Interview by Mike Madrid
If I don’t go to church it doesn’t mean I don’t still love God. And believe in God. But I temper that belief with a little sanity. I still believe, but the Church is institutionalized religion.
I’ve always lived in California except for a short three years in Virginia with my first husband. Got married, got divorced, got married again. Been married for 22 years.
I was raised by a fiercely liberal mother and a fair and decent father. I think that most of my opinions on how to act and respect other people were formed by my parents. Only child of my father. My mother has another daughter that’s older than I am. I’ve lost both my parents.
My earliest ideas about religion were formed by my mother, the devout Catholic. The Church was unshakeable back in the 60’s. Parents were told that when they were marrying out of their faith, you actually had to sign a paper where you will bring the children up Catholic. Both partners have to sign it, the mother and the father. My mother was raised Catholic, and she saw it as right to pass it down to me. My father was Greek Orthodox. While he didn’t participate in any active religion, my father backed my mother up in her morals and ideals of how a child should understand the religious content of their life. My father didn’t participate, he just said, “Do what your mother said.”
My mother was very religious. She believed in God, Jesus, the Blessed Mother, resurrection, the body of Christ, all the saints. hell, purgatory. Everything. And it was a very unshakeable belief. It was really my mother who formed that opinion of God—a benevolent old man with a white beard, and the lambs and the lions and everything else. The dogma of the Catholic Church encompasses charity, honesty, and compassion. That’s what my mother was trying to pass on. I think she was trying to let me know, “You can make you own choices as you get older, but right now I’m telling you that you’re going to do this.”
I was raised in the Catholic Church—baptized, First Holy communion and Confirmation. I went to catechism at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The little white dresses, and all the classes. This was back in the 60’s— you had the benevolent God, the wonderful God. And then you had the God that was going to send you to hell if you were bad. They start confronting you with bloody pictures of Jesus and the crown of thorns. You have questions. Why would people be so cruel to one another? Why would they take a seer or prophet and do this to him? And those were the questions that I mostly had. It wasn’t about my belief; it was why did they do this to him? And my mother didn’t have the answers. She just said it was done.
In order to keep yourself and your parents happy, you’re going to do whatever they say. Because you’re a child. It’s not like my cousin’s boy. He’s Jewish, and he’s supposed to make his bar mitzvah. And he said, “No, I don’t want to.” I made my Holy Communion when I was seven or eight. If I had said “no” to my mother, it would have been the battle royal. There’s no way I wasn’t going to honor her teachings by not going through with communion. That’s what she instilled in me. “Anything you do reflects on your father and I. Don’t ever make your father and I ashamed of you by acting the way we wouldn’t want you to. We want you to be a respected member of the community, and fit in.” So that was the glue that meshed that all together.
Dad used to say, “Nobody ever told you life is fair.” So that means, whether you want to or not, life is going to go on. Do you want to live your life, or do you want to be a bystander. My mother was never a bystander, and neither was my dad. And so, I get inspiration from them. They went through hard times when they were younger, and they made it. My mother and father saw that the world was a really ugly place. They were both children of the Depression, both very poor. No food, no clothes. Dad used to say that he had shoes with holes in the bottom. My mom was living in Colorado, in a house with a dirt floor. They didn’t have a lot growing up, and as they got older, they just liked to help people. And I think that’s what the crux of spirituality is. Helping others, being kind to others.
When my mother got herself established, she was able to help others. She took care of my grandmother until she died, took care of my grandpa until he died. My mother took care of her sisters until she died. Took care of me, took care of Daddy. And my half sister and her kids. She would bring people in who were hungry, or give them a place to stay or find them work. And Dad was the same way. He was the vice president of the Teamsters. My dad took a chance on a lot of people. Gave them work, found them a job. They knew you couldn’t get through this life concentrating on yourself. If you don’t have compassion for your fellow man, you’re not going to go anywhere. If you can’t help someone out of the kindness of your heart, don’t do it.
I never disappointed my parents. Being an only child, I wanted to please them above all else. Their upbringing was, “you’re going to act like a lady or I’m going to beat it into ya.” I never got pregnant. I never went to jail, never had the cops phone home and say, “We’ve got your daughter.” Because #1, my parents would have been furious, and #2, and more importantly, they would have been disappointed in me. When your parents have that look that says, “I’m so disappointed in you…” Makes your heart want to break.
Having a very strict Greek father, it was his way or the highway. Dad would have to meet every guy at the door to check him out, because they wanted to make sure I wasn’t running around with the kind of crowd that would drink or smoke pot. He put me up on a pedestal. I loved him more than life, and I would never do anything to disappoint him.
The moral compass was my mother. Being an only daughter made the moral compass a little on the strict side. “Don’t ever let me see you kiss a boy in public, you’ll look like a slut. You’re not going out wearing that, you look like a whore. Take that makeup off.” She remembered her younger days. My mother got married when she was eighteen the first time, to my sister’s father. I never asked her if they had premarital sex or anything, but obviously she was pregnant before they got married. She knew what the haps were with a sixteen year old, good-looking daughter. When I started going out, dad would say, “Be home at midnight.” I’d come home at 4[AM] and my mother would tell my dad I got home at midnight.
I didn’t start dating until M____[her future first husband]. He was my first real boyfriend. At that time, being seventeen, you still have the Church fundamental in the front of your brain. But what is going on around you is absolutely contrary to what is going on in the church. We were in high school in the 70’s. There was a lot of drugs, parties, booze, and a lot of promiscuous sexual activity. When you see your friends partying or having sex with someone…you want that. But at the same time you hang back. Because “what will my parents think?”
I think Catholic mothers understand more than most the problem of using contraception and unplanned pregnancy. That’s something they don’t want to see happen to their daughter. To get, as they used to say, “trapped in a marriage” because you got pregnant. That’s why my mother was fiercely pro-choice. When I was a teenager, my mother told me, “The one thing I don’t want you to do is to get pregnant.” She just came right out and said it. And you’re sixteen and you’re looking at your mother thinking, “God, how does she know what’s going on?” The Catholic Church does not allow birth control. I went down to Planned Parenthood and got on the Pill, knowing it was a sin. But also wanting to please my mother by not getting pregnant. I’d seen what it had done to my sister having three kids, bam, bam, bam. At that point you say, “Well, if this is against what the Church wants, but it’s best for me, I have to go with what’s best for me.”
I knew, turning sixteen, seventeen, that what I was doing probably wasn’t kosher with the Church—the birth control and the premarital sex and everything. But I didn’t care. This is what everybody else was doing; I was going to do it too. Everybody wants to be popular. My best friend was having premarital sex. She’s the one who took me to Planned Parenthood. She said,
“Come with me, I’m going to make you an appointment.” And she was a good Catholic too.
My mother was very pro-choice. And I knew that from a very young age. We never talked about it because, again, abortion is a sin. But she always taught me, “It’s your body, you do what’s best for you. Because the Church isn’t ‘God’. The Church is ‘man’. When you leave this earth you only have to answer to one person, and that’s God.” So that’s when the door kind of opened. I’d think, “Boy, if my mother thinks like this, maybe we’re not too far away from each other belief-wise.” When I was going to marry M___, my mother said, “Why don’t you just live with him?” I almost fell through the floor. Living in sin with my boyfriend? My mother, the good Catholic! She diverged from the Church all the time. There were a lot of things my mother didn’t like about the Church. While being fiercely religious, she still held her own opinions. She always told me, “I go to church to pray to God. I don’t go to pray to the man that’s up in the front.”
I stopped going to church in ’83 when I got married the first time. My faith changed a lot after the first marriage fell apart. It was bad. That’s a time when you turn to God and you say, “Why me? Why are you doing this to me? Have I not served you? Have I not loved you?” And God doesn’t answer you, and you have to figure it out on your own. I finally figured out, “You know what, if I’m not going to get an answer from God, I better do something about it myself. Because I’m not going to wait anymore. I can’t stay in this marriage anymore.”
My relationship with the Church changed after my divorce. When you’re divorced in the Catholic Church, you’re excommunicated. If you don’t get an annulment that’s sanctioned by the Church, you’re supposed to not be able to take communion. You know what my mother said? “Take communion anyway. Nobody knows. Don’t worry about the Church.” Because she couldn’t bear to think of her daughter as not taking the host. Again, my mother trumps God. I should say not God, but the teachings of the Church. Because that’s a Church rule, not a God rule. People got divorced in Biblical times.
A lot of Catholic kids like me, born in the 60’s, have questioned religion so much that the questions overtake the belief in God. How can there really be someone who knows everything? How can there really be someone who answers prayers? How can there really be someone who’s watching you all the time? As you get older, I think it diminishes your belief in God, bit by bit by bit. Maybe not your belief, but what the Church said that you had to do in order to worship God their way. God doesn’t care if you go to church. God doesn’t care if you’re in a church, in your bedroom, sitting in a chair, on the toilet. Wherever. He cares if you believe in him. I think you don’t have to be in a church to know and love God. You don’t need Bibles or books or scholars. You can do that by yourself. If you believe, you believe. And if you don’t, you don’t. You shouldn’t have to justify your beliefs to people.
I can quote you chapter and verse from the Bible. I read it. [She regularly posts inspirational Bible quotes on her Facebook page] The Bible is an oral history of the time of Jesus. But how accurate is it? Is it like Grimm’s Fairy Tales? Is it like the Superman comics? Everybody knows they’re written by a man, and they have morals at the end. What’s the difference in the Bible? It’s still stories with a moral at the end. What are you telling me? That I should follow this dogma, even though it could be a fairy story? You have to use your critical thinking skills in real life. You can read the Bible, but it’s how you act towards your fellow man. I think that’s mostly what the Bible centers on. It teaches you to be compassionate. It teaches you to not look at the differences between us, but to try and build those bridges so that we can really be together.
My dad said, “You must always be fair to people.” The two rules in our house—be kind, and treat others the way you’d want to be treated. And to me, that’s what God wants. And you can’t look at skin color or sexuality or anything like that. At all. I have friends of all genders and sexual preferences and religions and ethnic backgrounds. The only way you’re ever going to learn more about people is to not judge them, and listen.
You know how I feel about religion and politics—they should never cross. After I married my second husband, we started going to church with my mom. But you get in there, and they are preaching politics from the pulpit. The abortion issue. The Proposition 8 thing [banning gay marriage]. They were getting up in church and saying, “Vote for it in defense of marriage!” And I thought, “Hey, I come here to worship. I don’t come here to be swayed to change my opinion.” It’s unfair, and it’s not “Christ-like.” It has nothing to do with treating others as you would wish to be treated. It’s about singling out a single group of people based on one thing, and saying, “You’re less human than we are. You don’t deserve to have the same rights as we do.” It’s the same as black people had in the 60’s, when they had to eat at separate counters and drink from separate fountains. Separate but un-equal. And I think that’s exactly what the Church is doing now. They’re promoting separate but un-equal. It’s not fair! Why shouldn’t somebody be with the person they love? Does it matter if it’s two men, two women, a sheep and a woman? People deserve to be happy. It really turned my mind against the Church.
If all people are created the same, why are you ostracizing and being hateful to a certain group of people? That’s not what God wanted. Yes, it says in the Bible whatever it says, but the Bible was written by man. How do you know how God feels? God doesn’t tell you. You have to think and decide, and judge and make your own way. Have you ever actually met a person who has a same sex partner? Or has a different lifestyle from you? It’s all about ostracism. You’re different than me. I don’t want you anywhere near me because your cooties might get on me.
When you start preaching politics from the pulpit, I stop listening. Which is exactly why I’m not going to church anymore. People should be able to love whoever they want to. Women should be able to make the choice whether or not they want to have a baby, and to use contraception without guilt. And the Catholic Church does not believe in any of that. I just don’t think there’s any “God” in church. I think it’s men dictating what they want other people to do. It’s not about God anymore. It’s about politics. And it’s about money. Western religion is a big show. They dress up in their best clothes, they wear mink coats, Prada, Gucci. It has nothing to do with God; it has to do with showing off in front of other people. That’s not worship, that’s a fashion show. I don’t want to have to one-up somebody to be able to go to church. I want to go in my jeans and my t-shirt and say, “God, here I am, as I am.”
I don’t think the Blessed Mother gets enough credit. That’s why I pray to her. Again, I do everything the opposite. And since it’s such a patriarchal church in Catholicism, I prefer to pray to the Blessed Mother. Why is she any less than the men? Why is she #4 after the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? She did just as much to build this Church as the men did. So she got stuck with the crappy job. It doesn’t mean it was any less…necessary.
I think every Catholic has that division of “Little Bitty Favors” down at the bottom, “Medium Size Favors”, and “Really Big Favors” if it’s really bad. For me it goes—Jesus, Blessed Mother, God. So Jesus is the first one I ask. If I don’t get what I want, I’ll hop it up a notch to management, then I’ll take it to the CEO.
Jesus, since he was just performing miracles right and left and healing lepers and everything—that’s for little things. “I hope I do good on this test. Let me get something I want for Christmas.” Little things.
If it’s really bad, I pray to the Blessed Mother. The deacon at our church always said, “If you can’t get what you want from Jesus, go over his head to his mother.” She understands a lot more than the men do. Because she’s a mother, she understands what children go through. Her child died. Ok, the medical procedure today—that was the Blessed Mother. [She had undergone some medical tests earlier that day.] Last night I was up late, praying to the Blessed Mother. I just kept saying the same thing. “Just let me get through this.” And wishing that my mother and father were here. But they’re not here, and I can’t change it.
God is only for really big things. [Laughs] You don’t want to ask God for piddlin’ shit. You better make sure it’s something you really need. Because you call on God too much, and he’s just going to say, “What?! Every time something goes wrong, you’re calling me! Can’t you figure it out?! Can’t you take what you’ve learned and use it? Are you a dummy? ” Something like a death is God: direct line. God is for when my mother died. God is for when my father died. God is for when [my best friend] died. “Get me through this!” Why piddle around? If it’s a bad thing, and you really need help, that’s when you ask God.
You know how hard I took my mom and dad’s deaths. And I would just pray every day, “Just let me get through this.” And here I’m eight years later for my mother. I’m through it. And I’m three years later from my dad. And I’m still working on it. But I made it. And it is because I asked God—actually the Blessed Mother—to give me strength. “And Jesus, can you just shoulder this burden for a minute?” Do you know the poem about footprints? We read that at [my best friend’s] funeral. That is always one of the things that comes to mind when I’m under stress. Because “when it was only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.” And that gives me a lot of comfort. To know that, if you believe, that somebody that will shoulder that burden, or take some of that stress. Or let you make it through the bumpy plane ride or medical procedure. Or through your mother or father dying, or your best friend dying in a car accident. To me there is something out there that might be unseen, unheard, unable to be noticed by any of your five senses. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I think it comforts people to know they’re not in it alone. That in this vast world, if you ask for help, that there’s a great unknown person that says, “I’m here.” So you feel less alone. And if it turns out I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
Death is not a pretty thing in any culture, but shouldn’t you be happy that the person went, and they’re not suffering anymore? My father suffered. And while I didn’t want him to go, I was glad he went. My mother, the same way. You cannot sit there and watch someone deteriorate day after day after day and say, “God, why are you doing this to me? Why are you allowing my mother to suffer? The person I love most in this world.” And God doesn’t answer you. You have to figure it out for yourself. There’s no little voice in your head or a burning bush or anything like that. God is not going to give you the answer. Ever. Because he doesn’t.
I know I’ve always been afraid of death, But watching my parents go changed that. I feel very strongly that my mother and father have gone on to…something better. No pain, no cancer, no Alzheimer’s. And to not think that there was more than this, I think is selfish. I spent eight years mourning my mother. And she would be very angry with me. She would say, “If you don’t believe that I rose, why did I even waste my time teaching you?” Whether you believe in heaven, nirvana…there is something more than this. And I would like to think that the people who go ahead of us are experiencing that. But not only experiencing it, but their love still is there. The love doesn’t die.
I look forward to what’s going to happen next when my life is done. This is our earthly vessel. But when you die, you leave the earthly vessel here and your soul goes. And that’s just a little speck of light. It’s not you. The mind is a beautiful thing, and it has no parameters. Everything you’ve known, every person you’ve known, every thought you’ve had—you don’t know if that continues on with you. Or whether that goes like the Etch-A-Sketch, and you have a clean slate. Nobody’s been there. We don’t know.
I think innately we are human. And no matter what people say about God or karma, whatever they believe in. Compassion and empathy—I don’t think are so much God. It’s human. It’s the human condition that does that. And God might have a little bit to do with it, but I think it’s more us. As human beings, as people, as living, breathing, thinking…things. And you can use your religious beliefs and the morals that your parents gave you. But you have to understand that we’re just human. We’re not divine. It’s human to make mistakes, and it’s human to learn from your mistakes. Follow the path you’re given, but follow it well. Make decisions that are positive. Do things that are positive. Don’t be a drain, be a fountain. So, don’t suck…blow. [Laughs] You know what I mean!