by
My father was raised among working-class Irish Catholics, my mother in a tight-knit community of Eastern European Jews. Both communities were insular--my father once told me that, until he met my mother, the idea that Jesus Christ might not be the son of God, had never crossed his mind.
My parents were married by a priest and a rabbi, and soon left their small town behind. But neither was ready to part with their religion.
So I was baptized Lauren Michelle and given the Hebrew name Leah. My father dressed my sister and I in pastel dresses and little white gloves, and made us endure an hour of mass every Sunday. It was a soulless church built on the cheap in the 1950s. My mother dragged us to high-holiday services in the dank basement of the Jewish Community Center.
Religion was a source of tension in our house. My father joined a country club that didn't accept Jews as members, so my mother always felt like an outsider there. I did too. At synagogue, we were the only ones who couldn't read Hebrew, and I mumbled along during prayers. My mother shared everything with her mother, but when it was time for my first holy communion, she asked me to keep it a secret from my Jewish grandmother.
That was it. I'd had enough. Religion, I thought as an eight year old, was something deceitful, something that made other people angry, and made me feel divided. If there was a God, that couldn't be what he wanted. Confused by conflicting visions of God, I concluded that there probably wasn't one.
Even so, my father continued dragging me and my sister to church. After I received communion, I'd keep the wafer under my tongue until mass was over, then spit it out in the parking lot. I couldn't stomach the idea of eating the body of Christ.
By the time my little brother was born, our parents had pretty much given up on forcing religion on us. I think he was baptized, but I don't remember ever going to church with him, except occasionally on Easter or Christmas when we were all still little kids. Eventually, even that stopped.
I lived in Greece for a few years, as an adult. I once visited the island of Rhodes. On the night before Easter, people from all over the island gather at the port, carrying unlit candles. A flame arrives from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the light is passed from candle to candle, person to person. When it was my turn to pass the flame, I felt connected to people all over the island, and even in other parts of the world, but I didn't feel connected to God.
A few days later, I visited the island's only synagogue, an old stone building draped in ropes of magenta bougainvillea. The synagogue's roof was damaged during WWII, and was never repaired, so the sun pours in though the cracks. There are only 35 Jews left on the island. There used to be 4000. Some were killed during the war, others fled for their lives.
There were just a handful of people inside. There were old, and looked sad to me.
When the service began, the words they spoke were deeply familiar to me. They were the same prayers that I had mumbled as a child. Much to my surprise, I began to cry. For the people who were missing from this synagogue. For the void in my own life that I was feeling for the first time. I longed for a connection to something greater than myself.
I still don't believe in God, but that day, in that small, imperfect synagogue in Greece, I understood what my parents where trying to give me with religion. A connection to the past, a community, and a reverence for the sacred.