Faith - Embracing the Unknown

Seeing that it is Good Friday – still don’t know why/agree with that appellation – my thoughts have wandered to religion and faith.  I was brought up in the Episcopal Church, attending services every Sunday and even serving as an altar boy.  I never spent a lot of time with deep thoughts about it, it was just something done on Sundays.  Once I started working in high school to help for impending college I stopped going.  I even made fun of what we called, “Jesus Freaks”, something I now truly regret.  I ended up married to a truly devout Catholic (carefully avoiding calling her a fanatic – one of my dumber statements – paid for in full).  Since religion didn’t mean a lot to me at the time and it did to her I converted to Catholicism when we married.  I was kind of disappointed because it was virtually the same church that I grew up in.  The Episcopal Church in the US is the Church of England which separated from Rome when the Pope said Henry the VIII couldn’t boink Anne Boleyn (my high school history teacher just turned over in her grave).  When the kids came along my wife would take them along with her while I stayed at home.  My mother, who hadn’t been to church in decades, told me that I was failing my children by not going to church with them.  I never handled criticism from my mother well so I started going to church with them.  My wife was ecstatic and surprisingly I found that I enjoyed going.  I found comfort in hearing the words and themes again.  I think it was good for my and any kids, to be exposed to those lessons at an early age, when they are forming their value systems.  Neither of the kids attend church regularly now but I do think all the years they spent in church helped them develop into the people they are.  I still go to church every Sunday although I will never be the Catholic that my wife is.  Faith is something everybody has to define for themselves.  It can’t be forced, it has to be discovered.  My own faith is only challenged by my wife who is a strict adherent to all of the forms of the church.  I’m a little bit of a rebel and see many of these as man’s attachments and not Divine instruction.  I think it’s more important to believe, which I do, than it is to not eat meat on Fridays during Lent or regularly attend confession or the myriad other prescripts of the church.  This was a wedge between my wife and I until a Catholic priest in Virginia chastised her for being so hard on me and told her it was not for her to dictate faith to me – God I love that guy.  I know evil exists in the world, I’ve seen it up close and personal, and if you have one than you have to have the other.  I believe in the innate goodness in all men and embrace a belief that encourages us to be better.  Enough deep thoughts for today, I have to go warm up the fish sticks my wife sent with me for lunch.