*

Religion divides as much as it unites.

No, I’m not referring to the Hamas-Israel War. Or to the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. However, the latter centuries-old tension is closer to my religious experience growing up.

Religious differences are dangerous in the larger world and the personal world of our families.

I’ll get to my religious worldview in a few minutes. But first, you have to know a little about my family.

Mother

My mother was a devout Catholic. Her father, who died in 1945, four years before I was born, was a Protestant who became the first nonCatholic buried in the Catholic cemetery of my hometown. Albert Thomas sold life insurance to the priests in the Diocese of Davenport, played cards with the Bishop, and was a respected community member.

One of his three daughters, Florence, became Sister Marilyn Thomas, a member of the Sisters of Charity (BVM), until she died at 103 in 2019. Throughout my adult life, I met many of Fawny’s — so named because her brother Al could not pronounce Florence — on lunch visits to the Motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa. Over seven decades, I grew to love, respect, and honor BVM’s.

That’s me in the first photo with Sister Marilyn in 1957. Notice the Christmas cards on the wall, my mom’s handiwork.

Father

My father and his four siblings were each baptized in a different Protestant church. That’s he and my mom, Dody, on their wedding day in 1948 in front of the altar at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Davenport, Iowa.

After he returned from World War II, my dad courted my mom for two years. He agreed to begin the Rite of Christian Initiation to become a Catholic. As he told the story, he was mistreated by the priest in charge, and Dad quit, never to return to this church except for weddings and funerals.

My dad was a chemical engineer and always spoke of himself as an agnostic, someone who kept his distance from belief in a god. He died of cancer in 1993 at 71. In a final letter to his sister-in-law, Sister Marilyn, he refers to God’s plan. Did he, in the end, believe?

A lifelong Republican, he cast his final vote for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 because Dad hated the growing influence of the Christian Right on the Republican Party.

He also grew to love the BVM’s at Mount Carmel in Dubuque. They prayed for him every day during his seven-year battle with sinus cancer. He returned the favor by throwing the Nuns a pizza party about a year before he died.

Parents

While I was growing up, my dad always had breakfast ready on Sundays when we returned from mass. He had agreed that his children would be raised Catholics. I assume so because his three boys attended Catholic elementary and high schools. But I never heard my parents talk about religion. Or argue about it.

But there was tension. For example, the Protestant Gardner grandparents (Paul and Edith) and my Thomas grandmother Florence never socialized. Our family would spend Christmas Eve with Florence and Christmas Day with Paul and Edith. And my mom told us Edith favored the three Protestant daughters-in-law.

But my mom also taught her oldest son, me, at 16 that he and his first girlfriend, Sharon, could not get serious because she was Jewish. Of course, we did for two years, with me sneaking around.

The event that best encapsulates the strain from my parents’ mixed marriage was something that happened after my dad died when he was beyond personal choice. As our family filed out of the viewing room before the undertaker closed the casket, I took a last look at my dad. What I saw was a rosary wrapped around his helpless hands put there by my mom.

Though she lived for another twenty-five years, I never asked her about this. I wish I had. She must have yearned for my Dad to convert. Maybe we could have talked about her parents’ inter-religious marriage. How religious difference divides.

I’ve also thought about whether, if I could return to that funeral home anteroom, I would remove the Rosary, a symbol of the Catholicism my father rejected in life, from my Dad’s final resting place. I’m of two minds. I don’t know what Dad and Mom discussed in his last days. Perhaps he changed his mind, and the Rosary was faithful to that change.

Yet, I’m doubtful. I want to return to my father’s vote for Bill Clinton. What could turn him against the party he had voted for his entire adult life? It wasn’t just the Christian Right. It was the arrogance of absolutism — the absence of humility. I believe he saw in his final months on earth what could happen — what has happened — when one of America’s political institutions draws too close to one of America’s religious movements.

My Father’s agnosticism was not a failure of belief. It rejected the absolutism of mid-twentieth-century Catholicism and the late-twentieth-century American Evangelical movement.

Perhaps the God he wrote about in his final letter to Sister Marilyn was not the God of any particular religion. Maybe my Dad believed that no religion, particularly in its absolutist state, had a monopoly on God. It may be he was agnostic about religions but not about God.

The More

These uncertainties were my father’s final gifts to me. About ten years ago, I read The Heart of Christianity by the Protestant theologian Marcus Borg. Borg helped me understand my religious worldview and, I believe, my father’s. He wrote:

In the religious worldview, there is a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality. This view is shared by all the enduring religions of the world. In a nonreligious worldview, there is only the space-time world of matter and energy and whatever other natural forces lie behind or beyond it.

Similarly, William James distinguished between those who believed there was a “More” beyond the material world and those who thought there was only a “This.” The rituals, symbols, and beliefs point to “More” vary by time and culture, but the constancy of the urge toward such guidance is compelling.

Comparative Religions scholar Karen Armstrong writes that religious traditions are

Like fingers pointing to the moon; so very often we focus on the fingers and forget about the moon.

I’ve become comfortable with the Mystery of God and find it unsurprising that there are 4000 religions worldwide.

How could it be otherwise?

My father gave me the gift of uncertainty.

He had felt the lash of religious arrogance and foresaw what it would do to America’s Republican Party.

And we both loved the humility of the BVMs.

Religious absolutism deepens the world’s divisions and is an instrument of hatred.

Religious humility softens the world’s divisions and can be an instrument of love.