In the years before we started attending church, Sunday mornings were sacred to my brothers and me. We spent many of those mornings outside, on the banks of the creek that trickled through our large parcel of land. Naked but for our underpants, we splashed in the waist-deep water, delighting in the sensation of sun-drenched water on bare skin. When the water was not warm enough for wading, we would build elaborate fortresses out of tree branches and mud, fighting gallantly to protect them from dastardly invaders. In the winter months, Sundays were pajama days, reserved for reading by the fire, doing thousand-piece puzzles, or playing endless games of Risk or Scrabble.
When I was nine, my mother decided that it was time for my family to begin attending church. We were not at all a religious family, so my mother’s sudden attempt at piety seemed rather odd to my father, my siblings and me. Yet my mother’s word was law in our house, so we traded our nakedness for stiffly starched linen, our fortresses for upright wooden pews, and our storybooks for musty-smelling bibles. I was furious at the loss of my Sunday morning freedom, but church inspired less anger in me than it did profound bewilderment. I attended church every Sunday morning only because I was coerced, and I could not understand why people would willingly subject themselves to such torture. Nobody could give me a satisfactory explanation, so eventually I stopped asking questions, made a few friends, and won prizes for memorizing more Bible verses than anyone else in my third-grade Sunday School class did.
Although the weekly sermons, Sunday School lessons, and scripture readings bored, confused, and often irritated me, I did love the hymns. The angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament readings became kind and gentle, soothing in the cadence of the music. Intolerance and hatred were so easily softened by 4/4 time and consonant keys, and I could almost forget the discrepancies and deceptions that often so bothered me. As hard as I tried, I never did believe those hymns to hold any truth, but they were beautiful lies, thick and sweet like golden honey on my tongue.
When I finally became old enough to make my own decision about being involved in church, I did remain active in one for about three years. The ten prior years of mindless perfect church attendance had planted a seed of uncertainty in my once convicted mind, and that doubt brought me back week after week. As a small child, I believed that everything from the towering pines behind my house to the smallest pebble on the bed of my backyard creek had inherent, uncomplicated worth, but as a young adult I could not even find that worth in my own being because I was just unable to believe in the higher power from which I had been taught to derive that value.
Eventually I realized the wisdom of my earliest belief system, and I was finally able to return unapologetically to the quiet, carefree Sunday mornings of my childhood. Every so often, I still wander into a church on a Sunday morning and eavesdrop on a hymn or two before slipping back out into the bright morning sun, but I know that my children’s Sundays will be reserved for pajamas and puzzles.
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