The Agnostic's Catholic Son & Other Tales of the Bizarre...

My little altar server!

To those of you who have known me for a while, this may seem like a trip to the Twilight Zone. Yes, I was at the mass where my little boy did the altar thingy. No, I did not burst into flame...my hand didn't even fall asleep. Yes, I was very proud of him.

I started out life as a Lutheran. By age 12, I quit the church because I got into an argument with the pastor during catechism (I know, you're soooo surprised). He said dinosaurs never existed...that science just made them all up. He also couldn't sing worth a damn, had halitosis and did I imagine it or was he wearing a bustier under his robes?

In high school, I toyed with atheism but found it too religious. By college, I'd settled on agnosticism. I'd read something by some Greek philosopher named Protagorus (sp?) who said we should be agnostic because we just don't know. That sounded about right. Or lazy.I get the two confused sometimes.

Oddly, one of my best friends in high school was a Traditionalist Catholic. Why? I admired her faith. We were both comfortable with who we were religiously and decided that time spent prosthelytising (sp? again? I got to stop drinking while blogging) was time better spent talking about boys and why I sucked at geometry.

My daughter is far more interested in science and the Ramones and far too sarcastic to get on with faith of any kind, unless it involves Hershey's chocolate and fluffy kittens wearing sweaters with skulls on them.

So, how did it come to pass that my nine year old boy up and joins the Catholic church? And how do I feel about it?

You might be surprised to know that I am very proud of him. Jack has always been very spiritual, even as a toddler. I had briefly flirted with the Unitarian church and we went for about a year and a half. Jack loved it. When he was four, we visited the John Deere museum. He insisted on pretend driving the combine with me as a passenger. As we sat eighty million feet over the cement floor, he told me, "I gotta get one of these!"

"Where would you drive it?" I asked, wondering why there weren't any seatbelts.

"I'd drive you to church every Sunday!" Was his response, as I imagined terrifying the good people of the Quad Cities as we drove down the interstate, taking up five lanes of traffic at a time.

I quit going. And not just because I liked sleeping in on Sundays (although that is a really good point). The minister, who I really liked and who was the same age as me, told me one day that the Pagans had left the church when they cut down some trees. He wanted to get them back. I didn't have time to hunt down cantankerous pagans and I believed at the time that I had a much stronger relationship with my mattress than I did with, well, anything else.

When Jack turned 8, he wanted to work on his Parvuli Dei pin for Cub Scouts. We set him up with my in-laws and every Saturday, Jack spent the afternoon with them, working on the badge and going to mass. He earned the award. He also decided he was Catholic.

Jack asked to start CCD. He took to it with an enthusiasm that made me smile. Within one year, he'd caught up with the other kids. Last spring, he had first communion and was baptized. This year, altar servicing.

This fall, Margaret and I went with him to his first CCD class. The teacher kept trying to send Margaret to the sixth grade class and was confused when I said that their grandpa would be filling out the paperwork and bringing him every week. I watched other parents drag their kids in, cuffing them in the back of the head. I saw their unhappy faces as they looked forward to another year of enforced religious education. I wondered what Torquemada's kid went through ("You're going or else! Don't make me get my pliers young man!").

Last week, Jack came home with a new rosary. They had a quiz in class and if they got an answer wrong they had to sit down. Jack was the last kid standing. He never missed a question.

You see, most of these kids aren't there because they want to be. They're there because their (did you see how in four words I used three different variations of "their?") parents said they had to go. Jack may be the only kid at Catechumenate of Christian Doctrine (that's right...I know what it means) who is there because he truly wants to be. He takes great joy in it. Jack chose Catholicism. It didn't chose him.

I can deal with my kid being religious as long as it's something he loves. Don't all parents say that? And I believe it too! Well, as long as he doesn't become a mathemetician. I mean, I have to draw the line somewhere.


The Assassin