Post 574 - February 12, 2024

I am as baffled by religious faith as I am by the NFL.

Neither of them has ever been a part of my life. I recognize the places that they have in other people’s lives, but they don’t honestly play any part in mine. It’s not that I’ve walked away or rebelled, I simply never connected with either and it’s never crossed my mind to do so.

A friend of mine is color-blind. He didn’t know he was color-blind until he was a teenager. Before that, when people described things as being red, he just sort of accepted it even though he couldn’t see what they were talking about. I don’t think it stressed him out very much, he just blithely assumed that it was a given in the world that things that were considered red were different from things that were considered green things even though he couldn’t pick out what that difference was.

I feel the same way about religion and sports. I don’t see it. I don’t miss it. I just don’t see it.

When I was a kid, we went to church in an uncommitted sort of way. To me, it was something to sit through for an hour or two before I could go out to play. I never felt anything negative towards it except maybe impatience. I never thought as a kid, that people might believe what our minister was saying. It never occurred to me that actual belief was even a part of what was going on during those early Sunday mornings. I don’t know what I thought the purpose of all of it was. I guess I didn’t really think about it. I just sat through it as best I could and then went out to have fun.

My husband has a much more complicated relationship with his religion. He broke with his church. His story, not mine, but I think he is constantly judging himself using a metric of what his, now ex-church, says our behavior should be. I never broke with the church I was taken to as a kid because I never joined it. Because of that, I don’t ever think about what some higher power might think of what I might be doing.  

I think I have a strong sense of morality. Much of it, I suppose, aligns with the teachings of various religions but I don’t think that’s where I got it from. Maybe it is. When I feel I’ve transgressed, it’s because I feel bad about doing something. I get mad or disappointed in myself. I don’t feel the need to apologize to a higher power for it. Logically, it seems to me, that if there is a higher power that is all-knowing, they would already know what was going on and how I felt.

I wrote much of this as the Super Bowl was being played yesterday. In truth, I didn’t know what time the game was scheduled for. I only even discovered it was being played when I googled it. When I found out, suddenly all the press coverage of Taylor Swift and her football-playing boyfriend made a bit more sense.

As long as I am confessing all of this, I might as well add, that while I am aware of who Taylor Swift is and what she does, I couldn’t hum one of her songs or tell you any of their titles. As far as I know, I’ve never listened to her perform. If there is one of her songs that I do know, I am not aware that it is Taylor Swift singing it. It’s not that I have anything against her or the idea of her at all. Her music and I have just never crossed paths.

I think she’s a remarkable person. I am at least aware enough of her to know that. That she donates so much of her wealth to food banks and other organizations doing “God’s work” is beyond impressive. I’ve seen clips of her on talk shows that make me want to know more about her. It’s on the list.

In high school, I was part of our marching band. In the regular band, I played the clarinet. Sort of. In marching band, however, because I was strong enough to carry it, I was one of three people who lugged around a bass drum. We had green wool uniforms with white piping, and we played at all the school football games.

While I must have sat through an endless series of football games, I can’t remember any of them. I can recall the sensation of freezing our asses off on open bleachers while we waited for half-time, but that’s really all that comes to mind when I think about it.

During Jersey Boys, we must have sat through one or two professional football games. I can’t remember any of them though. I do remember being at a hockey game at Madison Square Garden and an all-star basketball game that might have been there too, but I couldn’t tell you anything more about them than that. We performed at the CBS upfronts at Carnegie Hall one year and as I think I’ve talked about before; I had a nice conversation with two enormous guys offstage while our guys performed their number. It was only later that I found out that I had been chatting with Eli and Peyton Manning, two enormously famous football players. The main topic of our exchange, if I remember correctly, was John Lloyd Young’s teeth. They were very impressed with how white they were.

I did enjoy going to see a few Australian-rules football games down under while we were working in Sydney and Melbourne. As opposed to American football, the Aussie version never stops moving. To be honest, a lot of the game’s appeal for me was watching all those hugely fit guys running around in very short shorts. I rooted blindly for whoever the people around me were rooting for and drank a lot of beer.

Religion and sport are two of the biggest businesses on our planet. As the comedian George Carlin so hilariously pointed out, God is all-seeing and all-knowing, and he always needs money. Because it is considered ill-mannered at best to question anybody’s faith, religious businesses are allowed to operate without paying taxes. As a result, the assets of some churches are truly staggering. Countless opportunists have taken advantage of the lax tax laws and the faith of their congregations to amass a personal dragon’s hoard of riches at the expense of their congregations.

I respect everyone’s right to believe what they want. I might not agree or understand, but it’s ultimately none of my business what anybody else thinks. While I am utterly disdainful of most, not all, just most, religious leaders, I have nothing but admiration for the faithful.

Houses of worship, for me, have an energy in them that resonates. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is about 1500 years old. Over the course of time, it has been a church and a mosque. Its walls feel saturated with the energy of the countless generations of people who have come there looking for answers and guidance. It is impossible not to feel that when you are inside it. Notre Dame in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London for me are the same.

Not every place of worship feels that way, but when I find a place where I can feel even a touch of that sensation, I tend to go back there whenever I can. Here in New York City, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine has that power. Maybe it comes from all the work that they’ve tried to do with the families who live nearby. St. John is unfinished. It may never be finished. When I first moved to the city, Italian stone masons helping with its construction were teaching local kids how to work stone. Given the decades of work stretching ahead, this would have given those kids a lifetime’s vocation. I don’t know what’s happened to them. Work on the Cathedral seems to have been on pause for several years. They probably ran out of cash.

When Notre Dame burnt down, I think it was the release of all that energy that made the world feel the sorrow that it did. So many people complained that more attention was paid to the immolation of an old church than is ever paid to the plight of the poor and downtrodden throughout the planet. It seems to me that the two things are not mutually exclusive. You can mourn the loss of an ancient building and the dreams and prayers it contained, while at the same time feeling compassion for all those in need. There’s no limit to our capacity to care. It doesn’t run out.

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is a remarkable building that somehow also has that energy without yet having a history of people worshiping inside it. Antoni Gaudi designed the strangest cathedral in the world. It is a deeply odd structure and yet it’s utterly captivating. I can certainly look at it intellectually and ask why the Catholic Church felt it needed to build yet another gigantic edifice instead of using all that money to feed and house the poor. A walk through its magical unfinished interior, however, only leaves me with the feeling of desperately wanting to see it completed. It’s so strange and so wondrous, all I can do is marvel at it. It’s been well over a decade since I’ve been there. It’s high time I went back and took Michael.

The temples in Kyoto, the synagogues in Prague, and even the Sydney Opera House in Australia, where people gather in a different kind of communion, are all places that vibrate with the best energy that humankind has to offer. I can feel that and appreciate it without being a believer.

We live our lives within a community of strangers. We make agreements to get along. We make religions to try and help explain our purpose and place in the world. We organize games with opposing teams to channel our competitive energy away from our interactions and into something separate and containable. In some ancient civilizations, attending sporting events was mandatory for all citizens. It’s how the leadership kept the population in line. Their people blew off steam in stadiums rather than out on a battlefield.

Each religion considers itself the only true faith. When people within those faiths start arguing about aspects of their sacred teachings, they end up splintering off from the main group and forming their own. The arguments can become so intense that wars are sometimes started and whole populations end up being massacred by people who somehow feel threatened by what that other group believes.

Fights and riots can also break out over the results of a game. People’s identities become so wrapped up in their beliefs and their teams that anything that questions or challenges them is seen as a threat. There’s a t-shirt you can buy that says, “My imaginary friend is better than yours.” It’s a popular one with atheists and an offensive one to the faithful. Even in writing that down I am possibly going to annoy some people.

It might be time to step back for a minute and take a deep breath.

We aren’t going to survive unless we can start learning how to live together. We are running out of space.

I don’t envy people with faith. I also don’t resent them. I don’t feel a lack in my life without religion. I don’t feel like I’m being left out while everyone is watching today’s Super Bowl any more than I felt left out the other day while everyone was watching the Grammys. I also don’t feel like I am missing out on anything by not going to church. If I did, I’d participate.

All the world’s major religions were created and established by men. Many of them were codified and written down by groups of men long after the prophets who originally inspired them were dead and buried (or transmogrified if that’s what you believe). I might have more faith in religion if I had more faith in men.

My mother-in-law was part of a group of ladies who worked together on projects for their church. They helped each other and supported those in the congregation who needed assistance. They arranged for the snacks after services and then when everyone was done, cleaned everything up. If you needed something, my mother-in-law was always the first person who would volunteer to do it.

My husband and his sisters are much the same as their mom. Somehow, they have managed to avoid the bad parts of their religion’s organization and hold onto the good parts. While they may not go to church every Sunday, they do follow the teachings of the man who started the whole thing. Whether they do it consciously or unconsciously I don’t know. They are good people. That, to me, is the spirit of what church should be and rarely is.

On that level, I understand the concept. From the beginning, however, many in church leadership have found a way to turn that impulse toward their own selfish ends.

I will never forget being in the main Cathedral in Lima, Peru with my mother. We almost had the place to ourselves. Every possible surface was covered in gold leaf. It was ornate to the nth degree. While we were looking around, a woman dressed in the traditional clothes of the mountains with a baby tied onto her back in a colorful blanket came in. She made the impossibly long walk down the center aisle surrounded by all that splendor, her footsteps echoing in the enormous space. She walked to a box set just above her head on a stone column and, on tiptoe, stuffed some money into it, crossed herself, and then left the way she’d come.

Surely her family or her village could have used that money more than her church did. What an amazing sacrifice she made. I’ve never forgiven the church for allowing her to do that. Give unto others, by all means. Give it where it’s needed though.

So many people are using their beliefs as a cudgel these days. They have gotten so fervent in their beliefs that they now seem to be fighting against them. The fundamentalists in our country don’t appear to realize that everything they are doing goes directly against the teachings they claim to have faith in.

They claim to have unshakeable faith in Christ but the man they are all following to the polls is the living antithesis of him. By their own definition, he is the walking personification of the anti-Christ whose arrival they all fear. They don’t seem to see it.

Politics and sport have become one. Somehow, their desire to win the game at all costs has blinded them to what they are fighting for.

It really may be time for all of us to step back for a minute and take a deep breath. Religious beliefs are personal and private. Maybe we should start keeping them that way. It would be nice if some of these mega-churches would start thinking about divesting themselves of their riches and using it to help improve the lots of our people in need. As one of the high priestesses of my own personal church once famously said, “Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow.”

I hope everyone enjoyed the game yesterday. Did Taylor Swift win?