Talking Religion

"My country is so full of sh*t," said one of the boys waiting for the bus. "Not so much the people, but I mean the government. Just one stinking pile of sh*t."

"All countries have some wrong," his companion replied in heavily accented English. "My country has many bad things too."

I immediately moved closer, the better to hear their conversation. This sounded interesting. We English teachers are, with very good reason, forbidden from discussing religion and politics with our students, and in any case, the English level of both boys was far higher than my students' -- so much so that it was a real pleasure to overhear their conversation.

The boys were quiet for a few moments, making me worry that they had noticed my interest, so I took a book out of my bag and pretended to read it.

"The government used to be perfect! They used to treat the people with respect, you know? Like adults."

"I know."

"Now, it's religion all the time. The women must cover themselves. The men must behave a certain way--"

"My father says that religion is like alcohol," interrupted his friend, pronouncing it al-co-HOL, like almost all of my students. "A little bit of it is good for you; too much of it is like poison."

I loved this so much it was all I could do not to turn around and congratulate the boy on having such a sensible father. I turned a page instead.

"Religion is sh*t," muttered the first boy.

"Religion can make our lives fresher," parried his companion in his soft voice. "No, not fresher -- richer. It can make us better people--"

His friend snorted. "Religion makes people stupid! It makes politicians even stupider."

Turning around, I frowned and pretended to consult my watch as I surreptitiously studied them. The first boy took me aback: he was the spitting image of David Levi, a boy I went to school with; if he'd only had waist-long hair and been a few inches shorter -- and several decades younger, of course. His companion was dark and swarthy, with liquid brown eyes and black curly hair.

"But it doesn't have to make them stupider," the darker boy insisted. "Only too much religion--"

"Even a little religion can be too much for some people!" the first boy practically shouted. "If you came to my country, you would see!"

"My country too," sighed his companion.

Now I was desperate to turn around and talk with these boys. I wanted to find out what countries they were from. I wanted to ask them about their families, their own religious backgrounds, what they believed in. I wanted to tell them about myself, too -- about all the religious zealots in my family. About the holidays that were ruined by arguments over religion; the family feuds that began when my mother made the difficult decision to leave the fundamentalist church her family had belonged to for ages. But instead I scratched the back of my neck and turned another page of my book.

"Still, people can use religion to help each other," the darker boy started again, and I thought of the charity coffee mornings, the fund-raising events, all the good things so many churches do. I agreed with him.

"Help each other!" muttered David Levi's dead ringer. "They say they help people, but really they help themselves!"

Damn it, I agreed with him too.

"After monsoon," murmured the dark-eyed boy and his voice was so low that I had to strain to hear him over the noise of the traffic. I took a step back and tried to resist cupping my ears.

But just then the bus came.

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.