I am not a Pagan

I don’t think I’m a pagan. . .Growing up Episcopalian in a Catholic elementary school

I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1970’s (having been born in the late 1960’s). My father was from an upper, middle class white family who traced its ancestry to the Revolutionary War (and some claimed to the Mayflower). They were also staunch members of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church (known at that time as a member of ‘the Protestant Episcopal Church of America,’ or as it’s now called ‘ECUSA’). His grandfather had ‘converted’ to Episcopalian following the Civil War, and after getting married a second time. He left the Congregational Church that my Rev War ancestor had been so actively involved in (a story for another time). To call us ‘cradle Episcopalians’ is to put it mildly – we were Episcopalians since the bloody Civil War! My mother was a first-generation immigrant, her father having come to the US when he was 5 years old from The Netherlands.  While she had been baptized in the Catholic church, her parents were not at all active in the church since the parish priest had told them that they couldn’t name my mother, Shirley. Apparently, Shirley was a name we give our dogs (what??), so they had been forced to baptize her Ann Shirley. They consequently quit going to church at all, though my mother did have a faith of her own.

The early 1970’s was the time of public school integration and other cultural changes in the US that my father struggled to understand. He was born in 1919 and raised within that context. I won’t go into a cultural bioptic here, but suffice it to say, my father wasn’t going to have his precious quartet of daughter’s attending the local public-school system. The distinct preference would have been for us to go to ‘St. Paul Academy and Summit School.’ This school was the result of the merger of his all boys’ alma mater (SPA) and the respective all girls’ school next door (SS). Now, the fact the two had merged was a major downer when it came to recommending it as a place to educate four young ladies, but the major attraction was that the school was modeled after East Coast private day schools and was non-denominational. Unfortunately, for us, my parents couldn’t afford the tuition. Likewise, they couldn’t afford to send us to the elite Episcopal school on the Minneapolis side of the river, so our only alternative was to enroll in the local Catholic elementary school (St. Luke’s which has since merged and no longer exists under that name). Thus, we were able to avoid the public school system, and I started my journey within the Catholic education system.

When I was enrolled at St. Luke’s for the first grade, I was warned that there were certain things that the Catholic students would be doing that I should not do. One was the sacrament of confession. We Episcopalians simply didn’t ‘do’ confession – we said the prayer of confession together during Sunday services, but the idea of going into a little box and kneeling to tell the priest everything you’ve done to sin and fall short of God’s expectations wasn’t happening. Of course, in first grade, you have to wonder what we were supposed to confess – I hit my sister? (Well, if I did – not saying that I did– she deserved it), I disobeyed my parents? (Really, we learned early on that you simply didn’t disobey them. I don’t remember being spanked, but the threat of it was more than enough to stop me outright disobeying either of them), I lied? (Um, maybe, I’m not really sure there was anything to lie about when you’re 6 years old). Anyway, the point is that I found the whole idea of confessions to be rather odd – you were meant to come up with something you did wrong (anything!) and then you had to go and tell some strange man in a white collar what you’d done. He would then tell you to go and say a certain number of ‘Our Fathers’ and so many ‘Hail Mary’s.’ One time, I ‘accidentally’ went to confession and then reported to my father how weird an experience it was. He immediately called the school (or maybe Mom did) and told them that I was not to go to confession since we Episcopalians didn’t do that, ever.

The other thing we weren’t meant to do was to go to church with our classmates. As non-Catholics, we were welcome to be in the church, but we were un-welcome to participate in the services (literally – that’s what we were told). The acceptable practice for us non-Catholics was that we got to go to study hall while the other kids trouped over to the church for their weekly mass. I remember one year when we were in Lent and a new young priest had come to do the mass. He found out that there were some terrible sinners who had not attended the mass that day. Being horrified that we would so blatantly violate the rules about going to church as often as possible during Lent, he gathered the miscreants and demanded to know why we hadn’t gone to the mass. One by one, he went around the circle of students sitting before him in chairs. One by one, each child said, ‘I’m not Catholic.’ Halfway through, his chin dropped, and he stopped the next student from responding. He looked at the rest of us and asked, ‘are any of you Catholic?’ We responded in chorus, ‘No!’ He then dismissed us, and we went back to class.

In a religion class during the 3rd grade, the teacher was explaining about world religions. She stated that there were Jews (e.g. Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews also killed Jesus), there were Catholics (Jesus’ chosen people) and there were Pagans (those who weren’t Catholic or Jewish). In retrospect, I think she was trying to simplify things for 8 or 9-year old’s. Of course, there was no mention of the other Abrahamic faith, or many other religions, these simply weren’t on the radar for good little Catholic children in St. Paul in 1974.  However, I was confused with the options – people were Jews, Catholics or Pagans. My sisters and I had taken to going to St. Clement’s with my dad (one of the few activities we did with him since he was very traditional and didn’t do a whole lot with the children). I knew that we went to church every Sunday and that we talked about Jesus at church, and we even went to communion where we were told the host and wine represented Jesus’ body and blood. It was very clear that we weren’t Catholic, but I also knew that we weren’t Jewish (because even at 8 or 9 years old, I knew that the Jews didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah). It was then I realized that teachers didn’t know everything.

From St. Luke’s I migrated to Convent of the Visitation (at last, an all-girls school), then eventually graduated from Archbishop Brady High School (a co-ed Catholic school).There were a few moments of levity at Vis as well. One year, Vis was organizing a busload of us students to go and march in an anti-abortion parade. I was simply horrified, and told my father what was being planned. He duly got on the phone and told the school, in no uncertain terms, that I was not participating. By that point, we had found that calls from ‘our Father’ were much more effective than calls from Mom, so he got the ‘hell, no’ duty whenever something came up that went against our liberal Christian faith. Another time, I wrote an essay on the importance of birth control as a part of a class assignment (no idea what the actual topic was meant to be, or whether it was just demonstrating a style of writing). This wasn’t necessarily to reinforce the fact that I wasn’t Catholic (think of the classic song, ‘Every sperm is sacred’ from Monty Python’s ‘Meaning of Life’), but rather a dig at the arrogant male teacher who was going on five children and didn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. My non-Catholic friends and I made sure that everyone in the school knew who we were, it was a definite source of pride to be ‘different’ in that way.,

Maybe the church had lightened up a bit by the early 1980’s, maybe the sisters of St. Frances de Sales weren’t so hung up on different flavors of Christianity, or maybe I had just learned how better to culturally integrate (lol). However, as the years went by, it became easier to be a non-Catholic in a Catholic school setting. Ultimately, being an Episcopalian in the Catholic-school system actually strengthened my affiliation with my own church. I found myself getting more involved in my church as I strove to establish my identity and explore my own faith. I moved through the various ranks of acolyte and progressed up through other positions within the church (Sunday school, youth-group, vestry, etc.). While I’ve explored and studied many religions, I’ve-always come back to the Episcopal church as my home base. I like to think it’s because of my Catholic school experience that I’ve been so firmly planted in the Episcopal church.

Divine Irony

Following graduation from High School, I made the decision to go to Macalester College. Not only did I like the various major course of studies and programs there, it was founded by the Presbyterian’s and identified as non-denominational. (There are some other reasons for why Macalester, but that may be the topic of another post). The student body included students from all different religions, and from all over the world. I took advantage of the international focus and took courses like Tibetan Buddhism as well as other Eastern religions of China and Japan. I thought I had finally broken away from the Catholic church and was getting on with my life.

When I was married for the first time, I didn’t have a firm home church. I had attended St. Paul’s Church on the Hill near the Macalester campus (now closed) during college, but I didn’t see that as my home parish. It was simply the closest Episcopal church within walking distance (I didn’t own a car). At that time, St. Clement’s had a newer priest that I personally didn’t care for – I think I didn’t like his style, but in any case, I had stopped actively going there after my family moved to St. Paul’s West Side my senior year in high school. I don’t actually remember now why this priest rubbed me the wrong way, but suffice it to say, I didn’t feel compelled to be married there. In my final year of high school, I attended a mission church on the West Side which wasn’t actually an active parish, so being married there wasn’t an option. My fiancé’s mother had a strong Catholic faith and was unhappy that her son was going to marry someone who wasn’t Catholic. In a bid to allay her fears, I agreed to be married in the Catholic church, but insisted that we have the Episcopal priest from St. Paul’s co-officiate the service. Fortunately, both the priest at her home church, and the one at St. Paul’s agreed, and we were able to have the wedding that satisfied my desire to be married by an Episcopal priest, and her desire that her son be married in the Catholic church. The priest at St. Paul’s told us that he was meant to ask permission from the bishop to conduct a wedding in a Catholic church, he decided that rather than deal with the bureaucracy, he’d just go ahead and do it, then ask for forgiveness later. Naturally, we had to forgo communion during the service since the Catholic priest wouldn’t serve me, and I wasn’t going to be excluded, yet again, from participating fully in the service.

During our marriage preparations, there were certain promises we had to make in order to be approved for marriage in the church. One of the key ones, since I wasn’t Catholic, was that we had to promise to raise our children Catholic. We both crossed our fingers, and agreed that we would raise them in the church. Once our son came along, we then violated our promise and had him baptized at St. Paul’s on the Hill. Two years later, we sinned again, and had our daughter also baptized in the Episcopal church. While my mother-in-law was less than pleased, her parish priest did try to allay her fears that her son and grandchildren were going straight to hell, by saying that the fact we were going to a Christian church and were actively attending services was a good thing, and she shouldn’t worry so much about our eternal salvation. This satisfied her, and she seemed less concerned during the second baptism.

Flash forward to 1995, and our little family moved to Swanzey, New Hampshire. For anyone that’s aware of what was going on in New Hampshire in the mid-1990’s, school funding was a major problem. The public-school systems in the poorer districts were woefully underfunded since the state didn’t provide funding and the local towns were quite poor (literally, people were living in poverty in Swanzey). As a result, the schools were definitely lacking when it came to resources to be able to really educate children. We used to joke with our neighbors that our 3 families were funding the entire town’s budget for schools (we owned larger homes and paid property taxes, unlike most residents who were renters or living in double-wides). Because of this, as well as a failed attempt at having my son attend first and second grade in the public schools (yet another topic for a future blog), plus the fact that both of us had been educated by the Catholics, we made the decision to send our kids to the Catholic school. There was a small Lutheran school in town (ELCA – aka the happy Lutherans), but it only had a few grades when we were making the decision about where to send the kids for school. They were promising to add a grade a year, but if they weren’t able to do it, it would mean that my son would need to switch schools multiple times. Potentially, going to the Lutheran school and then having to switch to the Catholics if they failed to follow through on adding the grades in time. We felt that kind of change would be difficult for all of us, added to the fact that we knew the Catholics are really good at educating children, therefore we put both our eggs in one basket and the kids went to St. Joseph’s Regional Catholic School. The irony of this did not miss us – the Catholic priest in St. Paul had gotten his wish, and we had inadvertently fulfilled the promise we made during marriage prep. Our children were effectively being brought up Catholic. Like my family had done in the past, I ensured that they identified as Episcopalians and that they were quite clear about that fact.