Mondays with Mike: OMG

The holiday season is already a blur, but one of the many things Beth and I did over the holiday season stands out clearly: We attended a Christmas Eve service at the 2^nd Presbyterian Church on S. Michigan Avenue. Beth attended Lutheran Christmas services growing up, and because it was a ritual her mother Flo always observed, it was a comfort to uphold that ritual this year in our own way.

I came by my skepticism honestly, from my mom Esther.

I didn’t grow up going to church or having any religious identity. My Italian grandfather ex-communicated the Catholic Church, and by family lore he did so somewhat violently. As legend has it Paolo Latini booted a priest off the stoop after the priest had visited the impoverished Latini residence asking for donations. And that was that. Paolo’s daugher Esther, my mother, though not necessarily an atheist, was thoroughly agnostic. She was suspicious of religious institutions, and as a public school teacher, didn’t have much use for church-run schools. She was a firm believer in separation of church and state as well.

My father grew up in the Serbian Orthodox Church but during my childhood, the nearest such church was a fair distance away in South Chicago. He’d go occasionally, and he’d sometimes ask if my sister and I wanted to go, and we of course said no. Other times, when he wanted to go to church but couldn’t make the trip to the Serbian church, he’d go to a local Presbyterian church (I didn’t go to that one, either).

So as a kid, I was pretty ignorant about religion, and still don’t know as much as I probably should. I remember neighbor kids who went to Catholic school talking one day about how the Jews killed Jesus and I didn’t have the faintest idea what the hubbub was about. To that, I count myself as lucky in a way that I never was instilled with any ideas about one religion compared to another. I kinda think they’re all a little wacky, and I find criticisms and endorsements of any one of them to be valid for all of them.

Still, I have been moved by the relatively few church services I have attended. We’ve been fortunate to be invited to several predominantly African American church services—in Urbana, Ill., Manteo, N.C., and here on the South Side. If a live gospel choir doesn’t lift you up, you’re in trouble. It’s a powerful natural anti-depressant, and an inspiration.

The service this past Christmas Eve was less dramatic but fulfilling just the same. There is a power to coming together at the same time in the same place to light candles, sing, pass the peace, and talk openly about striving to be good. We spend so much time making conscious trade-offs, favoring practicality and self-interest and expediency, doing awful things and excusing them as business decisions, nothing personal you know. Talking openly about striving for what’s really good reminds me that, inside, I know what good is. Finding the courage to do good is another matter, but it starts with recognizing how things should really be, even if that means also recognizing how far away we are from that point.

Still I retain much of my mother’s skepticism about religion. For one, I’ve always been on board with the encouragement to be good to our fellow humans, but never can jibe it with some of the fire and brimstone. And I’ll be honest, some of that hocus pocus stuff—virgin births, arks and such—well, I get the power of story, but being expected to believe literally in that all stops me in my tracks.

Another problem is I’ve seen a ton of: compartmentalizing righteous thinking to an hour or two of every week, and perversely using it as cover for being a scoundrel the rest of the time.

And so I, like everyone else, am left to try to reconcile all these big ideas. I feel a powerful spiritual good in coming together for these services when I do, or the many times people have done remarkably kind and generous things for us at very dark times, or even when I’ve witnessed awesome natural phenomena like pods of dolphins making their way down the seashore.

It’s real. It’s a wonder. And perhaps the trouble starts when we try to define it or call it our own through words and deeds.

I don’t know.