Take Me to Church

I grew up going to church every Sunday. It was a Lutheran church, chosen for no other reason than the fact that my parents, both musicians, liked how much music was included in the liturgy. My father’s grandfather was a German Jew who converted to Christianity and had a son, my grandfather, who became a Baptist minister, while my mother was raised by Christian Scientists, so it was complicated and there wasn’t an obvious answer as far as denomination went, only that it had to be at least somewhat progressive. Good Shepherd Lutheran it was. I loved the music as much as my parents did.

I was given a dime to add to the collection basket every week and sang from a hymnal covered in pebbled red leather with wavy white pages limned in gilt. When I was baptized, my godmother, another musician with a mane of red hair and a storied life as a bohemian intellectual in 1940s Greenwich Village, was asked if she renounced the devil and all his works and all his ways and she answered: “I wish I could.”

As many do, I fell away from the church as I grew older. When I married my husband, who was raised Roman Catholic, we agreed to have a former priest officiate for ceremonial reasons and to keep his mother happy. Neither of us attended church in the early days of our marriage. Then my husband was diagnosed with Stage Four cancer that he somehow survived after surgery and many brutal rounds of chemo and radiation.

The Way Back

Once he was on the other side, the church beckoned him again, so he started going to a Catholic one in the neighborhood and then asked if he could take our son. Sure, but don’t expect me to join you, I told him. The Catholic church? With its pedophiles and its desiccated livers in reliquaries and its forcing of women to be brood cows in the name of God? No, thanks.

But as the weeks and months went on, it seemed odd that we weren’t attending church as a family. I began, grudgingly at first, to tag along. What I found was something I didn’t know I missed. The thrum of the organ, the call and response, the words of the Lord’s prayer so incantatorily familiar except the part where Catholics stop short at the end and let the priest chime in leaving me to blurt the words irreverently over him. I started going more and more and went from wary observer to full-on participant.

I never took communion, but I taught Sunday school for several years, showing preschoolers how to make Jesus puppets and sing songs about loaves and fishes. The congregation was kind and left-leaning, and we stayed until a new priest, who fomented about the sin of abortion, arrived and then we eventually found a Catholic church I liked even better. By this time our son had turned against religion as teens are wont to do. Covid came and went, and after trying and failing to persuade my son and husband to start attending church again with me, the tables having turned, I stopped going completely. Then I experienced the horrible trauma that has defined this part of my life—no less brutal than rounds of chemo and radiation, frankly—and I came to see that I needed a place where I might salve my wounds.

This week I finally returned to church. I went to a Mass that is sparsely attended, because that was always my jam even before I was nervous around strangers, and sat in the very back where I always do and cried. The Holy Gospel reading was about love. "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other."

Love is what I needed to start giving again, even to those I don’t feel deserve it, and hoping against hope to receive again, even though I don’t feel I deserve it. When I wasn’t crying, I sang, and the act of singing, of feeling my vocal cords vibrating and the sounds they made then floating high above the clerestory, was a gift as precious as reliquary containing a desiccated liver.

 

Religion as Weapon

I’m not, generally—though I was recently—a moron. I’m aware of the power of religion to destroy as well as save. The people who tried to ruin me did so in the name of their religion. They believe, like the Westboro Baptist parishioners do, that anything is justified in the name of their faith, which their crazed zealotry has turned to rot and hate, hate they then wield in order to destroy people through doxxing and death threats. The more pain and suffering they cause, the greater their glee and sense of righteous vindication.

In response to some of these doxxing groups, a few counter groups have sprung up. They are not funded by billionaires or a foreign government so have less power than the ones that attacked me do, but the goals are similar. I follow them out of curiosity. On the same day that I went back to church, I noticed a video had been posted by one of them, a video of a self-identified Jewish man methodically ripping down posters on New York City streets of Gazan children who had been killed by Israeli forces since October 7th. (For the record, I think such behavior is despicable and that ripping down posters of hostages held by Hamas is equally despicable.)

The man shows no shame as he does this. In fact, he invites the cameraperson to follow him as he wheels a baby stroller—presumably with his baby inside, watching daddy try to hide the deaths of other babies—across the street to find even more posters.  Subsequent to the video being posted, the man’s name was revealed online. His New York Times wedding announcement with a photo of him and his wife was shared. The town where he and his wife and their baby live was posted, as was the name of his synagogue and the synagogue’s contact information.

Many of the comments all of this elicited were cruel, particularly the ones that referred to this man’s wife’s physical appearance. As someone who has been told to fix her ugly teeth, I winced but kept scrolling. I was angry at this person and I wanted to know that my anger was validated by these strangers. I considered contacting this man’s synagogue, where he is listed as a director of children’s programming, to anonymously to report him. What business does this hateful person have teaching children? Wouldn’t the synagogue want to know about this? Wouldn’t the parents want to know about this?

Resisting Temptaion

But thinking longer and harder, I realized I wouldn’t be doing this to save the kids from a shithead or to rid my little corner of the world of Islamophobia, I would be doing this out of vengeance, the same sort I deplored in my tormentors. Not love like my church told me to practice, but hate disguised as righteousness. This misguided person will suffer for what he’s done without my help. He will likely receive death threats just as I did. His wife and baby may be threatened. It no doubt pains him to read the ugly insults hurled at that wife. He may be relieved of his position at his synogogue. And much as his hatred angers me, I can’t help but feel sorry for him.

I never did anything like ripping down posters of dead or kidnapped children, but I have come to regret engaging with lunatics online and wielding such impotent anger against them. It was all obviously so pointless. A quick kick of adrenalin followed by months of fury and hatred raining down on me. No doubt not a single mind was changed. And while I would not bet money that the poster ripper will ever acknowledge he was wrong or feel any similar regret for what he’s done, I owe him the chance to at least ponder things free of one less dogpiler and perhaps get to the place where I now find myself.

Maybe his synagogue will help him with that. It seems like a lovely place from what I’ve read online, not far from where I went recently as the guest of my friend Kathy to watch a rehearsal of the New York City Ballet performing Dances at a Gathering by Jerome Robbins, set to music by Chopin. Two hours of music and dance that helped, like my church once more is, to stitch up with gossamer thread all the tattered shreds of my soul. In the meantime, I offer the only thing I can to this person being hunted like I once was: Peace I leave you, my peace I give you. Shalom Aleichem.