God, Help Me

Despite my repeated pleas to stop sending me Jesus e-mail, my mother has once again sent me a link to a religious site to help me deal with my tension about the MCAT.

This atheist thing just isn't working out for me. Apparently, nobody buys it. It's kind of like the Rodney Dangerfield of religion -- it gets no respect.

The thing with my mother is that this religious zeal is fairly new. For years, she poked fun of the Catholic church and refused to go. This after trying to make me go every week until I was in college, when I politely told the Catholic church where to stick it. She used to claim she was an educated and liberal woman, and the church was antiwoman and oppressive. So, she stopped going. (I stopped going because it bored me to tears. Church is not fun when you have ADD. There are only so many red hats and blue shirts you can count before that game gets old.)

Now, all of a sudden, she's found religion again.

It makes me a litte nervous. Not that being around Jesus fans is nervewracking (annoying and tedious, but not nervewracking), but because Catholics have a tendency to believe in miracles, visions, the devil and horrible lawn ornaments.

My mother told me a story about how as a child, she was afraid to open her closet door because she thought the Virgin Mary was going to appear -- like in the film "The Song of Bernadette." She wasn't so much worried about seeing an actual apparition so much as she was worried people were going to start lining up outside her bedroom, which would have been quite inconvenient for her.

For years I made fun of the neighbors who lived across the street from my parents -- they had a "Mary on the halfshell" in their yard, which I always thought was quite tacky. Now my dad has St. Francis statues adorning his Japanese gardens (That could just be an Italian thing...).

My Italian grandmother has always had what essentially is an altar in her bedroom. Statues of Jesus and Mary, mass cards, rosary beads, holy water, etc. Now my parents have little religious icons around their house and keep trying to foist them on me.

"Here, take this medal and wear it. It will keep you safe."

Why? Is it bullet proof?

I'm getting really nervous that there is a God, and he's got a sick sense of humor -- like, he made religious fervor a dormant but dominant genetic trait.

Posted by LA at April 22, 2003 11:50 AM | TrackBack