Politics, Religion, Family and Dancing amongst Landmines

I grew up in a family that voted democrat and prayed in the Protestant church. Perhaps I was adopted and no one ever told me, but that wouldn't account for the fact that I bear resemblance to both of my parents. As my life unfolded and I married, I developed my own belief system. I have strayed far from the left and sit quite comfortable in the middle right; until the chair I sit upon is placed at the dinner table of my family. A meal that involves politics is never healthy. My mother once accused my husband of brainwashing me because my views are quite different from theirs, I'm sure it was in jest or perhaps she attributed it to a right-winged conspiracy. We have learned that there are certain views that we will never agree upon and so we avoid them like landmines. How is it that of four children, I am the only one who is RIGHT? I mean that term both literally and figuratively…which by that very statement just alienated me more from my entire family. And so we stick to topics that are not political…..hmm….I am sure there is at least one….well, there is always religion right?

After 24 years of being married to a Catholic, I have finally become one myself. For me it was a personal choice, the RIGHT choice. I had attended Mass with my husband, as any good Catholic does; at very least on Christmas and Easter, also known as CrEasters, and averaged 10 masses per year. Being a Protestant attending the Catholic Church felt to me as if I was invited to Sunday dinner, but I wasn’t allowed to eat like everyone else. That left me unfulfilled and resentful of the Catholic faith. I was the anti-Catholic. I mocked the stand up and sit down and the fact that they don't use a BIBLE, but rather a small book with the passages from the BIBLE. I attended Mass because it didn’t matter to me where I prayed as long as I prayed. God would see how much I was devoted to my husband and his need to attend Mass. So I would marvel at the rituals that I didn’t understand and was forbidden to partake in. Finally the feeling of not belonging nagged at me so I studied the religion and attended the adult education for almost a year. I realized that all this time I was a Catholic, because I believed as they believed. I finally made it official in the eyes of the Church… Again, the only one of my siblings to convert, and quite possibly one of only a few people in America, who actually ran to the Catholic Faith instead of from it. But, if people, including Catholics knew more about their faith and worried less about the unfortunate way that events within the church were handled, they would realize the beauty of the Faith. But now that I have converted, religion has become a landmine as well.

So politically and religiously my belief system is on the opposite side of the scale of my family. And so we have learned to dance around issues that may offend the other. I remember the year that my Dad was so mad at me for sending him a George W. Bush Father’s day card, so mad in-fact that he didn’t come to the phone to speak to me for two weeks. It was just a funny card to me, but to him it was a landmine.

Funny how people who grew up together, raised you can be so idiologically different than you. So now when we speak amongst our family, we keep the conversation to family happenings and light news. If one of us should lay a landmine of politics or religion, the other can choose to detonate it, or dance around it.