Ironic

I was raised by hippies--never baptized, never schooled on any faith tradition, just left to my own devices for religious practice and education.

It’s ironic to me that as a college professor, at a private, Lutheran university, for a brief part of my semester, I teach the Harper Collins Study Bible—selections from Genesis, the Gospels, Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians, First John, Song of Songs, and the Book of Ruth.

Sometimes I feel self-conscious about my lack of childhood experience with Sunday School—especially in a crowd where these kids never missed a day. Maybe dad was the Pastor or mom directed the choir. That’s par for the course at Valpo. I’m definitely a new experience for them.

But my class is a freshman seminar where experience or lack of it (even for the teacher) is what it’s all about. So, I’m truthful about my hippie parents raising me in a Catholic neighborhood. I get a laugh when I tell the students how I was the only kid on my street that actually wanted to go to Mass on Sunday. Or especially when I tell them how I learned the Lord’s Prayer (from a Gideon Bible I stole from a Days Inn) under the covers with a flashlight because I didn’t want my parents to know but I couldn’t stand for my friends to think I wasn’t like them.

My students seem to like the fact that I am so different from the Lutheran homes in which most of them come from. They nod their heads in amusement when I talk about the friends that could never play on Sundays—how, instead, they had to dress up in fancy clothes, report to family meals at grandma’s or some uppity brunch restaurant.
On the flip side, they have no idea how alienating it was to be the only family who devoted Sundays to yard work, or to be the only girl without patent leather maryjanes. They can’t even fathom it, so they sit on the edge of their seats and they soak in every word—wondering how their lives might have been different if they had such a chance to skip out on Sunday obligations. Their own fantasies of my past reality give my tales an elevated level of interest.

But then I deliver the buzz kill by telling them I was married in a Catholic church and that my children attend Catholic school. Their eyes shift back to their bibles, their postures slump back down to normal. They’re disappointed in the fact that my Sundays in cut-off shorts and flip flops no longer live on.

But here’s the God’s honest truth: even in this pseudo-Catholic skin I’m in with a husband and children who belong, I can’t get used to Mass, especially on Easter Sunday. It’s too crowded. There’s no place to park, there’s no place to sit when you get inside. No matter what’s happening during services, I can’t help but sit in the pew and wish I was wearing yoga pants and a tank top, deadheading flowers in my yard, or reading a good book on the porch. Sometimes, I see myself as a 5th grade girl sitting on the front steps of my childhood home, wishing for the chance to go church and I smile at the irony of life.