From Satan to Sanskrit

Watercolor by Joel Chua from Metro Manila, Philippines

I went to a funeral yesterday.  My next-door neighbor and friend Cathy’s* grandmother died at 92 after a long illness.  I went to support my friend, of course, but I also went out of sheer curiosity.

Cathy is a native Georgian but you’d never know it to meet her.  She talks more like a California Valley Girl, ending all her statements with a question mark, while adding lots of histrionics and swoon-like gestures.

After we knew each other for a while, Cathy started telling me about her bizarre upbringing as the youngest child of a religious fanatic mother and a traveling salesman father who coped with his family life by being gone for most of it.  I listened to stories of a small, fragile child who instinctively rejected the fire and brimstone stories of the born-again doctrine.  Her stubborn refusal to comply and “accept the Lord Jesus as her Savior” resulted in frequent accusations of devil-possession and Satan shenanigans.

As the only person in her family, aside from her father, who was never “born again,” Cathy walked her own eccentric and deeply spiritual path, all the while being bombarded by ridicule for her heathen ways by her mother and sisters.  Her parents’ house, she told me, is filled with religious pictures and framed prayers.  She showed me a photo to prove there is even a printed sign in a frame on the wall opposite the toilet.  It warns against the trickery of Satan.

As a young adult Cathy traveled throughout Asia, lived for a time in Tibet and learned to speak Sanskrit in India.  Her home is decorated with the souvenirs of those travels, and the scent of incense can often be detected amidst the smokiness of burning sage.  She studies all kinds of alternative approaches to Western medicine and psychiatry, and she studies personality profiles as classified by enneagrams.

Until very recently, when she started dating an Otololaryngologist {Ear, Nose and Throat physician) who is a second generation son of immigrants from India, Cathy had been attending monthly Native American sweat lodges in an attempt to “work on herself.” About ten years ago, she discovered her significant artistic talent in the form of giant canvases covered with layers of paint applied with her bare hands.  At only five feet tall and around 100 pounds, many of her impressive works are far bigger than she is.

With her translucent skin that must be protected from the sun at all times to prevent exacerbation of her rosacea; her ultra-sensitive pale green eyes beneath white-blond bangs; a stomach that will take her to her knees without either warning or apparent provocation; and her frequent night terrors complete with sleep-walking and/or falling out of bed, Cathy has earned the nickname of Delicate Flower from me.

Cathy and I are about as unlikely a set of friends as one can find.  She is closer to my son’s age than to mine.  I am as non-religious as they come and it doesn’t matter if the religion in question is Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or any of the other religions of the world.  I wouldn’t voluntarily sit in a sweat lodge for any length of time, much less the hours and hours she spent in them.  I get annoyed when spoken to about Feng Shui; she lives by it.

I went to this funeral expecting to be confronted by the worst example of the Christian Right in all of America.  I was primed to hold my caustic tongue if someone asked me if I had been “saved.” I was prepared to be stared at and ignored for being the only person of color in the chapel.  Hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had pulled out a basket filled with serpents for the congregation to handle!

The only impression I held about Cathy’s family that materialized in the flesh was about her mother.  Described by Cathy as always “babbling” incoherently, her mom had been receiving the benefit of the doubt in my mind.  I thought Cathy had been exaggerating when she claimed to have never had a real conversation with her mom because of her inability to EVER get a word in edgewise.  She wasn’t.  The woman could talk!  I learned more about that family in one hour than I know about my own!

When we were in the car on the way home from the north Georgia location of the funeral, Cathy told me we had gotten lucky; that her mother had been on her best behavior after being warned by her daughters, and did not launch into one of her soulful sermons on salvation. 
 
In every other way, though, that family was the picture of familial perfection.  The service was more sedate and without dramatic effect than any I’d ever attended.  Conversation was easy and warm.  I was hugged and thanked for coming repeatedly.  Cathy’s mother told me to call her Granny!  

What I learned from yesterday is this:  We might have more to fear from the so-called Christian Right than we even know.  I’m not sure what I thought before yesterday, but people with these rigid beliefs that they attribute to Christianity are not walking around with any kind of identifying mark on their foreheads.  Some of them are quite capable of blending into the fabric of our daily lives without detection.  Not all the people who subscribe to the rantings of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh are out carrying offensive signs at Tea Party rallies.  

I also have seen first-hand how religious zeal can affect a child.  Many adapt and adopt the same level of belief and zeal.  But some, like Cathy, are deeply wounded by it and spend their lives searching for what they consider to be a “real family.”  Deep down inside, Cathy feels alienated, judged and filled with rage and she is barely able to conceal all that in the presence of her mother.

It was an interesting day. 

*Not her actual name.