Probably had too much evangelical nonsense from my poorly educated Mom, who finally got educated, when I was a little ‘un. In her retirement years, she graduated with a Masters in Arts and a M.Theology. What a gal!
Being forced to sit through hours of endless self-congratulatory rhetoric dressed up as prayers in meetings from the Wee Free, Brethren, JWs, LDS, Salvation Army, etc, where men were stereotyped as the ‘head’, women were relegated to the sidelines, … whichever group was currently in vogue with Mom, I finally rebelled and took Rebecca to read on Sunday in church. It didn’t ‘save’ me in their eyes, kinda pissed Mom off but I honestly hadn’t wanted to go… just did it to assuage her. Truly Rebecca was a terrific read!
The damage that such groups led by Willy Still in Aberdeen did to young people meant that they didn’t get the validation they needed, were all told how ‘bad’ they were… it’s not surprising that many of them needed to be treated for all sorts of psychological problems, including Mom.
Mom loved to dalliance (is that a verb?) with the ‘christian’ groups but at heart she always realized that they would never accept her as anything other than a ‘mere’ woman. She could never square that circle. Her fundamentalist views and her feminism often conflicted. I’m surprised that she didn’t mine that issue for far more than she did in her studies, but she wasn’t enough of a rebel to do that.
But even now it still pains me when people look at the Bible, hark back to simpler times, and then put 1+1 together to come up with the nonsense that gets put about as ‘christian’: **flat earth**, **creationism**, **one truthism**, etc. It’s rose-tinted nostalgia that obliterates what vile times those years were.
I struggle to understand those ‘little’ religions… their world-think patterns. Mom spent years studying theology later on… I think her dalliances with those religious cliques tainted her views somewhat. But later on in life, she fell under the sway of another ‘leader’, upped sticks and moved to a wee town following the group.
I think underneath it all was a drive for acceptance, meaning and desire for role. I understand those motives very well. For Mom, though, the expression for those came through religion. Was she so different for me, or indeed any of us?
When God gives you life, energy, time, a pair of hands and a brain… s/he also gives you the task of using them for the greater good, however you see that. She realized her contribution: her nursing, her teaching, her care of her mother who passed with early onset dementia, her mothering, her education and her practise of faith.
I still struggle to understand Mom’s life, as I look at my 59 years on this ball, going around the sun. I still struggle to understand mine, the cards I have been dealt, the choices I have made… sometimes it doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. But then this world is messed up.