It isn’t that I have any religious fire in my belly. Or that I wanted to consider conversion, or felt that in order to follow some sort of path to enlightenment I needed to know more about the religion I had been brought up with. It’s just that I missed talking about texts.
When invited to join the Young Women’s Bible Study group, I was more or less at my wits end. I had moved home unable to live on my own. With my RA, I couldn’t do things like hiking or dancing or grocery shopping or even buying new clothes for my rapidly changing body (Steroids are not fun. And they’re not good for your swimsuit aspirations. Not at all.) I had started up a game night with some friends from high school, and while it was wonderful to get together and rehash old stories from ninth grade, I was missing the pursuit of learning. I spent a lot of time watching tv and knitting furiously. Sometimes I would write, and try to keep up the rhythm I had finally achieved of several poems a week. To make myself useful I spent three or four hours a day up in the attic going through boxes of old school essays and art projects.
I was bored out of my mind.
So when an acquaintance asked if I would be up for joining our church’s bible study group Sunday nights, which consisted of women under thirty who got together at each others’ houses to discuss one passage a week, all I really thought was “new-people-closely-examining-a-book-in-a-setting-for-open-discussion-where-I-could-make-friends-and-also-there-might-be-cookies”. I said yes.
For the most part I was correct. At the first meeting everyone was very friendly and there was an openness to talking about very serious issues. It was wonderful to bask in intellectual discussion, wondering about what a passage was suppose to signify and how it was working toward some greater truth. No one even started the tautological “authorial intent” discussion that can waste so much time in a college lecture. The cookies were appropriately Halloween-themed and delicious. But eventually, as most spiritual discussions usually do, it turned to how we can apply such-and-such a passage to our own lives. And then came the God stuff.
Let me say here that if you have a belief in a higher being or higher beings or a spiritual conviction about morality or the afterlife, I respect that. Deeply. I have nothing against people who follow the teaching of a religion or feel that there are other forces guiding their lives. So long as a religion does not indicate a need to harm others and respects others’ differing beliefs, I have no problem with it. I will defend your right to practice almost anything. And I assume the same respect from others.
So as an experimenting atheist who has always felt more aligned with the Unitarian Church than the Presbyterian one I grew up in, being surrounded by people who were true believers and truly, truly, believed that I was also one of these believers was a bit uncomfortable. I felt like I was faking something pretty important, and I didn’t know why I had to. Let me be clear. I go to a pretty WASP-y church. We’ve got a lot of rather well-off old ladies. Everyone is very decorous and most spend a lot of time covering up a slight drinking problem. People talk about their boats. We all care about each other and we have a great focus on giving back to the community but we also turned down the idea of passing the peace because we don’t like touching other people. Because hands are icky have germs. Seriously. Naturally I had always believed that we were a bunch of atheists who just liked to get together and do service projects and bake pies and dress up once a week. Finding out that people who go to my church believe in God was a bit of a shock. Finding out that young people who go to my church believed in God bowled me over. I couldn’t really handle it.
At the end of the meeting I was asked to lead the next discussion. Usually looking at two paragraphs in book that had just as many footnotes as it did text didn’t scare me off. After all, the context was all there at the bottom, in four point. But I felt extremely uncomfortable. What if I did this too analytically, and came up with some sado-masochist theory about the relationship between God and his followers (Which I did, almost immediately.)? How does one fake belief and not feel extremely guilty, especially in a group of such trusting and welcoming people? It seemed like I would have to lie and attempt to look at the text in a way I wasn’t comfortable with. But I couldn’t and didn’t say no to such nice people who were so excited that I was there with them. After all, I figured, you can always learn from a challenge. And then, in typical hair-brained fashion, I left my bible at the meeting.
The next meeting was fine, actually. I got there early, and like any true-blue slacker, read my newly returned book ten minutes before the meeting. Reading half a page does not take too long. We were reading Ruth. The passage was about how a mother and her two daughters-in-law decided what to do after all the male relatives in the family had died. If I had a better memory, I’d tell you the exact lines, but if you care, it was one of the first chapters. Once I presented the passage in a basic summary, I kept quiet, or at least quiet for me. The group reasoned that the daughter-in-law who decides to follow the matriarch and lose her culture and identity was brave, and that she was an example of a woman who truly understood the path that God had laid out for her. I thought she was a bit nuts, a weak-willed character who instead of doing what is best for her, lays down all of her advantages to follow another. It is a little bit terrifying to see a character you really don’t respect to be considered the emblem of a religious ideal. Kind of like the Twi-hards and Bella Swan, but this time they won’t grow out of it. Thankfully we quickly got sidetracked and talked about our various experiences. One woman had been at Virginia Tech when the shooting had happened there. Another talked about various ways we find communities. There were more cookies. It was an interesting evening to be sure, but still an uneasy one.
I never made a conscious decision not to return, and in fact, I probably will. The people are very nice and I hope to make some friends there. However, in the weeks following the second meeting, it was hard to convince myself I wanted to go. I have a distance relationship, and I usually end up visiting my S.O. on the weekends, returning on Sunday. This is probably the main reason I haven’t returned—I would rather have dinner with someone I love than try to interact in a discussion while not offending anyone. But Bible Study is not a class discussion. And it’s not a substitute either.
plum in the icebox 