{"id":1105,"date":"2009-09-29T11:40:21","date_gmt":"2009-09-29T11:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/theirbadmother\/2009\/09\/what-do-you-do-when-the-path-is-dark.html"},"modified":"2009-09-29T11:40:21","modified_gmt":"2009-09-29T11:40:21","slug":"what-do-you-do-when-the-path-is-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2009\/09\/what-do-you-do-when-the-path-is-dark.html","title":{"rendered":"God And The Good Parent"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/em>(I wrote this post three years ago. I’m reposting it here, with some minor amendments, in two parts, because I’m still grappling with these issues and am no closer to answers – indeed, I’d say that I am further from answers <\/a>– than I was three years ago. Perhaps in revisiting the issue, I’ll find some much-needed clarity.)<\/i><\/p>\n

A few years ago, a friend of mine wrote a powerful post <\/a>about her struggle with issues concerning faith. Around the same time, another friend took on the same topic<\/a>.
\nBoth wrote from the perspective of lapsed believers, of women who had
\ngrown up with faith but grown apart from faith. Both struggled, in
\ntheir posts, to make sense of their relationship to God and Church. For
\nthe sake – for the possible sake – of their children.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Both
\nposts hit me in the gut. Hard. I’ve been wrestling with these issues since, well, forever. Since my own faith started taking sucker punches
\nfrom Real Life – divorce, death and other tragedies that make the voice
\nwaver as it recites the 23rd Psalm.<\/a> And since a young adulthood spent studying political philosophy, and
\nreflecting upon the political uses of religion, most of which reduce to
\npacifying or mobilizing the masses. Hurt, and reason: both have a
\nsobering effect on blind faith.<\/p>\n

I was once a passionate Catholic. As a teenager I thought seriously, if briefly, about becoming a nun. (This in my goth phase. Yes, I was a Catholic goth. I wore a rosary as an accessory to my uniform of black-on-black, but I took that rosary seriously, by God<\/em>.) Not so much because I felt strongly about committing to my faith, but because it was fascinating <\/em>and I wanted to make it my own: <\/em>all
\nof the esotericism and the Latin and the mysteries and the feeling, at
\nonce giddy and solemn, of tapping into some deep vein of meaning. I
\nwould sit in the dark in my room during thunderstorms, looking out my
\nwindow and trying to wrap my head around the relationship between God
\nand Nature, trying to work out the theology of Milton<\/a> and Blake<\/a> and Big Blue Marble<\/a>. I read the Bible for fun.<\/p>\n

I
\nwas into it. I loved it. It provided both security and stimulation,
\nsoothing me to sleep and pricking me awake, for a very long time. But
\nthen I grew up, and the stars threw down their spears.<\/p>\n

I grew
\nup, and my family – that had long been so solid, so secure – hit
\ndifficult times, and my parents split up, badly, and I left home and
\nmade all the bad decisions and took all the dangerous steps that
\ndisillusioned Catholic girls who leave home at 18 make. My mother
\ndeclared that God had abandoned her, and me, and us, and insisted that
\nshe would herewith keep faith only with Mary and the saints and that I
\nshould do the same. God was a mean old guy who provided no comfort
\nbecause He could not, my mother insisted, be trusted. He’d turn on you.
\nHe’d turned on her, and on us, after we had prayed so hard for Him to
\nguide us and keep us.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t sure that I agreed with my
\nmother, but with every bad thing that happened in my life and in the
\nlives of others, as the world came to seem uglier and uglier, my
\ncommitment to the Church waned. My faith waned. And it took a direct
\nhit when, in my very late teens, after I had left my broken home to try
\nto find my own place in the world, I was informed by a well-meaning –
\nand very Catholic – boyfriend that I was going to hell. He had
\ndiscovered, by finding and reading my diary, that I was tainted by sin
\n(a long story, and a whole ‘nother post). And, after going to
\nconfession to consult with a priest as to whether my<\/em> sins
\nmight taint him<\/i>, he informed me that God had told him in the
\nconfessional booth that he could no longer associate with me. I was
\ncorrupt, I had committed a mortal sin<\/a>, and I was going to hell.<\/p>\n

God
\ntold him to break up with me. And that was that. It was absurd,
\nunreasonable, and just enough to tip me over the edge that I was
\nalready teetering upon. This was not my Church, not my God.
\"\"<\/a>
It was, in a twisted way, my Lisbon Earthquake<\/a>. I thought: how could a just God, a reasonable<\/em>
\nGod, inspire such nonsense? And then I thought: what evidence have I
\never had that God was any of those things? A few moments of spiritual
\nepiphany while watching cute altar boys light candles and a succession
\nof thunderstorms didn’t weigh up very well against broken families and
\ndeath and starving children in Africa and messed-up twenty-year-old
\nboys spouting nonsense about God’s greater plan for their dating
\nfutures. Clearly, God was, as my mother said, a dodgy piece of work.<\/p>\n

I wanted nothing to do with it, with Him. That day was the last day that I ever went to confession.<\/p>\n

And
\nthen I went off to university and began studying philosophy and that
\ndid nothing to restore my faith. I began studying the Bible as a book
\nand God as source material for art, literature and politics. I
\npresented papers on how modern philosophers used women as figurative
\nrepresentatives of conventional Christian morality. I argued that some
\nphilosophers suggested, quietly, that women could be understood as the
\nultimate practitioners of moral deceit and use this deceit to their
\ngreater strength and that this practice reflected the politics of the
\nCatholic Church and of Christianity generally and that this revealed
\nall variety of interesting things about morality and virtue and the
\npower of women.<\/p>\n

I liked these arguments. A lot.<\/p>\n

And I
\nliked that, on one or two occasions, during mid-summer lectures in
\nwhich I related these and similar arguments, a thunderstorm would roll
\nin and lightning would flash right after I said something about
\nNietzsche or Machiavelli and godlessness.<\/p>\n

It was an ambivalent
\nrelationship. Philosophy was more interesting when it was
\ntransgressive, and it only really felt transgressive when it confronted
\nand challenged my faith. So faith became a way of keeping things
\nexciting, of pricking myself awake when I became complacent about
\nLiberalism and Secularism and Rationalism blah blah blah<\/i>. I became an
\nopportunistic believer, using God and belief in God as a tool to
\nadvance my own learning.<\/p>\n

Then the Husband and I decided to start
\na family, and there were problems, there were complications, and for a while it
\nlooked like we couldn’t have the family that we wanted. But then the path opened up and
\nI became pregnant, and thankful. I struck bargains with God. I swore up
\nand down that I would raise a believing child if He let this child come
\ninto the world. And when more complications emerged I swore harder. I
\nwent to sleep murmuring Pater Nosters<\/em> <\/a>and Ave Marias<\/a><\/em>. I prayed.<\/p>\n

And
\nI meant it. I prayed with full acknowledgment of my own confusion, my
\nown ambivalence. I couldn’t do otherwise; there was no comfort in
\nprayer unless it was confused prayer, if that makes sense. But my
\npromise to give my child the opportunity to experience faith was not
\nconfused. I meant every word. I wanted – I want – my
\nchildren, to know God. As I did.<\/p>\n

But I don’t know how to introduce them to God while remaining true to my confusion and ambivalence, which, however problematic, are sincere and deeply felt (perhaps now more deeply felt than ever). And I don’t know whether I need<\/i> to overcome my confusion and ambivalence in order to introduce them to God and to faith. Must faith always be grounded in certainty? Is it possible to introduce children to faith when one’s own is emphatically not so grounded?

(Tomorrow: why I want this for my children, and why I am confounded in this desire.)<\/b><\/i>
<\/b>
Amended from an original post published at Her Bad Mother<\/a>, July 2006.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(I wrote this post three years ago. I’m reposting it here, with some minor amendments, in two parts, because I’m still grappling with these issues and am no closer to answers – indeed, I’d say that I am further from answers – than I was three years ago. Perhaps in revisiting the issue, I’ll find…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,33,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","category-interfaith","category-philosopherisms"],"yoast_head":"\nGod And The Good Parent - Their Bad Mother<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2009\/09\/what-do-you-do-when-the-path-is-dark.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"God And The Good Parent - Their Bad Mother\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(I wrote this post three years ago. I’m reposting it here, with some minor amendments, in two parts, because I’m still grappling with these issues and am no closer to answers – indeed, I’d say that I am further from answers – than I was three years ago. 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