THE HALLOWED LIFE OF AN AGNOSTIC MOTHER /

VICTORIA BROOKE RODRIGUES

jONAH IS CUDDLED IN DINOSAUR-PRINT pajamas, smelling like half-days of preschool, and calling me to prayer again. Only a few months ago, this was the hardest part of my day: my son requesting not a bedtime story, not sleep-eluding snacks, drinks, or kisses. Only an unassuming sigh as he would curl his knees into his chest: “Prayer, Mama?”

I “grew up Catholic,” as I often hear other non-committals say of themselves. This means that I attended Mass throughout childhood, received every sacrament because it was expected of me, and most importantly, panicked in the back row of catechism classes waiting for someone to call me out: big, giant faker.

I was “agnostic” long before I learned the term’s meaning; I simply hid from others the hopes and doubts I had concerning any form of God or afterlife. I felt uneasy with the contrast between Christ’s teachings and the actions and beliefs of Western “Christian” culture many years before I would recognize it as a common touchstone in religious, political, and social commentaries. I couldn’t understand why God wouldn’t show me He was really there. I couldn’t understand how thou shall not kill could be subjective. I still can’t. Every night when I snuggled with Jonah and groped for a prayer, I wondered if it would be the night he might call me out: big, giant faker.

However, there was never a doubt that my son would spend his Sundays in Mass. My husband is no undecided; his Bible and Rosary are conditioned with the oil of his fingertips. I go to Mass every Sunday, not out of deference to him or my own ambivalence, but because I see in my husband’s faith something I have always envied, something I want our son to have a chance at if he so chooses. While there will always be room for questions and doubts in our home, I want Jonah to have the opportunity to explore his spirituality through the faith of our families’ cultures. I also want Jonah to have a visceral connection to the mysticism and iconography passed through his heritage, traced back to Hispanic, Spanish, and Portuguese roots, now growing among the penitentes and retablos of the American Southwest.

For myself, I desired to continue the tradition of my women-ancestors, for whom enacting daily works of faith was often their most liberated and mindful contribution to their family. While my grandmothers and great-aunts were required to ask their husbands’ permission to allow a visit from a friend, while they lobbied for money to take to the grocery store, and while they were asked to enforce rules for the children at the father’s insistence, there was one area of their lives where they were head of household: implementing works and rituals of faith. My grandmothers lit candles on the correct days, touched us with Holy water, and heckled Godparents. My grandmothers would not serve dinner until the prayer was spoken, and grandfathers showed uncommon remorse if they crossed such lines. While I was pained at the inequity they suffered, I wanted the womanly part of moral compass and spiritual guide. I wanted my son to come to me for answers before I believed I had any to give.

Yet I feared our return to church. Not Catholicism particularly; I have sorted through my anger with the Church. Time spent in various government and academic bureaucracies has lightened the burden of dogma and ritual, a satire on the human pursuit of order and meaning. I’ve seen sufficient violence and persecution from the hands of everyday people against other everyday people to know radicalism can spring from believing in anything at all: religion, politics, philosophies, traditions, soccer teams. Catholicism is the easily parodied Big Bad Wolf of belief systems, but in reality no more dangerous than other countless belief-centered elements of society through which we will help Jonah navigate.

What I did fear was allowing church or anything outside our home to become the centerpiece of Jonah’s morals, values, and understanding of the world. Sure, we regularly focused on ideas like the golden rule at home, but I worried that the power of Mass—the congregation booming in unison, the repetition of Christian-centric ideas—would overrule any impact I could have on Jonah’s perspective as his mother. I worried Mass might create an alienating schism between Jonah’s understanding of the world and mine, the canyon between the faithful and the doubtful. I was afraid that he would see Christianity as the only way up the proverbial mountain and later realize his mother was taking the scenic route. I feared his theoretical future judgment. I even feared his theoretical future pity.

Praying with Jonah began when he asked, after a long Mass, “What is Church?” “Church is where we pray,” I said. That night, when I tucked him in, Jonah asked, “What is Pray?” “Pray is when you ask for help when you need help, and think of all the things you are thankful for,” I told him.

Prayer began as a self-contained event I controlled. Jonah and I snuggled close and recollected various blessings, saying thank you to no one in particular. We focused on gratitude rather than the gratifier, because I knew no other way to simultaneously maintain honesty and satisfy Jonah’s need to connect with life’s abstractions: the most important, most difficult things to explain to a child.

But the simplicity of prayer ended when we moved from our church’s cry room, with its muffled speakers and crying babies, to the main congregation where Jonah could clearly hear the repetition of Mass every Sunday. He was particularly fascinated by the chanting, rhythmic, “Our Father,” recited in harmony. At night, Jonah asked to say the “Our Father.”

What is “hallowed be thy name”? What are trespasses? What is temptation? Suddenly I was Jonah’s values-and-abstractions dictionary, and I worried he would find my pages scrawled in illegible, circular rhetoric.

Who am I to explain holy?

The first few nights of this routine were anguish. I would lie next to Jonah formulating my answer, time in which he would repeat the question, as preschoolers will do. “What is hallowed? What is hallowed? Mommy, what is hallowed?” Of course, after I tinkered out my best stab at hallowed, the definition needed to be defined. What is honor, respect, revere?

Slowly, the routine eased. I was able to connect abstractions to real events and feelings in Jonah’s world, and build from there.

After weeks of hand-made prayers and hard-fought explanations, I realized that my prayer had been answered. Jonah would not sit silently and absorb a world view by repetitive osmosis. Instead, Mass forced Jonah and I to sit and hash out these ideas together. The outside introduction of “Truths” and truths showed me that, if I were to fail at my duty to identify and initiate discussions of important ideas, the repetition of laden words on Sunday mornings guaranteed we would sort them out on Sunday nights.

However, even in this I created an uneasy peace between the potential faith of my son and the woman breathing its words at bedtime. I was taking comfort in our prayer sessions as if the insights of a preschooler could cement his heart for a lifetime. Someday, if he follows down the Christian road, he will know the idealized mothers of the Bible, the women on whom Western, Christian models of feminine perfection are built. These are the women who greet God’s requests with thy will be done. These are the women who give completely their minds, bodies, and souls. My existential work with Jonah could not be more unlike their ecstatic suspension; my every word is tainted with self-interest. I profess the intention of raising him with an open heart and mind, but truthfully I am asking him to understand belief as I do, my will be done. I am no divine mother; I am instead my son’s namesake.

When the prophet Jonah refused to deliver God’s message to the Ninevites, God gave Jonah time to reconsider his faith while trapped in the belly of a great sea creature. I, too, am refusing to pass on all of the messages. Instead of a fish-dripping stomach, I am trapped under a head of never-cut hair with a sleep-twitching arm across my belly. All the same, I, too, cannot leave this place without reconciling my relationship to a creator and my created.

I struggled. Some nights I cut explanations short, unable to resolve competing feelings. Some nights I strictly gave my own interpretations, self-interested but true. Some nights I let catechism in, self-interested but true. And in this way, I learned about being a new kind of Head of Spiritual Household, one who is defender not of The Faith but of the faiths.

I learned that I was not the kind of mother who would let my children be told what to believe, by a church or by myself. I learned to have confidence in my uncertainty. I began to feel comfort not from strengthened faith, but from a promise of this fraught traverse of my son’s soul and my own. The struggle is an attempt to merge faith and doubt into a single spiritual life. The comfort is in the potential that Jonah will have his own struggle outside of both the Church and the Mother.

I was able to become the matriarchal spiritual guide in the same moment I ceased to desire it. Doubt can be as much of a foundation as faith.

In the story of the prophet, God forgives Jonah for refusing his instructions, only for Jonah to commit yet another transgression. Jonah sits outside of the city to which he originally refused to go, Nineveh. There he has finally preached his doomsday prophecy. With Nineveh in site, he prays to God to destroy the city, lest his status as foreseer and prophet come into question, not to mention his God’s reputation as the ultimate power of judgment. Jonah is unquestioning in his self-righteousness. The verses race with the excitement in his heart. The people within the city, on the other hand, decide to ask for forgiveness in case God might be merciful. Their words translate roughly to what so many of the faithful and the doubtful say every day of God: Who can tell? Who knows? Ultimately, God spares the uncertain Ninevites and scolds the devout and absolute follower, who cared more for his certitude than his fellow man. Perhaps what my son needs more than a faithful mother is one who is starting in the same place he is now, in the place of who can tell?

Now, Jonah and I often redefine the same ideas, night after night. Sometimes I’m not sure either of us totally understands, but there are signs we are getting there. One afternoon, Jonah came into my office and saw the dog collar I keep on my wall as a memento of a beloved pet from my childhood. After I explained the significance of this talisman, Jonah said, “That’s hallowed.” Surely a fraying collar is not in the traditional definition of hallowed, but it fits in the spiritual framework Jonah and I are building together. We both know that, like a cross, you don’t spend twenty years with a collar tacked to your wall unless you believe in it.

In true agnostic style, you won’t find me asserting that these worshiping Sundays and prayerful nights will ensure my son will appreciate the depth of his father’s faith or the pain of his mother’s doubt. Even where I construct a semblance of belief, I leave room for doubt. But mothering, like faith, is in large part living with a lack of control over what we crushingly desire to have in our command. The closest I have ever come to true religion is this resignation to toil toward an end, one which I have no real promise of and no undeniable proof, while begging from the world a kindness I have not seen it give anyone, all in concession to its infinite powers beyond me.