This post was inspired by a post at Peter’s Cross Station, which concluded with the questions, “What does your family do when it comes to religion? When it comes to passing on the family’s ethics?”
My husband and I were both raised Catholic.  I have struggled all my life with the tension between a spiritual and ritual tradition that resonates in my bones and political institutions and official doctrines that make me want to start doing a little temple vandalism of my own, while he alternates between unquestioning and comfortable practice and total non-practicing (due almost solely to conflicting Sunday activities) with nary a second thought.  But when we decided to get married and then have a kid, we decided to do the whole Catholic wedding, baptism, etc. shebang. We both felt like having a religious upbringing was good for us, and that it was important to us to give our future kids a specific religious tradition to help them navigate the world, if only to give them something concrete to rebel against or fall away from (other than us!)  And I think we both would have felt like something was lacking from our wedding if it didn’t have the level of traditional ritual with which important rites of passage in our lives and families of origin have always been marked.  I personally was leaning toward going over to the Episcopalians, as a church with much the same rituals and less problematic politics, but husband thinks that converting to another faith means that you are allowing someone to brainwash you, although apparently sticking with the folks who have been brainwashing you since birth is okay by him.  And really, in many ways, I think there are enough structural and ritual and ethnic and social class differences between Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions that I might never have felt completely at home with the Episcopalians.  So Catholic we remain.

Of course, being the control freak I am, I immediately set out to find a parish that was liberal and crunchy and intellectual enough for my tastes, and we ended up in a Newman Center (university-affiliated church geared toward students and academic community) that is run by Dominicans (order of priests and nuns and laypeople that is notoriously open-minded and peace-and-justice-loving with a nice balance of the contemplative and the action-oriented).  So our center has a gay and lesbian fellowship and an Amnesty International chapter and works closely with the local homeless shelters and immigrants’ rights organizations and almost never blathers about anti-abortion stuff at Mass because although there is an active anti-abortion community there are also a lot of us who don’t think it’s our right to impose our church’s theology of the body on everyone else’s bodies and would be creeped out by praying for changes in laws to tell everyone else how to live.  Our marriage preparation process was mixed—the large cattle call diocesan pre-Cana weekend was a big snore, although had some good moments and useful exercises, our conversations with our priest were amazing because Father N. rocks, the FOCCUS inventory was useful to take and then talk about, but by the time they finally hooked us up with a sponsor couple to go over the results and counsel us about them, we were a week away from the wedding and had already discussed and worked through almost anything on there that actually mattered to us.

The Natural Family Planning intro session was surprisingly terrific.  I personally don’t buy the no artificial birth control thing, since taking your temperature with a digital thermometer is every bit as unnatural as popping a pill or wearing a condom, in my book, and I don’t think an openness to the possibility of life precludes trying to make it a little more challenging for sperm to reach egg or fertilized ovum to implant, since sperm miss the goal all the time and fertilized ova don’t stick all the time (as we discovered once we really tried to conceive).  We didn’t actually go to the followup sessions where the go over the details of the method, since I had already acquired a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility (the non-religious bible for Fertility Awareness Methods of conception and contraception) but it was basically a good refresher about the basic science of fertility for me (who had of course diligently studied Our Bodies Ourselves some 15 years earlier and was by then well into TCOYF in preparation for our imminent plans to try to get me knocked up) and especially for him (who in all his years of Catholic schooling and public college had learned virtually nothing about the female body or reproductive system and had no idea what a cervix was or where it was located or why anyone would care, although I would note that by the time he was midway through our 12-week Bradley Method natural childbirth class he was totally comfortable going up to very distant acquaintances and inquiring about the state of their cervixes or duration of their pushing stage).  And I found thinking about what it means to be open to the possibility of life and to be in tune with the rhythms of one’s body quite fascinating, even if my own conclusions were somewhat heterodox, and I think it helped me think in a more spiritual way about the process of actually trying to conceive once we embarked upon it.

So I finally got knocked up and then we had to go to Baptism Preparation Class, because the Catholic Church really doesn’t like people to go through the sacraments with no idea what they mean these days.  And the deacon who led the two sessions, who I’d always found a bit annoying, was actually brilliant.  He gave us a lengthy excursion on the biblical and historical meanings of baptism in water and anointing with oil and all that stuff, and made sure we all understood that baptism really had nothing to do with saving babies from hell or limbo or whatever and never really was supposed to.  But the key thing I got out of it is that the birth is when you bring your child into the world in a physical sense, while baptism is about making a conscious choice to bring your child into a specific cultural framework by officially giving them a name and framework of tradition and ritual and a community and family that public commits to supporting you as a parent and your child as a member of that spiritual community.  It’s actually quite Lacanian if you think about it—bringing your child into the symbolic order (and, yeah, a very problematically patriarchal one, though it’s hardly as if the rest of the world is not) quite consciously and deliberately rather than in the rather haphazard manner we do most of the time.

So I guess for me that’s where I’m at in raising my son Catholic.  Since he’s only two, for now this means mostly just holding him while he looks around and helping him to see the stained glass and the statues and the crosses and the people and letting him feel the warmth and support of my body as he listens to me sing and pray.  And sometimes taking him to the back of the church or the “cry room” or the lawn outside to explore further when he just can’t stay still or quiet any longer.  But I think he does pick up on something of the medititative, introspective, but also profoundly communal experience of the Mass.  And sharing those moments with my baby and my beloved and my mother (who often accompanies us) and a whole community of people who simultaneously share my faith and have their own interpretations and doubts and struggles, is a really profound experience.

I feel comfortable that as he gets older, he’ll be getting a religious education from a community that shares our most important values, and we’ll make sure that we are talking about what he is learning there and elsewhere and be honest with him about the complexities of the ethical world and do our best to help him navigate it in his own way.  If he ends up leaving Catholicism behind, I’m totally okay with that.  All I can do is give him some starting points and support on his journey, but the path he takes is up to him.

But when it comes time for sex ed, I’m totally taking him to the Unitarians.