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By Root 440 0

am above knee-jerk crankiness. When a stranger on a bus asked if I was a Christian, I shot back perhaps a little too sharply, asking if he would treat me differently depending on my answer, and I could see immediately he hadn’t meant it that way. Because I grew up worshipping in a manner that could be described as unplugged and acoustic, I sometimes wax a tad irascible about churches that serve lattes and happy music. Church should not be easy, I said once while giving a talk, church should be hard. After which a woman mailed me an envelope containing full-color photographs of Asian children whose tongues had been ripped out after they professed Christianity. You see, the lady wrote, church is hard. Clearly we were talking past each other by the width of several zip codes. I get most crotchety when someone proselytizes me with an aura of patient indulgence, as if I am a fuzzy-headed wandering lamb who scampered off to the devil’s clover patch one day and never looked back. Just because you drop the dogma doesn’t mean you don’t dread the price of transgression. Mine is a chastened apostasy—I don’t claim to have the answers, and although I stand outside the church of my parents, I still peek through the windows for guidance.

I wasn’t surprised when Amy asked me about God. All children get around to it. It was actually a couple of years ago, and her voice came out of the darkness behind me in the van. I was stumbling through a wish-wash mumble when she granted me reprieve by interrupting with another question: “Why did the men kill Jesus?” That one is easier, because I may be a silly wandering lamb, but the story of Jesus, that one is written on my heart, every word. So I talked about Jesus. About how he lived, what he taught, and how he died. And then she asked if she could have a horse, and I was given time to regroup. But I realized the future had arrived, and there would be no opt-out. You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness. As eternally dangerous as it might be to end up a bumbling agnostic, it may be even more dangerous to begin there. The greatest gift my parents ever gave me was a firm foundation.

Lately we have begun going to church.

We have not made any final decision. For a while we attended services at the local Unitarian Universalist church. Then we went to several Quaker services. Currently we are attending Mennonite services held in a Jewish temple. We have felt warmly welcomed in all three settings, but neither Anneliese nor I have been able to settle. I bring with me my prejudice against anything more organized than a camp meeting, whereas Anneliese—with her background in Lutheranism, Catholicism, and shamanism—finds herself longing for more ceremony. None of this is made easier by the fact that we have friends and acquaintances in all three congregations, and there is the usual polite desire to keep everyone happy.

A couple of times already when I have been behind on some deadline or another, I have stayed home while Anneliese and the girls go to church, and this shames me. When I was a child, Sunday was a day of rest. The Ten Commandments, you know. No matter how far behind he might have been, no matter how much hay was down with rain threatening, Dad saw to only those chores required for the comfort of the animals, went to church, and took the rest of the day off. One year when incessant rain was blackening the mown hay in the fields a rare sunny Sunday dawned, and Elder John took counsel after the morning meeting to see if he could justify baling hay that afternoon. With forage desperately short and more rain coming, it would have been wasteful to let it lie, and so they baled, but I remember thinking it was a momentous decision. Issues of God and faith aside, I am thinking my little girls should come to see Sunday as a day apart. As a day to set all worldly business aside and abide in ceremony. I will never cut it as a Quaker—I cannot find it in me to renounce all violence, not with two daughters under my protection—but I do love their silent hour, which in my case invariably