For Susan

This post is for Susan, my coworker in California who expressed interest in my conversion to Mormonism. It occurred to me that I could share the text of an article I wrote on this topic for one of my college's monthly magazines in 2002. Susan's a brilliant writer(!), which made me want to clean this up a little bit. So here's truncated and slightly edited version of the original piece:

Diverging from a Catholic Upbringing
How an Amherst student found redemption in converting to Mormonism

I grew up in a family of seasonal Catholics. That meant that Mass was compulsory for me and my siblings every Sunday morning in fall, winter, and spring, and that our church was too old to have air-conditioning in the summer. Ever year we had a season's vacation from God, to sleep in on Sundays and recuperate from nine months of religious devotion.

My father was a seasonal Catholic, and my mother wasn't Catholic at all; she'd grown up in a family of year-round Congregationalists and was shopping for a new church when I was a kid. If you've never done it, shopping for a church is like shopping for a car: you choose a dealership, take a short test drive, and then let yourself be courted by the dealer. In this fashion, my mother tried out several churches of the Protestant persuasion, occasionally with me or the other children in tow. Her only lasting flirtation was with an Episcopal church, because the paster there often quoted T.S. Eliot and my mother liked that. I also grew fond of this church, principally on the strength of upbeat songs like "I've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart" and a fantastic nativity play. But when Mr. T.S. Eliot packed up and moved to Virginia, no amount of pleading could prevent her from returning to her church shopping.

Despite my mother's waverings, my siblings and I were cultivated into casual Catholics, with a routine that was generally the same: we went to mass with our father, knelt when we were supposed to kneel, stood when we were supposed to stand, and put quarters into the collection basket when dollars would have been preferred.
By the time I was eight, my mother had found the town's mormon church, which she considered joining, and which we occasionally attended with her. To a young critic of religions, the choice of Mormonism was a terrible error in judgment. Not only did the church service last two hours longer than the Catholic one, it also didn't have coffee and doughnuts afterward. To me, such considerations were the chief selling points of any church; the doctrinal differences often ran together in a haze. In the religion of my childhood, I believed in Santa Claus, but Jesus was a vague, contradictory figure.

By my sophomore year of high school, when I was supposed to be confirmed into the Catholic church, I knew that I lived in a house where the Gods of my parents were irreconcilably different. I grew up in a house of many religions, and it was paradoxical to me that somehow my parents expected that I would become Catholic. When I told my father that I couldn't be confirmed, I hid behind my parents' religious difference, feigning confusion when what I really wanted was to step back from religion entirely.

I'm not sure why, but that year, as I doubted the existence of God, I began to pray. That's one thing you learn to do when you visit all kinds of churches as a kid: you learn to pray kneeling, sitting, sitting; hands folded or clutching a rosary; eyes open or closed; extempore or memorized. I was an expert in prayer without having ever prayed myself in any genuine sense. I obediently and emptily joined in the recited prayers that were required in Catholic CCD, but in private and of my own volition, I never prayed. Prayers sounded unnatural and insincere in my voice. My father told me he prayed all the time, but I doubted the truth of that without ever inquiring quite what he meant. I had never heard my father pray, except standing beside him in mass.

On the other hand, as I entered high school I began to hear my mother pray at least once a day. She'd pray that we would be safe driving in the snow, that my brother's sniffles would get better, that I would be able to remember everything I sudied when I took my Latin test the next day. She prayed about everything, and no matter how trivial the thoughts expressed, the prayers sounded reverent and genuine. As an experiment, I started to pray the way my mother prayed. I prayed, and I asked for things: grades, babysitting jobs, college admissions offers.

My prayers soon became more complex. I prayed about things I was thankful for and discovered that I really appreciated my family, my piano, my teachers. I prayed that I would know if there was a God, and if there was a church I should go to.

I found my faith that year, accidentally, even unwillingly; I decided to become Mormon, knowing that for myself no more church shopping was needed. A religious conversion is an elusive process, and for me it happened in glimmers. It was the summation of many individual moments over several months -- moments in prayer, in study, and in talking with people about faith -- that made Mormonism feel right. The sensation in these moments is like the one I get now when I'm struggling with a paper at two in the morning and all of a sudden a great idea comes to me: a sensation of excitement, relief, peace. I got this feeling sometimes when I prayed, when I read the Bible or the Book of Mormon, when I went to church. I think of these moments as musical: they evoke the feeling that runs through my body when I play my favorite Chopin nocturnes on the piano. Perhaps something resonates within you when you perceive truth -- in music, in literature, in religion -- a kind of emotional and physiological response. I followed my instinct and joined a church that I had once regarded as strange, but that had become a powerful source of guidance for how to live my life most happily.

Right before leaving for college, I was baptized a Mormon. It was a turbulent decision that meant I wouldn't be like my father, and that I would no longer stand next to him in Mass and listen to him recite prayers. I regret my father's disappointment, but I've come to appreciate the lessons learned from growing up in a house of many religions. My home was a gentle preparation for the world, with its religious discord and many Gods.

Exhilaration

I realized, today, in a moment between tasks, that I had a wonderful feeling of content with my job: an exhilaration for its fast-pace, an excitement for the news and the trends I'm learning about, and the sense, also, that I'm starting to make a meaningful contribution to my company's work and to our clients' work. This is the first time I've quite felt this in the working world; honestly, my experiences in publishing and research and academia made me worried, one after the other, that I would never find complete fulfillment in a career, and that extra-professional activities would always have to be a more important dimension of my life, as a kind of compensation. When I taught ESL in Shanghai, I did have moments that were full of joy in that wonderful, inimitable way: when I explained something well, or engaged the class effectively, or offered encouragement to a student; but that job also a high number of frustrating moments -- dealing with difficult students, making photocopies, spending long hours in the evening preparing lessons.

But this job! It gives me a renewed appreciation for what work is, and for the feminist movement, and its idea that women should not be held back from this unparalleled feeling of accomplishment and confidence and value in the world order. I know I will not always feel like this about work; I think that in PR there is always going to be a fine line between feeling busy in a pleasant, worker-bee kind of way, and feeling overworked and stressed out. My workload at the moment is just right, but on the edge of being too heavy, with deadlines bunched closely together.

Today I piped in during a client call, and queued up my first press release, and wrote and wrote and wrote, and sent out an enormous amount of emails, and listened in on a fascinating webinar and distributed notes to my company, and made checklists on my white board for what to do tomorrow. And I got an email from a reporter from Forbes who wants to talk to me about one of clients. That felt kind of like scoring a three-pointer in the last second of a basketball game. I did so much today! It was a good, happy day. :)

In other news, we just got a census letter to fill out, and apparently the United States keeps track of which households have dogs and how many. We have no dogs here. But dogs?

a belated response

Thanks for the comments to my last post, y'all. Matt, I didn't know you read my blog! It was great to get the social science perspective. Riva, I liked your point about socio-economic class and aggression -- I've never given that much thought. And Tom, for you, I have a brief response to Obama's speech.

I lingered on this paragraph in particular:

"...the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

There are two points that grabbed me:

(1) We don't have to view white racism as endemic -- which is an interesting answer to my last post. It feels like there must be something at stake if we take this view-- as if we were enabling racism by understating it or denying its existence. The idea is liberating and refreshing; at the same time, it's also one that had to originate from someone who's not white.

(2) The middle east conflict is rooted primarily in the "perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam," not the actions of Israel. The US-Israel relationship is far more complicated than Obama implies here, and his use of the term "stalwart ally" felt uncritical to me; nevertheless, my objection is mainly rhetorical, and I think Obama's point is an interesting one. It's my tendency to put an unfair burden for the problems in the middle east on Israel policy and I ought to reexamine the issue a bit.

The pretend democracy of girls' basketball

Yesterday the father of one of my basketball players asked me in broken English who had separated the hispanic girls from the white girls in the teams, and why. I didn't understand him at first, and I was tempted for a moment to speak to him in Spanish, but sensing that he was upset and worried about having someone speak heatedly to me in a language that I didn't completely understand, I hid on my side of the language barrier. His question brought to the surface a tension that has simmered in the last five weeks of my church's basketball program for young women, which I co-chair with my roommate.

To briefly explain: the teams competing in the tournament represented girls from different congregations in eastern Mass and southern New Hampshire. Our stake (like a diocese, consisting of several congregations) was asked to send two teams from our area to the tournament, representing girls from discreet congregations, unless there were too few girls from one congregation, in which case we could combine congregations. Unfortunately, given the tournament guidelines, we ended up having to send two teams that differed in seemingly every possible dimension: preferred language (spanish and english), income level (most evident in the basketball shoes), race (hispanic and white) and curiously, level of skill in basketball -- our hispanic players were better than our white players, almost without exception.

In the weeks leading up to the tournament, we mixed the girls up according to skill level, which worked out quite well. The hispanic parents in attendance for the most part recognized the disparity in skill level between their daughters and the others, as evidenced by shouts from the sidelines like, "Passe a las ninitas!" (Pass to the little [white] girls); their aggression was also sometimes protested with shouts of "Suave!" and "Calmate!" The girls knew that at the tournament they would be divided by congregations, and our hispanic girls -- knowing that they would be an all-star team together, seemed to look forward to this with eager anticipation.

In a couple of our scrimmages leading up to the tournament, I was a referee, and I found myself agonizing over how to make calls equitably across racial lines. I read about a study conducted several years ago that concluded that refs tend to favor white players in their calls, regardless of the ref's race. What do you do, though, when the players of one race objectively are making more violations than the other players? This was very much the case in our scrimmages. For the white girls, the calls were usually for innocuous things like double-dribbling or travel; for the hispanic girls, it was invariably a foul of some sort. The kinds of fouls they were making were the kind that are important to call, where the game can become dangerous and nasty. And how do you repeatedly call fouls for one group of girls and not another? I felt somewhat vindicated when one of the hispanic players fouled out of the game on Saturday -- as if it were an acknowledgment that my basketball eyes were right. As much as I want to believe that race is a social construct that doesn't objectively exist, it certainly didn't seem that way this weekend.

I think we assuaged the angry father; someone with more responsibility for the tournament came over and talked him through it and said that maybe next year they would do things differently. And I think when his daughters' team won, the fact of their separation seemed less relevant. Our hispanic team won, so those girls will be advancing in the tournament; the white girls lost (interestingly, to another exclusively hispanic team).

(And I just found myself rereading this post, scanning it for anything that might be construed as racist. I took a course last year on racism in American literature and it is stunning to examine the covert racism in the writing of people who didn't think they were racist. One of the dangers of studying literature is the discovery that everything has symbolism and multiple layers of meaning and you can "mean" things you don't mean except subconsciously and I fear this post will be considered racist for perpetuating the categorization of people by race, whether or not you think race is a real thing. There is a class of people who "bleed white guilt" and I suppose I am one of them and this analysis is beginning to wear on me. Okay. Please don't be offended. The end.)