religion and culture intertwine

we didn't baptize sabin as a baby. i was reminded today, during easter services at the local church, why we didn't baptize her. there were two babies being baptized and in both cases, when the minister asked the question of whether the child believed in god and accepted the whole jesus christ story, the mother answered "yes" on the child's behalf. so two children were indoctrinated into a faith without having any say in it or knowledge of it themselves. which is precisely what i didn't want for sabin. i wanted her to understand and accept for herself when the time came. it's what my parents did for me (tho' i'm not sure if it was on purpose on their part or if baptizing the baby just wasn't really in fashion back then in the late 60s presbyterian church). whatever the reason, i am grateful and have done the same for sabin.

after the baptism part of the service was over, one of the families just left and didn't stay for the rest of the easter service. that struck me as a little bit harsh. kind of like a drive-in baptism. let's get it over with and get on to our party (and most importantly, our gifts). the grandparents sneaked out during the next song, as they missed out on leaving when the family themselves left.

the minister himself, a down-to-earth fellow who clearly didn't feel like shaving this morning (or possibly yesterday morning), despite it being probably the most important christian holiday, took it in stride, seeming not to even notice. he went on with his sermon. it was an easter sermon, of course, based on the reading of the easter story from one of the gospels (i'm not a biblical scholar, so don't ask me which one). it was the verse where the marys find jesus' tomb empty and there is talk of an earthquake and the appearance of an angel. he talked about how in the orthodox faith, people take it quite literally and on easter, greet one another with "he is risen, praise be, he is risen," or something along those lines.

he seemed quite cognizant of the fact that in today's denmark, people don't take the gospel quite so much as, well...gospel. it's more of a story and a culture and a metaphor that something bigger than us is there for us. we have chosen, in our culture, to call it jesus and god and the holy spirit, but what really matters is that this is a story that endures through the ages. and that, if we let it, it has the capacity to be a comfort to us in the midst of all of our other personal crises - deaths of those close to us, divorce, losing jobs, and the like. and somehow, it felt like he was ok with the family leaving after the baptism of their child, fully aware of the purposes the church serves in danish culture and his contribution to it. and the church was full (we and about a dozen others actually sat in extra chairs in the aisle, because every pew was filled), so he must derive some satisfaction from that.

confirmation is a big thing when you're a 7th grader in denmark. the preparations are held as part of the school day (thursday mornings from 8-9:30) throughout the school year, so if you should choose not to be part of it (which you are free to do), you would just go to school late that day. but i've told you about this before, so i won't rehash it all here. suffice it to say that sabin has chosen to be confirmed, which means that today, she had to be baptized. she's a teenager, so she didn't want to make a public spectacle out of it, so we arranged to do the baptism after today's easter service. i've had my issues with this minister, since he made sabin feel negated since he hadn't married, buried and baptized her family for four generations before meeting her at the first confirmation preparation course, but i have to say he won me over today with his pragmatic sermon and his scruffy beard. he was kind to her and understanding of her teenager-y angst about not being on public display. he talked to her kindly and when she answered for herself that she was accepting the christian faith, it was ok.

some part of me wishes she had chosen not to do it, mostly because as i heard those mothers accepting on behalf of their children today during the service, i thought about what a hard time i would have had, standing there lying in a church. because although i'm also raised in the tradition, i don't think i believe in it all in the same way anymore. but i believe she has gone into this with open eyes and that what she has accepted is to be an active part of the culture in which she is raised and in the western cultural tradition as a whole. i am also confident that she is an enlightened young woman and she is aware that the bible is a collection of stories with a historical basis and which are metaphors for meditation on the larger questions of life. we didn't baptize her because we wanted her to choose for herself and now she has, which is precisely what we wanted for her, that she would be the one to choose, not us. and next weekend, along with the rest of her peers and social group, she will be confirmed, not only into the church, but into the culture.

and there is something special about the ceremony of it all. i think that we, as humans, need ceremony in our lives. ceremonies around the different junctures - marriage, birth, puberty, winter and spring transitions and yes, death. the christian religion gives us that. and maybe that's not all bad.

a wise child once said, "you can be interested in god without believing in god."

my deeply engrained cultural background, which constitutionally mandates a separation of church and state, bristles at any hint of religion mixed into the public schools. denmark has no such separation of church and state. in fact, they have a state church (a brand of protestantism that's more or less lutheran in its manifestation, tho' they refer to ministers as priests). it's the kind of religion i can get behind, mostly because it's perfectly ok for ordained, practicing ministers within the church to say, out loud, that they don't believe in god. that's just how the danes roll. however...

you knew there was a however.

sabin is in the seventh grade and that's when all good danish children are conformed confirmed. they go through 8 months of conformation confirmation preparation classes and activities (including, oddly enough, some kind of orientering run in a forest near silkeborg) and then in april or may, they dress up in really slutty-looking white dresses (think along the lines of danish design meets my big fat gypsy wedding here) and have a big party where family members and their parents' friends throw a rather obscene amount of cash at them for saying yes to jesus. it's quite a racket, since no one really believes in that stuff in this country. the kids do it for the dress, the party and the money. and many of them will actually say so out loud.

so let's just say that i'm a bit skeptical of this whole thing.

sabin isn't baptized. we aren't religious and tho' we have no objection to her choosing to be baptized, we didn't wish to make the choice for her as a baby. if she wants it, she can choose it, but she needs to learn about it and understand what she's getting herself into. in order to be confirmed, you have to be baptized. she's not keen on that if it means a big, public brouhaha, so she wasn't going to go to the confirmation preparation classes. however, as her friends began talking about it, we all realized there is an element of social pressure in it and an element of socializing in it that she will miss out on if she doesn't go to the preparation course. so, she signed up after all. we also learned that she can be quietly and privately baptized a few weeks before the confirmation, so that was a factor as well.

and as she very wisely said, "you can be interested in god without believing in god."

the other thing about the confirmation preparation course is that it takes place during school hours. not after school or in the evening as one would expect. but from 8-9:30 on a thursday morning, when everyone should be in school. in fact, it counts as part of their school hours. because of that whole lack of separation of church and state. and at the end of the month, they have a whole day off from school to go to that orientering run together in a forest near silkeborg. tho' what that has to do with jesus is beyond me (it's not very well explained). maybe it's just teambuilding, i don't know.

but the whole idea that school time is taken up for an activity that is not compulsory really gets to me. if she were choosing not to take part, she could just stay home until 10 on thursday mornings and have a day off from school that thursday at the end of the month (hmm, maybe i could sell it to her on those grounds). they're doing this instead of learning something like science or math or english or even german.

i want to scream.

then, on top of it all, at the first meeting last thursday morning, the minister (i refuse to use the word priest) spent the whole time showing off to each kid how many of that child's relatives he had baptized, married and buried. since sabin's not from this little town, he couldn't do that for her, so quickly skipped her over, making her feel at least quasi-heathen (she is half american and a quarter swedish after all) and less important, when really the whole thing was an exercise in how important he felt himself to be.

i fear this is going to be a long school year. and i will likely have words with that man before it's over.

i'll admit that i hope that in the end, she does as her father did - he went through the confirmation preparation and on the last day of it, attempted to convince the minister that god didn't exist and left never to be confirmed. he had the the party anyway. and his father was very proud of him. the same will be true for sabin - we'll happily throw her a nonfirmation party and even buy her a foofy, slightly trampy dress if she insists.  but it really truly is up to her to make the choice for herself. happily, i think she's perfectly capable of that.

evangelists on my doorstep

two kindly-looking ladies with a bible and a pamphlet in their hands just knocked at my door. they came to sell me a future - one that is apparently laid out for me in the bible. and here i was, thinking it was a historical document, not a crystal ball. i didn't really let them stick around to fill me in (tho' i wouldn't have  minded knowing the next date of the rapture, since i never did figure out what to wear to the last two).

call me crazy, but i just find belief to be a very personal thing and not really something i want to share with strangers who knock on my door out of the blue. it seems to me that a whole lot of objectionable stuff is going on in the world in the name of religion and the bible and gods of all ilks.

but i do believe that god or a higher force or whatever you'd like to call it, is found all around us, in glorious skies and the sun breaking through the clouds and beautiful silhouettes of trees against a foggy horizon. it's there that i find god.

that's what i should have told them.

instead, i told them i was american and had had enough religion to last a lifetime...

deep thoughts

i saw an interesting discussion on the program univers on DR2 on the subject of people who are combining christianity and buddhism. there was a clip from the dalai lama's last visit to denmark, where he was saying that it's best for us to hold on to our religious background from the standpoint that our culture and sense of ourselves are so grounded in it. they talked to a woman whose home was filled with buddhas and jesus and mary icons side by side and who seemed like a peaceful, grounded, serene person. frankly, we could use some peaceful grounded serenity around here.

i've already been mulling over the whole religion question for awhile now, since spud wrote her god post. when she wrote that it occurred to me that you could be raised a church-goer without necessarily being raised religious. or at least you definitely can if you were raised presbyterian, as i was. we went to church every sunday, mostly because mom is the choir director and she had to be there. we tended to drop it over the summer, as we were showing horses every weekend and weren't home. mom's choir took a break over the summer as well. it's just how it was. dad went regularly only during april when he was an usher. mostly because church tended to interfere with football on sundays and being able to see the start of the games.

church served, in my view, a largely social function. i loved to dress up and we dressed up for church. i remember one year where it was my goal not to wear the same dress twice. and as i recall, i succeeded. we had a big fellowship hall at our church and the kids were actually able to do quite a lot of rambunctious running around. we had a wednesday youth group that took a yearly ski trip and it's where i learned to ski. but again, i remember it mostly as social and not as religious per se.

the little town of 1300 people where i grew up had no less than 12 churches. so on the surface it would look pretty religious. some were tiny little splinter churches that had broken off one of the others when something or other didn't function socially or they didn't like the minister. but again, it was a question of social relations more than doctrine. at christmastime and around the 4th of july, there are always community church services, where all of the congregations come together for community services, leaving aside whether they're bible beaters, catholics, dutch reformed or calm, understated lutherans or presbyterians. that was a good occasion for socializing.

i experienced some of the other churches, going with friends or a boyfriend, so i got a taste of some of the more fringe movements, where the preacher was a bit more aggressive in asking people to be born again and such. i never really got that, thinking i'd done quite ok being born the first time, thank you very much.

my sister and i weren't baptized as babies because our parents thought (at least at the time) that we should choose that for ourselves and know what it was we were getting into. i so love and respect that thought. and as a result, sabin's not baptized either. here in denmark, around 15, kids go to confirmation classes and they choose whether to confirm their baptism. if sabin chooses to go through that, she will also have to be baptized at that time. but at least it will be her choice.

the religion subject also came up of late because sabin has chosen to attend something called mini-konfirmand. the danish church, which is lutheran and a state church, is struggling in the face of irrelevance. people use the church for the big three - birth, marriage, death - but generally there aren't many who regularly attend sunday services. there is a very dynamic, lively woman minister at the local church and she's simply awesome with the kids, so sabin loves her wednesday mini-konfirmand sessions. they play games, build a few bible stories in lego and spend time in beautiful surroundings full of designer furniture and lamps (since it's a state church and the danish state is apparently keeping its assets in arne jacobsen chairs and PH lamps).  her best friends are there and she has a ball. so again, it's serving a social function.

one wednesday a month, they have "god & spaghetti" where you go as a family at 5:30, have a quick 20 minute service in the church itself (which is a lovely old building), christina, the cool minister, dresses up and pops out of a giant bible and tells some or other bible story and then we go over and eat spaghetti or lasagna and salad and socialize with the other kids and parents. and i hate to keep repeating myself, but again, it's largely a social thing.

but all of this undoubtedly proves what the dalai lama said about our religion being rooted in our culture. in that little town where i grew up, it would have been hard to be a member of the society without identifying with one of the churches in town, because it served such a social function. and i'm sure people there wouldn't like to look closely at it, but the various denominations had a definite class designation and hierarchy in the scheme of the social structure of the town as well.

so where does this leave me? especially when i'm in need of some peaceful grounded serenity? which is, admittedly, sometimes lacking in my otherwise extremely secular world view. i think that's the appeal of buddhism for people raised in western christianity. it's something you can do on your own, meditating on a pillow in your own home. it fits our individualistic view and can give us the space we need for quiet contemplation. i wish the program on DR would have gone a bit more in that direction. the woman with buddhas and icons nearly touched on it, but didn't quite. but the program did provoke me to think more about it, so i guess that's the best you can ask from quality television. i hope they do something about the old viking religions, i'd like to know more about those.

in which she gets all serious...

i keep thinking about the funeral we attended on tuesday. it was held in a little tiny church down on møn. or, more accurately, it was held in a little building on the church grounds that must have once been a stable, because magda didn't want to have her funeral in the church itself. she had said she didn't want to inconvenience god in that way.

the minister, a neat, athletic, small woman of the sort who looks like she rides horses regularly and spends a lot of time outdoors, gave a lovely eulogy, in which she addressed the question of magda's anguish over her non-belief. magda was seriously ill in the end, with cancer slowly taking over everything in her body. and when it comes to the end like that, people often begin to think about god. she had discussed with the minister how she had drifted away from belief. the god she knew growing up was a very judgmental, harsh, stern god. one who wouldn't tolerate people who didn't go to church every sunday. and it had been many years since magda had gone to church. so, magda didn't want to bother god with her funeral by having it within his house.

in some way, it's a tragic story, because if there was anyone who lived a so-called christian life--caring about her fellow humans, being kind and good and living "right"--it was magda. if there is a heaven, it's for people like her--genuinely good people who never say a bad word about anyone and live their life looking for the best in others. and not in a sycophantic way, in a genuine, real, honestly kind way.

denmark has a state church, which seems, rather than making people particularly religious, to make them feel that religion is taken care of for them and so people aren't rabidly christian like you see in the US. people may believe, but they don't engage in all of the outward trappings of belief, like attending church every sunday (tho' of course there are people who do that). they use the church at the big junctures of life--baptism, confirmation, wedding, funeral. i read not long ago that some churches were considering doing divorce ceremonies, to reflect the reality of life today and give people as much ceremony around breaking up as around getting together. that seems like a pretty radical step, but we are talking about a place where sometimes the ministers admit in public that they don't believe in god.

i talked with the minister afterwards and we discussed the issue of non-belief. from the words she spoke over magda's casket, she clearly dealt with the issue all of the time. and as she put it, god, as she saw him, isn't one to keep a book of how many times you go to church and he isn't one to turn you away in the end, or feel inconvenienced should you have your funeral in the church where you haven't set foot in years. those are human sentiments and god is purer than that--he just doesn't think that way.

i think that's a concept of god i could get behind, because especially in times of sorrow, we need to have some kind of belief, if only for our own mental well-being. in recent years, i've felt downright revulsion to organized religion as i watch the damage it does in the world--organized religions of all kinds, not just christianity. but i think that somewhere in my core, i do believe there's a higher, guiding force that gives this life we live meaning on some higher plane. at least i hope so. and if there's a heaven, i'm sure that magda is there, probably tending to the gardens.

scientific proof at last

there's a headline in my newspaper today that says, "Er de troende dumme?" translated, that's "Are believers stupid?" it goes on to report on a scientific study, released in the scientific journal Intelligence, that shows that the higher a population's average IQ, the less likely they are to believe in a god--whichever god that may be.

some examples:

• denmark - average intelligence 98, 46% do not believe in a god.
• sweden - average intelligence 99, 64% do not believe in a god.
• zambia - average intelligence 71, less than 1% do not believe in a god.
• united arab emirates - average intelligence 84, less than 1% do not believe in a god.

the study, which i couldn't gain access to online, not being a subscriber to the journal, compared average intelligence and religiousness in 137 countries.

the article doesn't give details as to how level of religious belief was determined. nor does it go that deeply into the general problematics of intelligence tests. i grant you that those are both factors in the credibility of the study. but, even not knowing that, the study is interesting.

a danish scientist, Helmuth Nyborg, was behind the study, which i guess is why Berlingske is writing about it. there is a rather humorous quote from him in which he says, "this doesn't necessarily mean that you become dumber for believing in god, but that you probably were already dumber in the first place." i'm not sure he meant to be funny.

now i sincerely don't want to offend anyone who reads my blog and who believes in god, but i have to say that with all of the killing going on in this world in the name of gods of all sorts, it is a bit of a relief to think that there might be a scientific answer behind it. saying that we are going to war because god wants it is a way of not taking responsibility for your own actions and that is what a certain mr. bush has done, as have a certain osama bin laden and his followers--they are also doing what they do in the name of god. both sides are equally guilty of using god to duck responsibility for their own actions.

in the ten years i've lived outside the US, i have seen a disturbing rise in religious fervor. when i visit my parents now in that little town where i grew up, there are many more in-your-face religious billboards and bumper stickers. and i'll admit it makes me very uncomfortable. i just consider religion to be a very private matter and not one that i would want to proclaim on a bumper sticker. (which i realize is rather negated by my writing about it here, but it's not something i do often.)

the little town of 1334 people that i grew up in had 12 churches. many were splinter groups from one another because even within that tiny little community, people couldn't actually follow the advice of the bible and just get along--loving their neighbor, and so on, so you might say a healthy suspicion of religion was instilled in me very early on. and you have to wonder how intelligent it is to spin off and make your own church every time you can't get along at a potluck, which is what happened. this may further underline the point of the scientific study.

there is a doomsday billboard outside of the town that says, "if you die today, where will you spend eternity?" the sign that follows is the town's sign. i've always thought that was a bit funny. whereever eternity may be spent, i'll hazard a guess that it's not a little town in south dakota.

but, that's enough controversy for today.