My mother, Ruth (née Maier) Sylwester died on May 12, 2016, at the age of 83. She enjoyed a long, happy life. She gave birth to and raised seven children, all of whom are still alive. She died peacefully, of natural causes.
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| Ruth Sylwester at about the age of 80 |
I am the first of her seven children, born in 1952. The seventh was born in 1961, so she gave birth to seven children in about nine years. She gave birth to three boys in a row, then to one girl, and then to three more boys in a row. (Mike, Steve, Tim, Tricia, Larry, Peter, Andy)
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My Mom and Dad visited my family in New Jersey in 2008.
Here we are in the dressing room of a Manhattan fashion show
where my daughter Luka (on the left) appeared as a model. |
She was an intelligent, attentive, loving, encouraging, tolerant, calm mother. She remained married to Robert Sylwester to the end.
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| Ruth Maier at about the age of 18. |
She grew up as a "PK" -- a "preacher's kid". Her father served as the pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Eugene, Oregon, for about a quarter century. He was the pastor at her marriage ceremony in that church. One of her brothers, Don, became a Lutheran pastor.
While attending high school, she served as the yearbook editor, she was inducted into the National Honor Society, and she was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Oregon.
She dropped out of her first university semester to get married, when she was barely 19 years old. My Dad was 24 years old and was the one-person staff -- teacher, bus driver and janitor -- of a Lutheran elementary school in Vancouver, Washington.
Dad still was working at that school when I was born ten months later. Mom remained home as a housewife for the next two decades.
After her youngest child, Andy, began attending school, Mom resumed her college education and eventually earned two Masters Degrees -- in 1) Library Science.and 2) Secondary Education. Subsequently, she worked as a school librarian and finally as a bookstore owner. She read avidly and filled our home with books and periodicals.
She filled our home also with antiques and art. Our home was decorated beautifully. She well could have become an artist. For a couple years she wove artistic fabrics on a loom.
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A key development in my Mom's intellectual life was her rejection of the Lutheran Church. In about 1970, a couple years after our family moved from Nebraska to Oregon, she stopped attending church services. The church that she stopped attending was the church she had attended as a child, where her father had served as pastor.
My Dad objected to her decision, and they argued about attending church practically every weekend for a couple of years. Sometimes there was yelling, and always there was at least angry tension. He argued for staying and trying to reform the Church. This weekly drama traumatized our family.
My Dad continued to attend church services without her. The children had to attend with him, but they too stopped attending church as soon as they could get away with it.
I myself was rather critical of my Mom's refusal to attend church. I thought that her marriage obligated her to deal with her religious change in a more compromising, gradual manner. Her refusal to attend church embarrassed her family, especially my Dad. In the weekly arguments at home, she often lost her temper and sometimes made anti-male comments, which upset me.
She emphasized her complaint that our Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (LCMS) adhered to a doctrine of forbidding women to serve in positions of authority. More generally, however, she had lost her belief in Christianity.
Gradually this argument between my parents dwindled. Dad continued to attend church, and Mom continued to stay home. All the children went through confirmation (Steve and I already had done so in Seward), and the youngest Andy was confirmed in about 1974. Perhaps that final confirmation marked the end of that family trouble.
After Mom rejected Christianity, she developed a personal religion, which featured reincarnation. She believed she had lived other lives in the past and would live other lives in the future. She believed in a spiritual world and in divine beings. She believed in spiritual mediums and sometimes visited fortune-tellers. Ironically, Mom became much more spiritual than Dad, who was quite a rationalist.
I respect Mom's rebellion from Christianity. My Mom made a difficult intellectual decision and upheld it in the face of disapproval. Her apostasy upset her retired-pastor father and other Lutheran relatives.
I myself have evolved far from Christian doctrine. I attend church only rarely, and then I usually attend a local Roman Catholic church. My religious evolution was not, however, affected significantly by my Mom's rebellion.
Now that my Mom has died and I reminisce about her life, I consider her religious rebellion to be an important turning-point in my perception of her personality. She became significantly more self-assertive, intellectually independent and argumentative.
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After Mom died, I discussed her religious rebellion with my godmother Marion, who grew up with her, almost as a sister. Marion told me that already in adolescence my Mom resented her father's patriarchal attitudes. He had in his home library a book titled
Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers, which criticized uppity females. At some point Mom angrily stole that book from his library and eventually gave it to her daughter Tricia as a relic -- according to Marion.
I do not remember my Mom ever saying anything negative about Christianity while we lived in Seward. I suppose she made some snide remarks about the Lutheran Church's discrimination against women, but any such remarks did not impress me as serious. I did not perceive any portents that she would quit the church angrily a couple years later.
Now as I look back now, though, I think that her religious rebellion began, under the surface, already in Seward. I regret now that I did not question my Mom about this when she still was alive. Now I have to speculate a lot as I write this article.
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We lived in Seward from 1959 to 1968 -- when I was age six to 15.
Our family had a photograph album that had many photographs of our Seward years, but the album has been lost. Until the album is found, I have practically no Seward photographs of our family to put into this blog.
The below photograph was taken at about the beginning of 1958. My Mom had recently turned 25 years old and already had four children. She is wearing a maternity dress for her fifth child, Larry, who was born in February 1958. About a year-and-a-half later, our family moved from Eugene to Seward.
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Family of Robert and Ruth Sylwester in about 1958 in Eugene, Oregon.
(Left to right) Ruth, Tricia, Mike, Steve, Tim, Robert.
(Ruth was obviously pregnant with Larry.) |
During that last year-and-a-half in Eugene, my Dad was studying for his doctorate at the University of Oregon (UO). We lived in a small apartment that the university owned and provided for married graduate students. Baby Larry slept in a dresser drawer.
Until my Dad became a graduate student, he had attended only Lutheran parochial schools for his entire life. He attended Lutheran elementary and high schools in Portland, Oregon, and then attended Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska. Then he taught at a Lutheran elementary school in Vancouver, Washington, for several years before enrolling in the UO doctoral program. When my Dad finished his doctoral work, he became eligible to fill a faculty position at Concordia College in Seward.
So, except for that couple of years as a UO graduate student, my Dad attended and taught at Lutheran schools. Although my Mom had grown up as a Lutheran preacher's kid, she attended only public schools, because Eugene did not have any Lutheran schools. My Mom's first experience with Lutheran schools happened after she married my Dad and became the wife of a a teacher at a Lutheran elementary school.
Since my Dad was the school's only staff member, there were no other staff members' wives who might have socialized as peers with my Mom. I suppose that she was isolated somewhat from the society of Christian education, even though she was married to a Christian educator.
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Concordia College provided housing to its faculty members, but when our family arrived in 1959, there was no house available in Seward that was large enough for our seven-member family. Therefore, our family was assigned to live in a large house that was
located in Middle Creek, several miles outside of Seward. Our house was surrounded by farmland. Our house stood next to a church and a one-room school that served the area's farmers.
We lived in Middle Creek for a year. I loved attending second grade in the one-room school so much that I felt sad to move away to Seward. I described our Middle Creek year in a previous article of this blog.
When we moved into our Middle Creek home, my Mom was 26 years old, the mother of five young children and pregnant with her sixth. (Peter was born in the middle of our year there.)
Our house in Middle Creek was infested with insects, especially
boxelder bugs. I remember the day we moved into the house, when I was horrified by seeing many of them crawling around everywhere.
The house was infested by moths, and we had to put mothballs in all our clothes closets. The house was infested also with mice, so we set mousetraps in the kitchen, and every morning we threw a dead mouse or two into the garbage.
So, Mom suffered a bad start in our Nebraska years. Our Nebraska house was infested. Mom had no nearby Nebraska neighbors in Middle Creek and did not have the free time to travel into Seward to socialize with other Nebraska faculty wives there. Probably Mom's first Nebraska winter was cold, windy and snowy.
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After we had lived for a year in Middle Creek, our family was assigned to our home in Seward, on Faculty Lane. There we were surrounded by other faculty families. Each family had many children who attended the nearby Lutheran elementary school. Mom socialized with the neighboring faculty wives. The children's extracurricular activities -- sports, plays, concerts, field trips, swimming lessons, etc. -- brought the parents together. During the summers, big picnics took place on the campus for all the faculty families.
In our last couple of years in Seward, many of the faculty married couples got together for volleyball games in the gymnasium, and Mom really enjoyed that social activity.
Mom enjoyed many happy times in Seward, but I think she always felt somewhat alienated. Her heart was back in Oregon. She did not want to participate actively in whatever clubs, activities and projects that were available for Concordia's or Seward's women. Her large family always gave her an excuse to avoid participating. She basically was an introvert, and her life in Seward reinforced her introversion. She stayed mostly within her immediate family.
The Seward Concordia experience probably socialized my Mom less than it socialized other faculty wives.
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A hobby that Mom developed and enjoyed in our early Seward years was buying and restoring antique furniture. She bought the furniture mostly at farm-household auctions. Today we would call them "estate sales". The farm parents grew too old to operate the family farm, and the children did not want to take over the farm. The family sold the farm and home and all its stuff. The farm family hired a professional auctioneer to come to the farm and to auction everything away during a Saturday.
Mom began going to these auctions soon after we moved onto Faculty Lane. We now had a big house but little furniture. She began by buying basic furniture -- beds, dressers, tables, chairs. She soon learned how to improve the furniture's quality by stripping off the old paint or varnish, sandpapering the surfaces smooth and then brushing on new paint or varnish. I remember seeing her spend hours restoring furniture pieces for hours on our Faculty Lane driveway. She did this work outside because of the turpentine, sand papering, varnish, paint, etc.
She continued going to these auctions whenever she could. Sometimes another faculty wife would accompany her -- Betty Stelmachowicz became a rare close friend this way -- but Mom would go alone if necessary. Sometimes she traveled rather long distances. My brother Steve went along with her sometimes. I myself went to one auction, where I bought a television set for my bedroom.
The near solitude of these activities -- the traveling to the auctions, the selecting and bidding at the auctions, the restoring of the furniture, and the decorating of the home -- fit well with Mom's introverted personality. When she did these activities, she might be accompanied by one or two other persons or she might do them completely alone. She was happy doing them alone. Mom loved the artistry of these activities too -- making plain things beautiful.
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Dad had much talent in the visual arts. As a child, he had taught himself origami, and he folded beautiful paper decorations for our home every Christmas. As an elementary-school teacher, he had learned many school crafts -- silk-screening, papier-mâché, and so forth. While we lived in Middle Creek, he painted a plain wood hutch as illustrating the song The Twelve Days of Christmas.
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Part of a family portrait. On the left side is a wooden hutch
that my Dad painted while we were living in Middle Creek, Nebraska. |
Eventually Dad focused all his free time on writing and abandoned the visual arts, except for our origami decorations during the Christmas season.
Eventually Mom became our family's visual artist. Her main medium was auction purchases, and her gallery was our home's interior.
By the time we moved away from Seward, our home was full of antiques and art. Soon after we moved back to Eugene, all those antiques and artworks were destroyed in a warehouse fire. My Mom started over and eventually decorated our Eugene home just as beautifully.
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Dad's Concordia office was in Weller Hall's basement, right next to the studios where the art classes were conducted. Dad became close friends with the chief art professor, Reinhold Marxhausen, and then with other art professors such as William Wolfram and Richard Wiegman.
In general, my parents socialized mostly with the the faculty members who were involved in the arts -- the visual arts, theater and music -- rather than, say, theology or history. For the purpose of this article, I will characterize the art-specialty faculty members as rather malcontent. Whenever their church art was criticized by Lutheran philistines, the art professors griped about the criticism. For example, I remember Marxhausen griping about criticism he had heard about some cloth banners he had made to decorate some church services. Also, the visual-art professors received outside income for their artworks and therefore could consider quitting their Concordia positions.
My parents' close social interactions with the art professors influenced my Mom. Their particular discontent about the Lutheran church rubbed off on her, especially since she herself had become active in visual arts.
Especially
Reinhold Marxhausen inspired Mom's interest in the visual arts. He preached that we always are surrounded by beautiful things if we simply learn to recognize them. He preached that we can easily turn ordinary or found objects artistically into decorative objects. He decorated his own home with such objects, and he also gave a lot of public, slide-show lectures, demonstrating his ideas and found-object art.
Mom admired also his wife Dorris's jolly humor and social confidence.
Dorris participated actively in Nebraska state politics. Mom admired Dorris for being a secular activist away from Concordia College.
During the summer of 1964, while our house was being moved from Faculty Lane to North Columbia Avenue, our Sylwester family lived in a dormitory across the street from the Marxhausen home. In this blog, I have written an earlier
article about being summer neighbors of the Marxhausen family. This was a time when Mom got to know the Marxhausen family especially well and was influenced by their rather unconventional (for Concordia) lifestyle.
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Our family subscribed to two newspapers --
The Omaha World-Herald and
The Lincoln Star -- and to a large number of magazines --
Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, Readers Digest and so forth. In our early Seward years, Mom did not have time to read books, but she read newspapers and periodicals -- and all the subscriptions were purchased by her.
She also bought book sets for children. For example, our grocery store sold a multi-volume
Golden Encyclopedia set -- one volume every month. In general, our family had much more reading material coming into our home than other families.
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In a previous
article, I wrote about Mom's parents and her oldest brother Bill serving as missionaries in Africa. Uncle Bill and his family returned from Africa to the USA in 1963 or 1964, while our family still was living on Faculty Lane. Uncle Bill's family stayed with us for about a week and then moved to Oklahoma City. We Sylwesters visited them in Oklahoma City for about a week.
Uncle Bill became very critical of the Lutheran Church while he was working as a medical missionary. As I understand, he felt that his doctor skills were not being used effectively and that his family was not supported adequately. So, when he returned to the USA, he spent much of his energy bad-mouthing the Lutheran Church. Eventually he quit the Church completely.
On one occasion, my godmother Marion visited us in Seward, and she and Mom drove together from Seward down to Oklahoma City to visit Uncle Bill and his family for a few days. On Sunday morning, that family did not go to church, but one of the children was watching a religious program on television. Uncle Bill angrily ordered the child to stop watching the program.
My godmother Marion told me that memory recently. She added that Bill was resentful because his father had forbidden him to attend social dances while he was in high school, because he was a pastor's son.
Anyway, I assume that my Mom was influenced significantly by her brother Bill's criticism of the Lutheran Church, of Christianity, and of missionary work in foreign countries. I think she was proud and interested that her parents served as missionaries, but she came to think that missionary work was generally arrogant and chauvinistic.
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When our family's youngest child Andy began attending school, Mom began attending classes at Concordia College. This happened during our last two years in Seward, when Mom was about 34-36 years old. Mom's auction-buddy and neighbor Betty Stelmachowicz was attending college classes about the same time, Mom and Betty spent a lot of time talking with each other after classes.
One of the first classes that Mom took was an art class, and I think that subject interested her most. She learned how to mix oil-paint colors and to make mosaics. I think she realized early that she did not have the time, patience and discipline to become proficient in illustrative arts. Eventually she came to prefer collages, weaving, stamping and other such non-illustrative arts.
She also took courses in literature, history and sociology. In these courses she began to read books for the first time in about 15 years. I remember that in her literature course she read a William Faulkner novel.
I remember a particular incident involving her history course. She read about how Ivan the Terrible had used the Christian religion to justify a horrendous massacre of Russian aristocrats. She was seriously upset by the religious hypocrisy of that historical event.
I think that Mom did not take any Concordia classes about Christianity -- about theology, church history or any other religious focus. Instead, she seemed eager to study secular subjects.
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Mom read Betty Friedan's book
The Feminist Mystique while we lived in Seward. The book was published in 1963, but I think Mom read it a few years later.
The book proclaimed that many women found themselves feeling intellectually stunted in mid-life, after marrying young and then spending many years working only as housewives. Mom recognized herself as just such a woman.
The book inspired Mom to resume her education and to begin a career outside her home. The book caused Mom to much more critically re-examine her own life and the conventions that had influenced her younger decisions. In her own case, her decisions had been influenced strongly by the Lutheran Church.
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The years 1967 and 1968 were socially volatile throughout the USA. People were re-thinking and challenging many social conventions -- in politics, racial relations, music, art, fashions and so forth.
During those two years, when Mom was attending Concordia College classes, a major controversy about doctrine was developing in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. I wrote about this in a previous
article. The culmination of his controversy during those years was part of the overall social ferment. Some Lutherans were challenging the conventions, and some Lutherans were pushing back against those challenges.
I don't remember my Mom saying anything about this controversy, but I am sure that she sympathized reflexively with all the Lutheran teachers who were being attacked as heretics.
I don't remember Mom expressing any opinions about that controversy while we lived in Seward -- except to make some snide remarks about the Lutheran Church's discrimination against women. Mom did not express any criticisms of other Lutheran doctrines. In retrospect, I think that she did have strong opinions but that she refrained from voicing them in the presence of us children while we lived in Seward. She herself was losing her faith, but she did not want to cause us children to lose our faiths. (She never tried to turn any of her children against Christianity or whatever religious or philosophical beliefs they maintained. She thought each person should decide such beliefs for himself.)
While we lived in Seward, I never had any idea that Mom would quit the Church. Only after -- long after -- she did quit the Church have I considered that her loss of faith probably began already in Seward.
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During our last two years in Seward, I attended Concordia High School. Although our family received a faculty discount, attending this parochial school cost money. Paying for a series of seven children to attend Concordia High School and then to attend Lutheran colleges would have been financially ruinous for our family.
My brother Steve remembers overhearing a conversation between my parents in Seward. Mom suggested to Dad that all we children should attend Seward's public high school instead of Concordia High School.
When Dad received an offer to become a professor at the University of Oregon, Mom was eager to move away from Seward Concordia as soon as possible. This was a big step up in Dad's academic career, and he would be earning much better money and benefits. Mom's parents and most of her siblings were living in Oregon. She looked forward to making a new beginning in her life.
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Mom enjoyed many happy times in Nebraska. Although she was socially isolated, her solitude facilitated her artistic development. She did have a few good friends among the faculty families, and some of them influenced her well. When she returned to college in her mid-30s, Concordia College was a relatively comfortable place for her to begin. Seward was a place where a major intellectual development in her life began.
Most of all, she wanted to be a good wife and mother, and Seward was a good place to do so. The town was safe, and she let us kids roam around freely, as long as we showed up on time for dinner.
Providing a Christian education to her children was important to her during most -- perhaps all -- of the period when our family lived in Seward. If she indeed did begin to leave Christianity there, that happened only during the last couple years of the eleven years that we lived there.
The attending-church battle between my parents was waged openly for only a couple of years -- during about 1970-1972. Perhaps during that period Mom made some angry statements about Seward Concordia. I really don't remember that she did, but she did make a lot of angry statements during the weekly arguments.
After those battles ended, more than four decades passed. Mom did not bad-mouth Seward or Concordia College, at least that I ever heard about. On the contrary, she discussed that period of our lives positively. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, Mom was an intelligent and calm person. She looked back on that period with a correct perspective, which included an appreciation of that environment's many good qualities, which fostered her family's development and her own personal development.
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My Dad's response:
My perspectives of Mom differ slightly from yours on occasion Mike, but this is your perspective, not mine.
For what it's worth, though, Mom's background led her to believe that movies and social dancing were wrong, so I got her to go to movies and to learn how to dance and that it was fine for us to go out to dinner and have a life independent of our family. She subsequently embraced all of these eagerly and found them to be yet another great joy in her life -- going to Salishan, to Ashland, to the theater, traveling to conferences with me, etc.
Relative to religious differences. We actually agreed far more than we disagreed. I thought that the LCMS had been on its way towards a positive theological moderation but got sidetracked by a rabid right -- but that it had values worth preserving. Mom's religious background had been more rigid than mine, so she disagreed. It had nothing worth saving. We had always considered our perspectives as more of an intellectual interaction, and in the end, both of us gave each other the right to our own opinion (something we had also given to each of our children).
Mom was her own self -- private, quiet, and unassuming for the most path. I think she saw me as more gregarious and outgoing. A good balance. We each gave each other a different perspective of life., and that provided the balance and a good marriage and parenting needs.
Two errors, Mike:
1. Mom read Betty Fiedan's The Feminine Mystique during our Seward years. It was a genuinely important book in her life. [This passage in the above article is now fixed.]
2. Mom returned to school librarianship after owning her bookstore for four years. During those final years in her professional career she moved from school to school to reorient libraries -- when teachers went on sabbaticals and things like that -- into beautiful new facilities.
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My sister Tricia's response:
I was heavily influenced by Mom's decision to leave the church, and I am thankful for that. Mom was a great role model for me.
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My brother Andy's response:
I was struck by two passages:
I myself was rather critical of my Mom's refusal to attend church. I thought that her marriage obligated her to deal with her religious change in a more compromising, gradual manner. Her refusal to attend church embarrassed her family, especially my Dad. In the weekly arguments at home, she often lost her temper and sometimes made anti-male comments, which upset me.
…I myself have evolved far from Christian doctrine. I attend church only rarely, and then I usually attend a local Roman Catholic church. My religious evolution was not, however, affected significantly by my Mom's rebellion.
Everyone who lived in that house was affected by this dispute. I don’t recall us ever talking about how it affected us, beyond the fact that it gave us each an argument to stop going to church. But I was taken aback a bit by Mike’s reminisce, because it is so polar opposite from mine.
First, I never felt embarrassed by Mom’s decision, nor was I ever critical. I felt embarrassed by having to walk down the center aisle when we arrived late, because it felt ‘showy’. This could all be explained by my age. Mike’s reactions could partly be due to his position in the family, and him being in high school.
My reaction to Mom’s complaints, about dominating men in particular, was to wonder what the hell was wrong with men. I paid attention to her, took her as a credible voice, and I reflexively took her side, perhaps because I was youngest, but it has been my impulse through life to favor the underdog. Mom’s complaints have always been with me, and I tried hard to understand what she was so angry about. I was a boy, and became a man, and was acutely aware that I was in the camp that angered her. But I understood it wasn’t everyone that made her mad, it was a certain kind of man. The type of man that demeaned and dismissed her. At many points in my life I’ve sworn to myself I wasn’t going to treat others like some have treated me, or other people I’ve seen mistreated.
As for my religious evolution, not once have I ever been a blind faither. I remember doing my paper route and wondering how God could send babies to Hell, or stupid people who just didn’t know what they were doing, to Hell. I remember when I first started dating Mary, and learned the importance of spirituality to her, that I was missing something, and felt I was ‘broken’ somehow. My thoughts about religion have meandered so far I can’t talk about the topic without nuance. I have come to a place I never could have imagined, where I know that Science can’t answer everything, and that there are aspects of our lives we can never know or understand, and must simply give in to our subconscious.
I don’t believe in any kind of ‘god’, but I recognize a real value to religion, in that it’s a way to commune with others and to connect with a part of ourselves that is an eternal mystery. I don’t resent any of my religious instruction; rather, I feel it gave me a base, a structure that helps me understand our culture, and allowed me to veer off into my own exploration.
There’s not a yes or no, right or wrong to how these things affected us. It’s just interesting to me that they’re so different.
