Getting Religion

My mother was crazy about religions. By this I don't mean that she pursued a multitude of faiths; I mean that she was fascinated by the world's religions -- by why and what people believed. Although she was an essentially practical woman, she collected interesting religions the way some people collect antique vases or political buttons.

A lot of people who ask others about their religion are merely using this as a means of promoting their own religious views. My mother was different: she really wanted to know. Whenever she got lucky and found someone who was prepared to talk, she would listen, enrapt, interrupting only infrequently to ask more questions.

"Tell me about your religion," she would say to the turbanned man in the adjoining garden allotment while I cringed in mortification. "What sort of things do you believe in? I've heard you are vegetarians; is that true?" The Sikh regarded her warily: Is this woman for real? you could almost hear him thinking.

If you've read the Harry Potter series or seen the movies, imagine a slightly more respectful Mr Weasley encountering muggles. That was what my mother was like when she met someone who practiced a religion she had only heard of or read about in books. It was too much to ask her to keep her curiosity to herself, and bless her, she meant absolutely no harm.

"Now if you were an Orthodox Jew," my mother would say eagerly to a friend of mine she had cornered, ignoring my exasperated embarrassment, "then you would have two separate sets of cooking utensils, wouldn't you? For milk and meat dishes." My friend would squirm. "Umm, I'm not sure, actually..." My mother was, though. She'd read about it: she knew about keeping kosher, and she knew about the parts of the Old Testament that covered this. But she wanted to know more.

Agnostics and atheists were not exempt from my mother's interest either: she wanted to know all about why they had come to their own personal decision not to believe. She felt a little sorry for atheists, but she did expect them to be able to back up their convictions with a convincing explanation.

"According to Annie McIntyre, Catholics don't consider our marriage binding," my mother told my father one evening. "Not even after twenty years!" She wasn't upset by this; she was fascinated, and amused. She had been raised to hate and fear Catholics, but it hadn't taken. She had a number of Catholic friends and, though very much a middle-of-the-road Republican, subscribed to the Catholic Worker for over a decade. When concerned friends and family members told my mother this was a Socialist paper, she just shrugged. "Dorothy Day takes care of poor people. She puts her money where her mouth is, like Mother Teresa. I don't care what her politics are."

But what my mother liked better than anything was discussing the Bible. Raised in a fundamentalist religion, my mother had rebelled and joined a gentler, more tolerant denomination when I was seven years old. For the next twenty years, her sisters cried, scolded and begged to get her to come back to their straight and narrow road. They would not listen to her explanations and refused to accept her interpretations of the Bible. My mother longed to have an open, informed discussion of the Scriptures. As a result, she was the only person I have ever known who actively welcomed all religious callers. Jehovah's witnesses, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons -- my mother was their willing and eager audience.

There was only one problem: my mother knew the Bible too well. Not only had she grown up in a poor home where the Bible, a ragged dictionary and a set of Shakespeare's plays were the only books available, she had a prodigious memory and could quote whole sections of the Bible verbatim. Most of the people who came to our house bearing religious tracts found that their own Biblical knowledge wasn't up to scratch when pitted against my mother's.

"I think I might have upset Gloria," my mother sighed once, when the young Jehovah's Witness left after a lengthy -- and no doubt exhausting -- discussion. "But she really should brush up a little on her New Testament."

My mother got to know most of the door-to-door missionaries by name. Whenever she saw one in the neighborhood, she would run to find her Bible and keep an eye out for him or her, frequently peeking out the window to make sure our house hadn't been passed by. In time, they stopped coming to our door: my mother was too much for them.

"They were at the MacDougalls twenty minutes ago," my mother noted sadly one day. "And now they're down the road and across the street. I think they're skipping this house intentionally!" Clutching her Bible, she looked like a child who hadn't been invited to her best friend's birthday party.

At the time, I could not understand her fascination in the beliefs and philosophies of others, her determination to explain her life's views, her zeal to share her opinions, though not proselytize. But every few days when I write a blog entry, I delight to present my view of the world, my opinions, my insights, however simplistic. And as I read the comments others write -- which I find infinitely fascinating and amusing -- I see that I am engaged in a very similar activity to my mother's.

I'll bet she would have loved having a blog.