JUNE 23, 2023 – If church is what had connected Mother to Cyril Hanney, it was not he who connected Mother to church. As the years passed and rectors came and went, Mother became about as active at Trinity Episcopal Church as anyone could be. Once the new church—an architectural monstrosity inside and out (the architect’s specialty was supermarkets)—was built, Mother continued her tireless efforts in the name of the Lord. And over time, Bibles, bible study guides, banners, pamphlets, notebooks, “God” books and all manner of other religious materials began to stack up in the house. Mother served on the church vestry and on numerous committees. She directed the choir, played the organ, led Bible studies, helped in the church kitchen, taught Sunday school, and visited the elderly, the infirm, and the hospitalized members of the church. (She also made sure that the offering envelope I put in the plate each Sunday actually had coins inside.)
It seemed that at least a couple evenings every week, Mother would finish up her piano lessons and rush off to a church meeting. Upon returning, she’d always have something critical to say about it to Dad, such as, “I just can’t understand why the other members of the vestry want to [do something or other that was ill-advised].”
Dad would listen casually and offer a simple, “Why don’t they just . . .”
What surprised me was how over time, Mother influenced Dad—a highly self-reliant, non-joiner, independent thinker, solo-pursuit kind of guy—to accompany her to Sunday worship services. And what shocked and annoyed me to no end was when Dad himself joined forces with Mother when I staged an open rebellion over having anything at all to do with church.
She was always dragging me to churchy stuff, starting with Sunday worship, of course, and continuing with Sunday school, confirmation, pot-luck dinners, extra services during Lent, and so on. I grew to hate it, and there was little in life that I detested more than Mother barging into my bedroom on a Sunday morning and calling out, “Time to rise and shine!” That right there was enough to put me in a foul mood.
When I was mercifully sent off to boarding school, I never once attended church, except for compulsory but fairly generic and ecumenical vespers Sunday evenings at Sterling School where I attended my freshman year. While home on vacation, it was a different story, and eventually, I learned that acquiescing in Mother’s insistence (and Dad’s demands) that I attend Sunday services while on break was simply the price I had to pay for being given total freedom from religion during my time away.
Yet, I couldn’t escape Mother’s attempts to get me to church while I was away at school. She wrote to me often, on several occasions twice a day, and nearly every letter contained an entreaty—replete with underscored words—to go to church so that I could “hear the word of our Lord and participate in communal worship, because where there are two or three gathered in His name, there He will be too.” Left to my own devices, there was no chance that I would go to church while away at school. Mother’s urgings reduced the chances to below zero.
It wasn’t that I no longer believed in God or Jesus or church. It was simply that I associated all three with Mother, and Mother was clearly obsessed with them and there was no subject you could bring up with her without God being dragged into it and that bugged me to no end. It was not God or Jesus or church that annoyed me. It was Mother. It was Mother saying and writing in her correspondence, such corny lines as “Just rejoice in the day of the Lord and all that he hath made.” Little did I know as a teenager or even as an adult until I was all of 37 that there was more to the story. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
