Lapsed atheist

 

I read a letter on poetry today and heard a phrase I had never heard before, but which described many interesting moments in my life.

As a romantically religious child, I grew up collecting stories of the Catholic saints, candy striping at a Catholic hospital and attending various churches and Sunday schools with my Grandmother, great aunts, and friends. In Mermaids, the mother tells her daughter, who is obsessed with Catholicism, "Charlotte, we're Jewish." Nobody ever told me that. I was desperate to be Catholic, or Jewish, or anything except what I was, a mid century child growing up with two religiously lapsed parents, both of whom had been very religious at some point in their lives. My father as an Episcopalian and my mother a Baptist.

I married a man with a religious name who was a devout Episcopalian, still serving as an acolyte even as he went to college. I am still not sure what attracted me to him more, the fact that he seemed to care for me, his romantic name, or religious bent, which later turned out to have been heavily based on both the priest's daughter and the regulation pool table in the church's hall, but why is probably not important. I did marry him and became a devout Episcopalian for many years.

I taught Sunday school, put out the church newsletter, produced little acolytes and thurifers and even angels for the pageant every Christmas. Priests, ministers, nuns, and chaplains numbered among my closest friends. Our social lives revolved around the church and the people therein.

Until it didn't.

The intolerable hypocrites who began to try and run the church had something to do with that, as did the intolerant teachers in the junior high Sunday school who did not brook any real questions. Plus my marriage began faltering a little more every year until finally, divorced, supporting myself, and released from the constant need to appear holier than thou, I began to think. The thoughts are ones I have written about in previous thoughts, but mostly they began to un-deify god and strengthen my belief in something bigger and greater than the jealous creature created in the Bible.

I am very comfortable with my beliefs now, but there are still times when the old need to talk to someone finds me doing just that. Dear God . . .

I have even found myself considering joining my friend and his congregation occasionally. Some of those people were very good friends during important parts of my life, but my present belief system always made that feel awkward.  What do I say when they ask where I have been? 

Because, actually, I am still there. 

Today I heard a phrase that describes me for those times when I need some carefully defined words to utter in response to those questions, and it is: 

Sometimes I am a lapsed atheist.