Photograph by CORBIS
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Faith, Hope, and Clarity
By Betsy Carter, November & December 2004
Baby boomers have always gone their own way. But when it comes to finding religion, can they remake God in their own image?
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I remember the first time my father told me that he was an
atheist. Even as he spelled it out for me, the word sounded
frightening, like a barbed-wire fence. My parents were German
Jewish immigrants who fled from Hitler in their early 20s. They
had to leave Germany because they were Jewish, and yet when they
came here they were not actively religious. I could never figure
out if that was a giant paradox or a natural reaction to what
happened to them.
Out of respect for some sense of tradition we went to synagogue
on the high holidays, but that was pretty much it. Then, when I
was 10, we moved to Miami. I fell in with a pack of Baptists, and
during the first summer there they asked me to join their Bible
school. I was curious about this strange religion and eager to be
part of the group. So every morning that summer I showed up at
the Flagler Baptist Bible School, where we read the New Testament
and sang songs about Jesus. The teacher was nice and the songs
were pretty. I loved the way our voices all blended together,
zealous 10-year-olds singing at the top of our lungs. But most of
all, I loved the sense of being a part this new community.
As my father pushed into his 70s, his barbed fence came down. He
began going to school at night in order to learn about the
history of Judaism. He, too, had found a place where he felt he
belonged. I wish I could say that I was happy for him, but
instead, as I entered my know-it-all 30s, I fought bitterly with
him about his newfound devotion. Nobody should tell you how to
think, I said. Certainly, I wasn't about to be bound to God
or doctrine. I was of a generation that challenged authority on
everything from sex to war. Why should religion be any different?
Then I got older. My parents died. I had a bout with cancer. I
live only a couple of miles from where the planes crashed into
the twin towers on September 11. I can't say that my beliefs
were shaken on that day, because I'm not sure I had any
beliefs to shake. But I knew that whatever I did have was badly
in need of repair. Life had ruptured in ways I could never have
fathomed and I couldn't put the pieces back together again. I
wasn't exactly looking for religion; that would suggest a
fuller articulation of what I felt lacking. There were pieces of
things I yearned for, qualities in people that I envied. I
wondered if there were others who felt as I did, a little lost, a
little scared, and a lot in need of some answers. So I went in
search of people who seemed to have what I was looking for.
The first thing I found was an ongoing Gallup poll showing that
only about 31 percent of Americans say they attend worship
services once a week, a number that has remained steady for a
decade. Assuming that I am not the only one looking for spiritual
solace, I wondered where people were going to find it.
I began by talking to someone who never lost it, a friend of a
friend named Sally O'Dell, 53, who lives in Battle Creek,
Michigan. She has one of those warm voices that implies a smile,
and we quickly fell into an intimate conversation. As she was one
of eight children, she found it nearly impossible to spend time
alone with her adored grandfather. An early riser, she would be
the only one awake when he would head off to morning Mass.
"He'd take me by the hand and we'd walk to church
together," she said. "He had a quiet face, and I knew
something was happening with him. He had some relationship with
God. He didn't shove it down your throat, he just lived
it." Those cherished memories of communing with her
grandfather led Sally to become a devout Catholic. She still is.
"The church became my place," she said.
Sally feels safe enough in her place to question her religion.
"I've had issues with the Church. We've had terrible
scandals. But I'm comfortable being angry with God and
asking, 'What were you thinking?' or 'Can you help me
out here, I'm in a fix.' God can handle that."
22 percent of men in their 50s say nature gives them a spiritual
high; 11 percent of women say the same.
Lucky Sally; she never left home. As for me, I love what I know
of the rituals and the music of Judaism. They bring me back to my
childhood, for a moment. But why can't I make that feeling of
belonging last?
That question led me to Irwin Kula, a man with wavy gray hair and
an easy smile who looks more like Muppets creator Jim Henson than
he does a rabbi. Kula, 47, is president of The National Jewish
Center for Learning and Leadership, a group that seeks to
reimagine religion both inside and outside the Jewish community.
He told me that all mainstream religions are attracting and
keeping fewer members. For religion to survive, he said,
we'll have to start crossing boundaries.
I told him about my Baptist Bible school experience, and he did a
double take. "That's my point," he says. "You
didn't become a Baptist because you studied at Baptist
school. Whatever you learned there enhanced who you most deeply
were. You understood this intuitively."
I asked him why it's so hard for some of us to come back home
to religion. "What we've left behind isn't the same
because we're not the same," he replied. "We go
back into institutions to take care of the basic needs. We buy
the service—the funeral, the wedding—and are happy
not to be touched by it again. The agreement is, I need to get my
parents buried, or to get married, but I want to have very little
to do with you. We have such profound disrespect for the
institutions to begin with."
But that doesn't necessarily mean we forget them or that they
don't regain importance later. People have always been
searching for the path home. Every religion says that you have to
leave home and go to some "promised land," said Kula,
if only to learn that the promised land is within you. Think of
The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland. The
protagonists make it back a little wiser and more grateful. What
may be new is the diverse paths we're taking to find that
knowledge.
"If we understood that it's about that journey and not
about answers, people wouldn't have to literally leave [their
religions]," Kula explained. "It's best to view
religious systems as tools and resources rather than answers and
prescriptions." For some, this can mean reinventing a
religion in order to make it a tool more suited to their present
lives.
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