Now I Lay Me

By Renee Shay, Harvesting Thought

–explore–

“Now I lay me down to sleep, praise the Lord, my soul to keep.  If I die before I wake, God my soul is free to take.”  What a hell of a thing to teach a child, this prayer, so that they say it every night before they try to close their eyes to sleep?  I was taught this prayer.  Going to bed every night that I can remember from my childhood, thinking about the fact that I might not wake up.  I used to also hate sleeping on my back because not only was I already thinking about death as I recited this prayer, as I got older, going to open casket funerals, you realize that laying on your back, arms across your chest, “sleeping,” is the death position.  Add these two things together, it becomes a perfect recipe for a lifetime of struggling to fall asleep.  I feel the need to explore these types of things and to recognize the impacts they have on one’s life.

I was baptized and raised in an average Catholic household.  My parents made us kids get out of bed, when we had that one chance on the weekend to sleep in and made us go to church every Sunday and on Christmas Eve.  They made us attend catechism and eventually go through the confirmation process.  I remember hating to wait for my parents to pick me up after classes.  It was a fact, my family was the last most every time, we would always be waiting to get picked up.  We would often go back into the dark creepy church, one would go down the stairs to the basement to find the church aid at her desk, we would ask her to use the phone.  The others of us would stand guard upstairs but we were kids and curious.  We would often open the sanctuary doors and peer in.  It was quite different at night, lights off, with no one in the pews.  We loved pushing each other in and getting spooked by the torturous station of cross statues illuminating in the minimal light coming from the stained-glass windows.  I can add that too, thanks to Catholicism, a lifetime of stress built into my psyche for those who are late and the disturbing impression an empty church can leave on a child’s imagination. 

I was confirmed my senior year in high school whatever being “confirmed” meant, it meant nothing to me.  I do remember having to sit with the priest in open confession near the alter, to get confirmed.  Oh boy, the secrets I could have told but did not.  Why would I, to the stranger in a robe?  That was not the type of confession that could cleanse a soul, not even close.  It was clear then as it is now, I did not care about Catholicism and just went through the motions to do as little as possible to get through it.  I did not care about what the strange man in the robe was preaching on Sundays or whispered to me in open or in closed confession while having a screen between us.  As if that hid our identities, laughable.  No way, one truly confesses in that setting, no way.

I did not care about what the nuns or parishioners who volunteered to teach us during catechism were trying to teach us.  No offense to them though, they were oftentimes the mothers of my classmates, meant well, and some good nuns.  I believe, if I recall correctly, even my mother, when she had the time, assisted in helping my class prepare for confirmation.  Truth be told though; I had felt no connection to the church even with her involvement, none.  I felt awkward studying with those I studied with in my public schools.  I hated singing, kneeling, genuflecting, reciting prayers and bowing down to some guy hanging by nails on a cross with red blood drops dripping from his hands and feet.  Again, how disturbing to be worshiping a man that was hung on a cross, in some foreign land, so many moons ago, no one that I have met in my lifetime has ever met.  Blood dripping from his feet and hands?  Seriously, disturbing to say the least.

I did not understand the depths of the hypocrisy that I was witnessing, I was a child, of course I did not.  I did know something was not right, I knew that.  I was smart enough to know to be wary of what I was hearing while someone carefully selected some passage from a book called the Bible, written so many moons ago, you wonder what its relevance is today on my life, turns out, none.  I did know not to trust those who claimed to be religious on Sunday.  I watched them parade their families through the services, it was a show.  I knew some who were looked up to in the community and the church.  They were the lawyers, the doctors, priests, and the business owners, but they were also the drunks I witnessed the other two nights, Friday, and Saturday, of those same weekends.  I knew they were nursing hangovers those Sunday mornings in church and were forcing themselves to attend.  It was not long until I became one of them, hungover and pretending on this one day of out of the week to be a good churchgoing person. 

–challenge–

This week began with me hearing on a National Public Radio (NPR) – British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) segment about the stories coming out that 215 children were found in a mass grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia [BBC News – Reuters Article May 29, 2021].  This one school out of many, was the creation of the Roman Catholic’s quest to assimilate indigenous people into their way of being.  It is just another reminder to me about the hypocrisy that existed and still exists today with people who claim to be religious.  About how the church tried to indoctrinate me.  As if the actual term “religious” has any graceful meaning left to it, not to me.  What atrocities have taken place throughout history at the hands of these humans who think their way is the best way?  What lengths, how many have died at their hands? How many more graves there are yet to be found?

I often think, would my family, some two hundred years ago, have partaken in these types of actions, if those were the times?  Would these types of teachings, would these types of crimes committed at the hand of churchgoers, taking children away from the only life they had known and dumping their bodies in unmarked graves have been so commonplace to think that my own mother could have fell victim to those beliefs then?  How did those Kamloops children die?  At the careless or abusive hands of those teaching them that their way is the way to live?  My mother was never such a person, and I am not meaning to suggest that she would be capable of such horrors inflicted upon innocent child.  She was a beautiful hardworking soul who would not hurt anyone, she saw the lines not be crossed.  Hard to imagine, if this were normal, what would any of our parents have been like then?

Infallible righteous teachings through the millennium that still exist today.  I do know, my own parents had their boundaries.  I do believe in my heart, that even though many others participated in such atrocities that my parents would have not.   They had conviction, they knew right from wrong, even if the priests that preached did not.  Even if the others who stood beside them during Sunday sermons as business owners or churchgoings could very well have been the ones who would have.  I have evidence that my parents had lines they would not cross. I have their stories.

Growing up, my father used to tell us the parental guidance (PG) rated stories about how he was abused by nuns.  Sometimes it was stories we overheard when the grownups were talking, and we were in the other room but could still hear them.  As we got older though, we heard them directly from him.  He would tell of the abuse he endured at the hands of nuns during his Catholic School days.  How, if he were doing something incorrect in the classroom, whether it be grammar or behavior, whether it be someone who was left-handed and they wanted to make right-handed, he or they would get the rule slaps across their hands.  Nuns freely abused kids in the classroom, the rule was the mild form, humiliating those who were abused in front of their peers.  He grew up and vowed to himself that he would never put his children into a Catholic School system, never and he held to that, all seven of us kids, went to public school.

There were other stories like when my parents had to rescue my Aunt Rita, my mother’s sister, from a nunnery that was not allowing her to fully express herself.  She had more progressive views on how things should be but that was not allowed.  She was becoming increasingly distraught with her plight.  She had promised to dedicate her life to the service of that guy hanging on the cross, Jesus Christ, but she could not have her own thoughts, her own way of interpreting her experiences.  It was cult-like, and it was a harrowing experience that my parents went through to get her out.  The nunnery did not want to let her go.  Through the family stories you hear how my parents were credited with saving my aunt from the Catholic church.  You see, my parents were never going to put us in a school system like that.  Though, they did maintain a relationship with the church, though they did put us through baptism, catechism, and confirmation.  They said once we became adults, we could make our own choices about whether we wanted to be connected to the church or not. 

My mother, later in her life, when she had more time, delivered communion to nursing homes and assisted the church during the communion portion of the service.  Still churchgoing, faithful, until her dying breath, with wanting the priest to deliver her last rites, she believed in it.  There was still that hook, some eighty years of life, a hook.  One of the last things she said on her death bed as our oftentimes loud and unruly family gathered around her over the course of two days to say our goodbyes, she said, “I don’t need rest now, I will get plenty where I am going.”  She believed, bless her soul, may she rest in peace.  It is hard to grapple with, my challenge is that I see someone like her with a faith that tells her if she is devoted to it, she will reach the promised land.  Yet, such a beautiful soul as she was, there were others with those same beliefs that were not as beautiful, that committed crimes against children.  What is wrong with this picture, with this thing called religion?

–expand–

My week ended with the reflection and celebration that the United States of America, the Congress (House 415-14 vote & Senate 100-0) who are filled with those we have elected to govern us, reached consensus that the day of June 19, 1865, will now be a federal holiday.  Most have just thought of Juneteenth, if they thought about it at all, as a black thing, some type of event for black people.  Having no idea of the history, the meaning behind it.  I too admit that over the years, when I saw and went to the celebrations in my own community, I was expanding my knowledge of its significance.  Now, at least once a year, others in America, those with skin as white as mine, will have to at the least recognize that the day exists and that it is an important day in our, both black and white, history.

My week bookended by thinking about religion, thinking about the pain and torture those young souls endured at Kamloops and other religious places like it, in the name of Jesus Christ, and to be thinking about slavery.  The unspeakable, the unfathomable, the incomprehensible treatment of other human beings.  How could any one of these things be done to another human?

I sat on a rock on the shores of Pacific Grove, California yesterday for the first time in our history during a Juneteenth federal holiday.  I was elated yet saddened to know what was behind it all.  I closed my eyes and began to contemplate how it must have felt for someone across the world sitting on a beach on the continent of Africa, many moons ago.  Sitting on a rock on a beach as I am, enjoying the same sounds of waves, enjoying the same warmth of the sun on their face, enjoying the same sounds of sea gulls passing by.  Some other human being with the only difference than me being the color of their skin.  I ponder, I see a sailboat passing by offshore, it goes along its merry way and does not bother me.  And I imagine them seeing a ship drop anchor in their bay, row boats coming ashore filled with strange men with skin whiter than theirs.  I am in no danger, but they were.  They would be taken from their shore, beaten near to death, chained, brought across the world to my shores, never to return to their homeland again, enslaved by the people with skin whiter than theirs.

A lot of terrible things have happened to human beings at the hands of those righteous few who think that it is okay to harm another that they were incapable of seeing in their own likeness.  The two examples here, Kamloops and Slavery, only naming two out of the uncountable many.  How could someone justify unthinkable acts with such destructive consequences on other’s bodies, minds, souls, oftentimes in the name of business, culture, ethnicity, and religion?  

I applaud our Congress this week.  Not the cowardice fourteen congressional white men who were incapable of being true to themselves, not them, but the rest of them.  Not for doing the right thing because many do not have that capacity but for taking an action that will now force others to force themselves to either look away once a year and pretend our history is not our history.  To have them must learn more about a day in our history when they lost the battle to keep slavery alive, the word was out.  To have them to have to recognize that somewhere deep down in the history of these America’s, in history of our own families, our own communities, our own places of worship, we are capable of such atrocity that they should think, those church going, prayer loving selves, “but for the grace of God, there go I,” whenever they hear the word Juneteenth.  

It is my hope that someday humans put the Bible, their version of it, on a shelf where it belongs.  It is a part of history, but it is the past and does not need to be our future.  It is my hope that we use our desire for community to include all of humankind not just a select few.