My two-cents worth and then some. An online journal by LP Brown.

Browsing Category Religion

Pledging Allegiance

by on ·Opinion, Religion

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes, and he is turned out for what he knows.  – Mark Twain

I was in grade school in the 1950s when many public schools in the U.S. began requiring students to place their hands over their hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Within days after the routine started, my mother began helping me memorize the Pledge, although she expressed her disapproval of the school’s policy. She said that we owe allegiance to God, not a flag. My siblings and I heard our mother repeat that statement numerous times during our early school days.

I don’t think mother was unpatriotic. But being black in America and having grown up under racist Jim Crow laws in a small North Carolina town didn’t inspire patriotism. I wonder if her strict religious upbringing also discouraged saluting the flag. Sometimes, during our chats on the subject, mother would emphasize the point by referencing Bible scriptures like those in Exodus. “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them.”

From her perspective, the flag represented a graven image, a god of sorts, and her children reciting what was frequently referred to as the flag salute was disrespecting God.

In the 1970s, when mother began studying with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (I also refer to them as JWs or the group), she must have had a hallelujah moment and done a happy dance after learning that their long-dead leader, Joseph Rutherford, had declared that the flag salute and numerous other social activities and customs violate Biblical commands. (Rutherford, the second president of the incorporated Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, renamed the sect Jehovah’s Witnesses following the death of the founder Charles Taze Russell).

I was a young woman when my mother – one of nine children of a pastor and his wife – rejected her Southern Baptist background and converted, so I escaped being born into a family that worshiped with the group. My dad never became a JW, nor did I.

Maybe I’ve been looking in all the wrong places, but I have yet to find anywhere in the Bible that says a Pledge of Allegiance to a flag or singing a National Anthem is sacrilegious. I didn’t say it wasn’t in there; I said I haven’t found it.

Because of my strong desire to understand what led my mother to convert from her Christian upbringing to join the JWs, I’ve done much research on the group, scouring books, articles, and websites over the years. I learned that Rutherford was disgruntled with the government following what he considered his unjust imprisonment in 1918 after he began promoting Russell’s anti-government book The Finished Mystery.

Following his release, Rutherford proceeded to reorganize the group and issued a blistering condemnation of things of “the world,” including the celebration of holidays and birthdays. He also disapproved of other religions, claiming that theirs is the one true religion.

Decades ago, years before my mother joined the group, I studied with Blanche, a JW whom I had met and befriended when we lived in the same high-rise building. After knowing her briefly, she invited me to “Bible study” with her. That’s when I learned she was a JW, and I suspected I had been targeted to become a baptized JW.

I may not be the brightest bulb on the string, but I have high wattage. It didn’t take long for me to understand that if I were to join the JWs, I’d have to give up my self-autonomy and conform to the group’s doctrine. I had been baptized as a Baptist when I was a young teen. One baptism was enough, thank you.

Soon after I stopped studying with Blanche, I learned that Witnesses are discouraged from mingling with “pagans,” eventually, our friendship dissolved.

JWs are forbidden from questioning “the Word” and must adhere to the group’s rules. They are discouraged from having close relationships with “worldly” people because they (we pagans) are seen as bad influences. In addition to not saluting the flag, JWs avoid military service, singing national anthems, jury duty, and voting. They do not celebrate holidays or birthdays, and they don’t accept blood transfusions because they believe the procedure creates a risk of losing eternal salvation.

In 2018, Derek Miller and a CTV investigative team published some facts about the JW religion that many people might not know.

People can and will worship however and whomever they choose, and for various reasons, I choose to avoid all organized religions.

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A Time to Laugh

by on ·Religion, The Way I See It

People joke about God having a sense of humor. I’ve done it, too. But, something happened to convince me that not only does God have a sense of humor, He sometimes uses humor to shake us up.

This morning – I am saying my a.m. prayers and have progressed to “hallowed be Thy name” when my mind begins to wander. Should I have Hazelnut or Arabica Dark Roast coffee with breakfast? Unfortunately, it is not unusual for my thoughts to stray when I’m saying my prayers. The Lord knows that I sometimes have the attention span of a two-year-old with ADD. I force myself to refocus and get back to the business at hand. I apologize to the Lord and start over as I always do whenever my prayer is interrupted.

“Our Father…” I get as far as “Thy will be done,” seconds before my cell phone pings on the nightstand beside the bed, indicating that I have a text message. I ignore the phone and apologize again for the interruption before restarting the prayer.

As I ask God to “Give us this day,” a loud, horn-honking car alarm goes off outside my bedroom window. Son of a biscuit eater, I think, then add Sorry, Lord.

I begin again and manage to finish praying without any more interruptions. And then the strangest thing happens. I turn on the TV to watch the news while making my bed. The set is tuned to the channel it was on when I turned it off last night. Grey’s Anatomy is on. Then comes the kicker.

Dr. Miranda Bailey (one of Grey’s key characters) stands before an altar holding glowing candles in the chapel. She stretches her arms to her sides, raises her head toward heaven, and begins to pray. She says, “Lord,” but before she can utter another word, a coworker arrives by her side and begins chattering. Although the intrusion is brief, Dr. Bailey’s frustration is evident. When the coworker leaves, Bailey turns back toward the altar and is about to resume her prayer.

“Lord,” she says again. Then she is interrupted by the phone inside the pocket of her smock. She pulls out the phone, glares at it, and sighs in frustration as the show goes to a commercial.

I am a little bit rattled by the parallel between what I just saw and my earlier experience while trying to finish my prayer. I pick up the remote control and change the channel while thinking how strange it was that the TV happened to be on that station and showing that particular scene. I don’t believe in coincidences. Surely, God was jesting, about my apologizing for the interruptions. In addition to wrath, mercy, and love, He does have a sense of humor.

Religion – like politics – is a touchy subject. Many people refrain from discussing those two topics because the conversation can turn from an interesting discussion to a nasty argument before you can say Hail Mary.

I am not a religious person, nor am I an atheist. I am spiritual. People who don’t understand my philosophy would likely label me a Christian atheist, but I reject that label.

Sometimes, when discussing the subject, I use the words religious and spiritual interchangeably because it’s easier and less time-consuming than explaining my viewpoint. As I see it, religion is a detailed tradition of organized beliefs and regulated practices shared by a like-minded community and often led and controlled by a person or person(s) who consider themselves called or appointed by God.

Being spiritual is having a one-on-one relationship with God or whatever one chooses to call the Supreme Being. Therefore, I do not feel compelled to have an intermediary or middle person – another imperfect mortal –interpret, explain, or orchestrate their understanding of the Higher Power to attempt to drive me to think their way.

People who claim to be spiritual instead of religious are not necessarily agnostic or atheist. On the contrary, many of us are God-fearing Christians. We just don’t want to be affiliated with religious institutions and groupthink that impacts people’s free will and common sense—shades of Jim Jones, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, and Heaven’s Gate. And we do believe in prayer.

As author Stan Toler says, “You don’t necessarily need a great sense of humor to get God’s punch lines. You just need a great sense of faith.”

Amen.

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Spiritual or Religious – How Do You Worship?

by on ·Lifestyle and Culture, Religion

An acquaintance (for anonymity I’ll call her Ivy) recently asked me to what church do I belong. I’ve known Ivy professionally for a few years, and as long-time patrons and proprietors sometimes do, we disclose some information about our private lives. I’ve learned that she is a devout Christian and attends church regularly. That aside, I believe her to be a kind and thoughtful person, and I think the feeling is mutual.

When I answered Ivy’s question by saying that I was not affiliated with any church, for a second she looked like she didn’t believe me, and then she asked, “Why not? Aren’t you religious?”

People rarely accept a straight yes or no answer to any question. The subject of religion is no different. When I responded no, Ivy’s puzzled expression did not surprise me.

“I’m spiritual,” I told her, “But not religious.”

“What does that mean?” She asked. (Did I detect sarcasm?) “What’s the difference?”

I expected that question. I’d been asked before. Expressing my opinion usually leads to a long, dragged out discussion.

The last (and only) house of worship where I held membership was Guildfield Baptist church. I think I was about 12 years old. I had been attending Sunday school at the little church for as long as I could remember. One day, I asked my mother if I could join, and she consented. The next Sunday, when the pastor opened the doors of the church, I became a member. A few weeks afterward, I was baptized.

Having watched movies like The Bells of St. Mary and The Song of Bernadette, led my naïve and impressionable mind to believe that when I grew up, I wanted to be a nun. (Silly me.) I did not understand at the time that as a Baptist, I would have to convert to Catholicism to pursue that goal.

My parents reared my siblings and me religiously. I attended Sunday school regularly, church occasionally, and sometimes both on the same Sunday. I think mother was proud of the fact that I also sang in the junior choir, and I enjoyed it. At home, when our family gathered around the table for meals, we kids were required to say a Bible verse after grace. When I could think of nothing else, I opted for the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.”

I still remember, occasionally, sitting with my mother as she read the Bible to me and sometimes asking her questions that she answered to the best of her understanding, but not always to my satisfaction. My bible discussions with mother remain as fresh in my mind as if they occurred yesterday.

My affiliation with Guildfield church ended after my family moved out of the neighborhood in the mid-1960s. During the years following our move, I attended numerous houses of worship, including Mosques and the Kingdom Hall, but I never joined any of them. The only time I enter a church nowadays is to attend a wedding or, most likely, a funeral.

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6.

My religious upbringing remains embedded, but I stay away from organized religion.

The question from Ivy wasn’t the first time that someone asked me to explain what I mean when I say that I am spiritual but not religious.

As I explained to Ivy, “It doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in God. I’m not an atheist, though I might be borderline agnostic.” I laughed. She didn’t. The puzzled look on her face told me that she didn’t understand my humorous jab or she didn’t think it was funny.

What I wanted to say to her was, “I take issue with organized religion. I dislike the hypocrisy, the disguised money-grabbing, sanctified pretense, and the holier-than-though attitude of some church folks.” But being the diplomatic person that I am (most of the time), what I said instead was, “I prefer not to follow organized practices and religious dogma. You know what they say, ‘Different strokes for different folks.’” That ended the conversation.

I don’t need religious, social networking, nor do I feel compelled to commune with a group of people or pray in a house of worship. I have a one-on-one relationship with God. If it is true that God hears us when we pray no matter where we are, then I could pray as easily in a closet or car, as in a church.

In my lifetime, I’ve known some professed atheists whose moral standards and actions are better than some people who regularly fill the church pews. Absent their belief in God; I find atheists to be no more immoral, judgmental, or hypocritical than folks who claim to be holy and sanctified.

Some people use the terms religious and spiritual interchangeably. As I see it, religious people base their faith on what they are taught by ministers, priests, pastors, overseers, and other dutiful clergypersons. Spiritual but non-religious people often develop our beliefs based on personal experiences that may or may not be gleaned from our familiarity with religious organizations. No matter how we choose to identify ourselves — as spiritual or religious — the important factor is how we live and how we honor God.

 

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Looking Back at The Funeral

by on ·Family, Journaling/Writing, Religion, The Way I See It

I wrote the entry below in my journal on May 11, 2014, the night before Mother’s Day, weeks before my ailing mother died, and days after her doctor called my siblings and me to his office to tell us what I had already presumed. (The fact that this is being published on Father’s Day is coincidental.)

Mother’s cancer had returned after three years in remission and a few months following her breast surgery. It was terminal. Her doctor said that chemo and other interventive efforts to prolong her life had been exhausted. The ire that led me to express angry feelings in my journal later that evening was not the result of the doctor’s disclosure. I became enraged after my sister told me over the phone that she and our mother were writing down service arrangements for mother’s funeral.

I knew that my exclusion from the planning was intentional because my sister and mother were members of the same religious organization and I purposely have no membership with any organized religion. The deliberate slight led me during that telephone conversation to decide that I would not attend my mother’s funeral. (Circumstances, which I’ll later explain, changed my mind. I did attend the funeral. My sister did not.)

My sister, brothers, and I each dealt with my mother’s pending death in our own way. I, as I often do, wrote through my pain, confiding and psychologically transferring my feelings to my private journal. Now, as the fifth anniversary of mother’s death approaches on June 18, I’ve decided to share, in my public journal, a condensed version of the entry I wrote on that Mother’s Day eve. For me revealing these thoughts and pent up emotions is cathartic. Others may see it differently, and that’s okay. And as much as I know I should resist saying this about that; I’m going to say it anyway – Whatever.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Dear Diary,

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. What a time to be writing this.

I won’t be attending mother’s funeral. People will wonder why — let them. While the service is underway, I will be here, at home, feeling a lot of things, but guilt will not be one of those emotions. I’ll probably be reminiscing.

Like every good mother, mom instilled pearls of wisdom in her children as she and dad raised the four of us. She never stopped giving us advice, even when we were adults. I remember following frequent news reports about the Jim Jones tragedy in Guyana that dominated the airways, mother and I had many conversations about how easily people are lured into cults. “Stay away from them,” she cautioned.

I detest the fact that mother ultimately disregarded her own advice when she joined an organization that in my opinion, is nothing less. Her decision curtailed our family gatherings and resulted in our family becoming distant in the past few years. I imagine that once mother leaves us we will be more estranged.

So often I think about family gatherings that we enjoyed at mom and dad’s home on holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas until her conversion changed that. I miss those get-togethers. What kind of religious organization restricts members’ from participating in what they call “worldly” activities, birthdays included? How crazy is that?

They like to take control. Mother let them take over her life, and I will always believe that she ultimately came to regret it, though she would never admit it. Dad tolerated them because of mother but he turned a deaf ear to her request that he join a study group and he refused otherwise to have anything to do with the organization. He and I sometimes discussed the irony of the situation. How unfortunate that when he died in August 2006, mother invited them to eulogize his funeral. I don’t think I will ever get over that. It’s part of the reason that I cried so hard at dad’s funeral. I’m still pissed-off about it because I felt that dad was disrespected. If he could have sat up in his casket, pushed the lid off and said, “Hold it one damn minute. I’m not going out like this. Not like this.” He would have.

Although he didn’t regularly attend church, he was a protestant, not one of — them. When arrangements were being made for dad’s funeral, I told mother that I wanted one hymn included in the program. Just one. My favorite, “Amazing Grace.” She told me that was considered to be a pagan song. Therefore it wasn’t allowed. Well, darn, dad and I were both pagans then, weren’t we?

Since mother has assigned my sister to oversee her funeral arrangements, I am certain that I will not be asked if I have any input. Just the same, I am going to keep insisting that the program include the congregation singing Amazing Grace. The same song that I wanted sang at my dad’s funeral. Nevertheless, this woman persists.

Dr. Wayne Dyer says that “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.” I studied with the organization for a brief period even before my mother did. It didn’t take long for me to decide that I wanted no part of any group that manages its members with what I consider nothing less than mind control. I’d say that exposure gives me props for knowing something about which I speak. Against the protest by my then friend with whom I was studying, I refused to succumb to the brainwashing and, I quit the sessions.

My presence at mother’s funeral would serve no purpose. Feeling as I do now, resentment would most likely lead me to show my annoyance during the service for the group that I feel stole my mother from our family long ago.

They profess to be nonjudgmental, yet they judge others every day, especially people who they label as pagans because pagans are of different faiths and are “of the world.” They spew a lot of hogwash about how they cannot fraternize with people of the world. Oh? Where the hell do they think they are on Mars?

I don’t see where they exclude themselves from taking part in worldly things – except those things they don’t want to participate in like jury duty or the armed services. Then, they quickly become religious objectors — if you can call it that.  They cheer for their favorite sports teams. They buy worldly convinces like automobiles and computers. They’ve even put their literature on the Internet. Are those not worldly things? And just like numerous other “Christians” some of them fornicate, lie, and commit crimes; and then they try to justify the bastardly deeds of their corrupt members by saying, “Oh that person was not truly one of us.” How many times have I heard that used to justify a wayward sheep?

I mourn for the person that my mother used to be. I feel that she was taken away from me a long time ago even though she had not yet left this earth. I have my peace, knowing that she will no longer be under their control. I hope that she has her peace.

An organization that philosophizes to its members that they are God’s chosen while putting other religions down is, in my opinion, hypocritical. Granted — it is every person’s choice to be a member of whatever religious group they choose – or to be a member of none. But what peeves me is when one religious organization condemns others while claiming that theirs is the only “truth.”

Ultimately, I did attend my mother’s funeral. It was my sister who chose not to do so. The unplanned situation that resulted in mother’s funeral arrangements being left to me by my sister was the result of some tense, back-and-forth conversation between us over my insistence that Amazing Grace be sung during the service. The minister my mother had requested perform the service strongly objected to including that hymn or any hymn associated with pagan religion and informed me through my sister that he would refuse to administer the funeral if I persisted. I did. In turn, my sister also refused to have anything to do with making the arrangements or attending the service.

You see her faith advises members against taking part in what they consider services associated with a “false religion.” A funeral is considered a religious service because it may include such practices as the congregation joining in prayer with a “worldly” minister or priest who is not of their faith, and God-forbid the funeral be held in a church. Mother’s was held in a funeral home.

People who purport yourselves to be God’s children — check yourselves. 

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Mother’s (Birth) Day and other Special Occasions

by on ·Family, Holidays, Nostalgia, Parenting and Grandparenting, Religion

Had my mother lived she would have turned 91 years old on her forthcoming birthday, October 22nd. Instead, she slipped into eternity early on a warm summer morning four years ago.

I’ve seen where many people wish Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary or post other heartfelt greetings to their deceased loved ones on social media; and if that works for them, that’s fine. But I can’t help but wonder – why?

When my mother’s birthday arrives in three weeks, I won’t wish her Happy Birthday on Facebook nor will I post it in any other public place. Because if the Bible is to be believed – that the dead know nothing (Ecclesiastes 9:5) – then mother won’t know that I wish her a Happy Birthday anyway. And as much as she expressed her disdain for social media when she was alive – by the off-chance that there is Facebook in the hereafter, she surely would have nothing to do with it.

My mother’s chosen religion forbids their members from acknowledging birthdays and other so-called pagan holidays; so when she was alive wishing her happiness on such an occasion often led to a repetitive interchange between us.

Mother would say, “You know I don’t celebrate (whatever the holiday in question).” And I would protest, “But I do.”  The conversation usually ended there, until the next time. Yet, to my pleasure, she never refused to accept the cards or gifts that I gave her on those days. And she always (perhaps begrudgingly, although she didn’t show it) acknowledged the gesture with a polite, “Thank you.”

I regretted the fact that mother would not allow me to take her out to dinner, to a stage play, or someplace special on her birthday, but it bothered me more on Mother’s Day. Even before I became a mother, I relished Mother’s Day and considered the day to be a special occasion for honoring and showing reverence to all mothers and especially good mothers like mine.

Since my siblings and I were adults when mother decided to convert her faith, I have wonderful memories to cherish of earlier times of family get-togethers at my parent’s home on holidays like the Fourth of July (Can you say crab fest?), Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And for a few years, even after my siblings and I married and had families of our own, we’d all bring our kids to the grandparents home on festive occasions. Unfortunately, those happy get-togethers dwindled and eventually stopped; too soon.

In three weeks when mother’s birthday arrives, I won’t publicize it on social media. I will acknowledge it privately. And before the day is over, I know I will smile with tear-filled eyes as I remember a recurring dialog that she and I shared many times in the years before she died.

“You know I don’t celebrate birthdays.”

“But I do.”

 

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