting my family, I still have the urge to get up on Sunday mornings and head to our little brick church with stained glass windows to say hello to those folks. I feel at home there in their company, their fellowship. This community supported me, led me and sent me out into the world. I’ve always been thankful. 

It’s not that I don’t believe what my grandmother believes, I think I just believe it on a different scale. At some point, I adopted the one truth, many paths concept of spirituality.  I came to this by way of the thin slice of the religious pie I was exposed to. The Baptist church, the Methodist church, the Presbyterian church, and all those liberal mind-expanding classes I took in college. I also came to it just by moving through the world. I had a community, a church community that looked after me and, in that way, gave me the freedom to find my own path.

One day, Eliza will choose her own path too no matter how hard my grandmother tries to steer her toward the cross. I want people to stop her in the grocery store, having known her since she was in elementary school, and ask her how college is going. I want her to have a community that will watch out for her and support her when she begins to seek some sort of meaning in this world. I think I’m as surprised as anyone (except maybe Seth) that’s this is leading me to think about taking her to church.

Jennifer Savage writes about being a new mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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