Hmm... Unitarian? Ok!

If you know me, you know that I don't profess to be a Christian. I don't really profess to be anything but a seeker. People who have asked me what I believe usually come away confused. For awhile my husband thought I was Jewish.

I was raised outside church. I have never been baptized. My parents never talked about God, never professed any belief in God, condemned the religion they had been brought up in as coercive and narrow-minded, but they did not condemn the religious impulse. They told me that they wanted me to find my own way to religion if that was my desire when I was old enough to understand what I was getting into.

What am I getting into?!

Of course I came into contact with religion when I was a kid, via the older generation in my family, a short stint in Catholic girls' school (my parents put "unitarian" on my application to avoid uncomfortable questions), and my friends (Jewish and Methodist).

Going to Catholic school was a real cognitive dissonance and complicated my relationship with religion in a big way. I remember distinctly sitting in my first Mass, terrified, because I didn't know whether to take communion as an unbaptized heathen and thus commit a sin, or sit there while all the other kids and the teachers took communion and admit I was different from everyone else (as if that was the only way I was different!). Of course, being different is far more appalling to a kid than sin. I mean, you'll have to pay for being different immediately afterward, when the other kids can get to you. The repayment for sin, by comparison, would be somewhat delayed. It was a no-win situation. So I took communion.

I think that may have been the first time I encountered the cruelty that sometimes manifests itself in religion. I felt humiliated and rejected, and angry for having to make that choice. I'm still angry about it.

Wow.