The Church of the Great Mystery - essay

I simply cannot deal with politics tonight. Please bear with me.

My religious training has been, shall we say, limited. My father did not attend any church. He rationalized this by saying that as he made his living as a gambler it would be hypocritical (actually, I think he recognized a great con when he saw one). My mother did not attend church, she said, because she was deaf and couldn’t hear the sermons. She tried to read the bible but finally one day put it down saying, “I don’t believe any of this.”
I guess my parents felt some kind of guilt over their failure to be churchgoers, or perhaps it was simply because they didn’t want the neighbors criticizing their childrearing, but, in any case, they decided when I was about six years of age, that I should attend Sunday School. Although my mother had been baptized a Lutheran (I don’t know if my father had been baptized) the local Lutheran church was not very close to our home. They settled on the nearest church. It was on the corner only three doors away. I believe it was a Congregational Church. So on Sunday morning my mother would dress me in my best and send me to Sunday school. I actually attended two or three times before I became completely bored. Even the huge sandbox in the basement could not hold my attention (I thought it was pretty stupid having a sandbox in the basement when the whole outdoors beckoned). I soon learned that if you just presented yourself at the front door and picked up the schedule or whatever it was, you could then run off and play for an hour before going home and turning over your false evidence of attendance. This worked only for a very short time as someone in the congregation squealed on me. My parents decided it was no use and never again sent me to Sunday School.
Thus it was that I developed no belief in organized religion or God. As I grew older and learned more and more about the religion beliefs of my friends and neighbors the less I wanted anything to do with any form of organized religion (or even any disorganized religion for that matter). At the same time, however, I intuitively sensed I might be religious in some very fundamental way. Then one day when I was well into adulthood I finally saw something religious that appealed directly to my nascent religious nature. It was a photograph by Edward Curtis of a Plains Indian holding a buffalo skull and captioned, “A Prayer to the Great Mystery.” The Great Mystery! Marvelous! I determined at that moment that if I were ever (highly unlikely) to be affiliated with a church it would have to be The Church of the Great Mystery. It seemed obvious to me the Indian was thanking the Great Mystery for the yearly return of the buffalo and other game, the use of the land and water, the marvelous plants and flowers, and all of the other benevolent features of human life we enjoy and depend on, on this mysterious planet blessed with a sun, suspended in infinite space, and spinning in an endless but predictable cycle of growth and decay.
Think of it. It’s the perfect solution for the seemingly irreligious. It represents a perfect amount of reverential awe with an accompanying sense of humility and insignificance. It requires no ostentatious church buildings, no collection plates or demands on the poor for money they could better use elsewhere. You don’t need fancy icons, statues, altars, virgins, angels, cherubs, saints, or other such objects or paraphernalia. More importantly it doesn’t demand speculation about whether or not there is a God, one God, several, or many, whether God is male, whether or not there can also be female gods, and if so, do they have two arms or many. It doesn’t concern itself with whether God is called Allah or Jesus, Yahweh, God, Buddha, Tammuz, Adonis, or whatever. Nor does it concern itself with profound religious questions as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or if calico cats represent the devil. But the best part is, it's impossible for anyone to argue the Great Mystery doesn’t exist. You may well not believe that God is an old white man with a long beard, or that heaven is populated with angels, or that hell is a real possibility because satan exists, but how could you possibly argue the Great Mystery doesn’t exist?
What is even better is that you don’t have to have a bunch of old men dressing up in very expensive medieval gowns and funny hats and walking around all serious-faced and self-important. Nor do you have to have holy water, be immersed in water, be sprinkled on the head with it, or whatever. And you never have to listen to “Drop Kick me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life,” or “put one hand on the radio and one hand on the afflicted part,” or “if you don’t believe this you will go straight to hell.” Better yet, there is no speaking in tongues, handling snakes, staring at the sun, sleeping on nails, crawling miles to the temple, or self-flaggelation.
I admit to be completely unable to relate to people who believe the bible is literally true. In fact, I don’t believe such people should be allowed to vote. If they cannot appreciate the age of the earth and the cosmos, the existence of dinosaurs, the evolution of species and humankind, the diversity of life and belief, and tolerance for such diversity, they can go on killing each other in the name of this or that religion and believing that only they have the “truth,” forever. Admit it, it’s all part of the Great Mystery that none of us can even hope to understand. Oh, yeah, I forgot, except for the fundamentalists who know the truth about everything.