Sunday School
I was baptized Catholic because my mother was raised Catholic and because we were living in Venezuela at the time (my father was Venezuelan and my mother worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela). But after my parents were divorced (yes, they were both Catholic and yes, they were both technically excommunicated for that) and the next thing you know we were in Costa Rica without my father. The thing about Costa Rica was that while everyone knows it today as a great spot for ecotourism, in 1959 when we went there it was most often mistaken for the similar-sounding and better-known Puerto Rico. We shared a little tropical valley several hours outside of San Jose with some Missionaries from Iowa. The Catholic Church in Turrialba was all chickens and uninterested and tired priests in dusty and faded old robes going about their masses in Latin because the locals found it more significant to hear “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum” rather than “Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo, santificado sea tu nombre.” It took one visit to this rural congregation with people wandering in and out with the street dogs, for my mother to decide that maybe we would be better served by going to the weekly services conducted by those Iowa Missionaries. They were Presbyterians and their Sunday gatherings were more like a cultural convocation of Americans stuck in this remote tropical valley set between two live volcanos. It was an important social event each week to which we all looked forward.
When my mother decided after two years to go back to the States for graduate school, she chose the University of Wisconsin (Go Badgers!), which somehow felt right, given its proximity to Iowa. When we rented our little two-bedroom crackerbox house in the suburbs, the local community church was none other than a Presbyterian. It was a short walk from the house, so it became a routine part of our Sunday mornings. It too was a big part of the social fabric of the local community. Everyone in the hood was there except for the odd heathen fathers who preferred to stay at home reading their papers. The kids would go an hour early at 9:00am and go to Sunday School down in the basement until the sermon started at 10:00am. That lasted an hour and was followed (after all the hymn-singing was over) by a friendly potluck out on the lawn, weather permitting, or in the basement if it was inclement.
When we first moved there in 1961, we were regular attendees. Over the next few years, as my mother’s work intensified and we became more religiously lax, we became casual attendees. To be honest, I liked the Bible studies (the best storytelling ever), the hymn-singing and especially the potluck. You see, my mother was a better grad student than she was a family cook, so that potluck was always a culinary highlight of my week. But kids will be kids and pretty soon my sisters and I were getting creative in rationalizing our oversleeping. We would stay up extra late the night before watching, of all the things, Colossal Theater, with all its Greek, Trojan, Persian and Phoenician paganism.
From Third Grade to Eighth Grade I cannot recall attending church at all, though I’m sure I must have attended some. The next time religion entered my life was when I went off to Hebron Academy Prep School in Ninth Grade. This was a classic New England Prep School with strong WASP tendencies. Every Sunday we had mandatory services in the morning and then equally mandatory Vesper services after our evening meal. Every Sunday night we sang an hour’s worth of hymns from the old hymnals. I kinda liked it though would not admit it. I also found my old Sunday School training useful because Freshman English was a study of the Bible and Latin I was more than a little focused on the religious transformation of the Holy Roman Empire.
And then, the next year (1968), we moved to the Eternal City and the convenient choice of schools were Notre Dame Prep for me and Marymount for my sisters. By that time my mother was over her excommunication, but expediency determined a return to the Catholic community, which seemed only appropriate given our physical proximity to Vatican City.. The school accepted Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The only difference was that Catholics were required to take Religion, where non-Catholics were taught Ethics. I’m not sure what symbolism that distinction was meant to imply, but I went along. I declared as a non-Catholic.
From then on, as I was asked to fill out forms asking for my religious preference, I would declare myself as a generic Christian. The next time the issue came up was when I got engaged to my first wife, who was a lapsed Catholic with a very religious Catholic family. That meant that I needed to convince a priest that my baptism qualified me as a real Catholic. I made sure to mention my Notre Dame high school diploma (leaving out the part about taking Ethics). It got me by and enrolled in a strange pre-Cana class so that my bans could get posted. Don’t ask me what that all means because I have no clue.
All my Sunday School training has left me with a good working knowledge of the Bible, but don’t ask me to quote scripture. I think its like having taken four years of Latin. It’s not so day-to-day practical, but it does form one of the tenets of a good liberal education and I’m glad to have it all in the vault. My kids all got baptized in deference to their mother’s’ wishes, and they all attended a bit of Sunday School, but nowhere near as much as I did. And no one I know has ever sung Vespers every Sunday night as I had.
Tomorrow is Sunday. Neither Kim nor I have ever been in a church for the last fifteen years except as tourists or to attend weddings or other related events. We do not and have not belonged to any congregation, which I dare say must be the norm these days. But still to this day, when asked to declare my religious preference, I still say Christian. I recently got into an unexpected debate with a friend who is a declared atheist. I was surprised to find myself defending Christianity in a pretty aggressive way. I may not be a big fan of organized religion, but all those years of Sunday School and Bible study have left their indelible mark on me. I find myself defining myself as a Christian in my defense of the Good Samaritan way of life and the Golden Rule these days when harsher attitudes are all too common. I wish more Americans had gone to Sunday School or the equivalent for their particular religion. I wish Donald Trump had gone to Sunday School.