Honestly, I thought that this day would be easier than it turned out. Nothing went wrong with the ceremony and Gabriella was so perfectly behaved sleeping on me through Mass and only complaining at the tail end of the baptism itself because the priest was taking just a little too long for her liking. No, instead I found myself deeply conflicted wrestling with feelings of anger, hurt, and fear.
I was raised in an absence of religion, instead my parents emphasized logic, reason, and skepticism. Growing up I was an outsider as I am not baptized and had never set foot in a church, excepting as a tourist, until I met my wife. To me matters of faith and religious belief were a curiosity as they are not something I have ever felt before nor really been exposed to as many of my friends were professed atheists or agnostics. In these recent years, though, my curiosity has curdled into an aversion as I hear the language of faith become intertwined with that of war, discrimination, hate, and violence, not to mention what feels like an all out assault on reason, logic, and intellectualism.
Sitting through the Mass, I had a hard time reconciling these feelings with the priests call to pray for enjoining my daughter to the church that here I stood on the threshold afraid of the capacity of their faith to do harm and what it might mean to my daughter. Can I protect her? Can I teach her to question deeply and throughly? Can I raise her to be skeptical enough to preserve her personal integrity? What will this mean to my marriage? Will we find ourselves reaching for each others throats playing out the tired stereotypes of atheist versus theist? The stress that day is still weighing on me today.
Management might know a little of my feelings. I have never been shy in expressing my dislike for organized religion, arguing that it is another political mechanism aimed at command and control of people, but I have not really expressed this fear that grips me tightly. We have only discussed this in the academic sense and never really tackled it as an emotional issue. Bluntly, I am afraid of religion and those people that call themselves religious but what makes it even harder to swallow is the irrationality of my fear.
On the surface, the fear might not seem so irrational what with the talk of this administration centering on a “divine right” to wage war, to incarcerate and torture individuals, DOMAs being passed nation wide that couch discrimination in passages from the bible, the ongoing attack on science from religious and political leaders among others. All but a handful of those issues affects me personally so why did I feel my stomach knot up and a cold shiver pass over me while I sat in church holding my daughter? I am not sure.
Maybe I want to shield my daughter from all of that, to provide her with the tools and skills necessary to survive in the toxicity of that environment. I fear for her. I fear the world we are making, or undoing, for her. I fear that I will not be a strong enough husband, father, and individual to help her through it but before I fall asleep, though, I find I am just afraid. Profoundly afraid.
