The Church Tours

I’ve told the story of why my dad left the Catholic Church before but I’m going to tell it again. Back in the 1920s when Dad was eight years old a priest, while teaching Sunday school, accused my dad of throwing a spitball. If you don’t know what a spitball is, it’s a piece of paper that’s been chewed and shaped into a ball. Dad always claimed he didn’t do it but that didn’t stop the priest from opening the door on a potbelly stove, picking my dad up by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and pretend he was going to throw Dad inside to teach him about the fires of hell where bad boys go. After that, my dad refused to go back to Sunday school and while his siblings continued growing up Catholic my dad was sent off to the only other church in town, a Methodist.

I was grade school, too, when I had a life-changing ‘church’ event of my own. Less dramatic but just as hurtful and long-lasting. I can still see myself with long pigtails and wearing a pink print dress standing on the playground during recess and being told by a classmate that she couldn’t play with me anymore because I was a “heathen who didn’t go to church.” The day before, I had gone home with her after school to play and her mother had given me the third degree. “What church to you go to?” Blah, blah, blah. It was after that when my parents had my brother and me start walking up to one of the four churches close-by for Sunday school and it didn’t matter which one. Our choice. At one of those churches I learned that God was an image cut out of a book, pasted to a piece of flannel and slapped above a flannel-backed cloud in the sky where He overlooked a field full of cows. 

Oddly enough, my date for the junior prom was the son of a dairy farmer. A deeply religious farmer who beat his son for dating a girl outside of their church---that would be me in case you’re having a Dense Dianna Day. My friend ran away from home after that beating but he didn’t stay away long enough for his black and blue marks to fade. He told me that farming was in his blood and if he didn’t break up with me, his father would disinherit him and give the family farm to his cousin. I got over the breakup quick enough but I spent the ‘60s trying to figure out why God encouraged his followers to abuse little boys with spitballs, polite little girls with pigtails and a nearly grown boy who thought I was special enough to introduce me to his parents. 

Being brought up in what was known as the "city of churches" I learned the art of avoiding the topic of religion early on in life. I have a master’s degree in avoidance so imagine my surprise when I signed up for a senior hall tour of a church denomination that’s only been in town for ten years: The Unitarian Universal Church. Why did I want to learn more about this church? Because several (holier than thou) people I know think the place is the devil’s spawn and by contrast, one of my favorite and most admired bloggers is a member of the UUC. So I dusted off my eggshell walking shoes and hoped my seatmate on the bus didn’t want to talk Christian doctrine. She didn’t. The church tour series goes to two different churches every month and the other church on our agenda Thursday was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, another controversial church according to some. 

The local UUC church actually holds its services in a Jewish Temple and has been doing so since its inception which seemed weird until I learned that the UUC’s logo---a flaming chalice---has ties to an underground group during WWII that helped Unitarians and Jews escape Nazi persecution. Sometimes we’re so busy looking at the differences between people and groups that we overlook their similarities and where their histories intertwine. I was impressed by the minister saying they are an inclusive community that celebrates theological diversity. She is free, for example, to base her services on readings from scripture, Buddha, the Torah, Maya Angelou or wherever else she finds inspiration. A recent sermon of hers I found online was inspired by Donald Trump saying he doesn’t have time to be politically correct. Another thing that sets them apart from some other churches---if I'm understanding it right---is they consider Jesus to be a high prophet but not God, not part of a holy Trinity.

The other church we toured, the LDS, was everything I would not like in a church but the hour and a half we spent there was certainly interesting. If you’ve ever had two of their missionaries stand on your porch steps you’ll get the picture of the tag team that walked us through the workings of their church, throwing in a heavy dose of evangelizing for good measure. 

Tour or no tour, I do occasionally wonder if I’m still searching for that enlightenment I think I found in my twenties. Will I wake up one day with a desire to start attending church? If so, the UUC is probably the only place I could feel like I belonged. Life would be less complicated if I had a church here in the city of churches. A church comes with a social life and that would be nice, too. But I’d feel like a hypocrite if I took up a religion like the LDS that personifies the meaning of God as I have come to know God---that combined goodness of mankind, a force for and of goodness. Can you believe it, in one of the class rooms at the LDS they even had a cut-out silhouette of God/Jesus standing on cut-out clouds. The more things change the more they stay the same. Not since college have I seen so many prints of Jesus in one place. There must have been over fifty in the building.

When I was an art major in college, we studied a lot of religious works of art because throughout man’s early history anyone with an artistic talent was basically enslaved by the church for the express purpose of personifying God. And while many religious philosophies of the world used artists to do pictorials to teach spiritual concepts and lessons to the masses who could not read, the Christians were the most prolific, especially during the reigns of Sixtus IV and Pope Julius II. Fast forward a few centuries when the depicted messengers became more important than the message---how do you put that Jeanie back in the bottle? How do you embrace God if you think of God as something separate and outside of yourself, outside of your own ability to create goodness and love? How can a person claim to know God yet carry out actions rooted in hate? I guess that's a diploma for those who do it to explain because try as I might over the decades, I haven't figured it out.

I apologize to anyone still reading this super-sized blog post. I usually don’t post things longer than 900 words but try as I might I couldn’t edit down my thoughts and anecdotes any more than what I’ve shared above. I even cut a whole passage about drum circles, Christian hymns and wailing walls that I particularly liked. If I’ve inadvertently said anything unflattering or untrue about your religious beliefs, I’m sorry. Please feel free to correct any errors or misrepresentations I may have made. ©