JUNE 24, 2023 – (Cont.) Over the years, I tried to establish the origins of Mother’s religiosity—apart from her association from early childhood with old Grace Episcopal Church in Rutherford, New Jersey. Her mother was an avowed atheist, who said of Mother and her devout faith, “She certainly never got it from me.” If Mother’s father was at all religiously inclined, as Mother claimed, his beliefs were never revealed to me, except by the fact that when he was in his 80s, he sat in the same pew with me once at Grace Episcopal Church—and nodded off during each part of the service that allowed us to sit for more than a minute. I inquired once of the only other source I could identify: Uncle Bruce—UB—Mother’s only sibling.
The opportunity presented itself one day when I was in Rutherford and UB and I drove past Grace Church, which was about five blocks from my grandparents’—and before them, my great-grandparents’—house at 42 Lincoln. It was UB, actually, who opened the door to the conversation.
“There’s where your Mother was married,” he said, pointing to the church. “And where you and Kristina were baptized.” (Twenty-eight years later, Kristina was also married there.)
I seized the moment. “I’m curious. Was Mother always religious?”
“She went to Sunday school,” said UB.
“Anything beyond that?”
“Not that I can remember. She wanted me to join the church.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want her to feel bad. I went through a little ritual and they gave me a Bible,” UB said with a tone of ridicule. “They wanted to hang a cross around my neck too, but I took that off as soon as I could.”
“How old were you?”
“Oh, I must have been 19 or 20.”
“Ever go to Sunday school before that?”
“Grandpa wanted me to go, but my teacher was a girl in high school, and I didn’t like her, and besides, what did she know? Nothing! So I quit going. I’d just head down to the river and stay there for the time that Sunday school was in session and then went home.”
“Did Grandpa suspect that you weren’t going?”
“I don’t know. I suppose, but he never said anything.”
Beyond these simple, reported facts, I have no information that suggests an infusion of religion or religious example in Mother’s youth. Dad wasn’t religious, so she wasn’t influenced by him. I can conclude only that her deep intellectual and apparent spiritual commitment to the faith came later in her life, and that the cruel truth was in the call from Elsa when Mother was 67 years old and in the hospital.
Ironically, by that time, Mother’s religion had actually rubbed off on me—at least for a time, until I was able to sort it all out, in further irony, thanks to a book Mother gave me by a Canadian Roman Catholic Priest, Father Ronald Rolheiser, entitled The Holy Longing: A Search for Christian Spirituality (1999), and her familiarity (and meeting) with the radical theology of the Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, maverick Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey from 1979 to 2000. But I’m getting way ahead of the story.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
