Thesis Explorations: the Family Religion

For a while in high school I was annoying my father asking to let me go back to church with my cousin. I felt a spiritual lacking. Finally he decided that we would have a family service on the porch every sunday. It began with him sitting us down on the couches in our livingroom and explaining why my brothers had to wake up so early on a sunday morning: me, the one sister. He went around and asked us each what we knew/remembered about church and christianity. He then read aloud the first commandment from his Bible and asked us what we thought it meant. This continued for a couple months. We gradually graduated to sitting around the bar on the porch once it became warmer. We would read one of the commandments or from Jesus’s Sermon on a Hill in the book of Matthew and have a two-hour discussion on what we thought it meant. I think this was my first actual introduction to having an analytical discussion. My Dad says that he can’t believe the different angles we brought to the surface. He had studied the bible all of his life, he lives by it to many extents, but his five young children had caused him to see it differently. Success. My Mother, on the other hand, is a newfound pagan. She is exploring the world of the goddess and feminine energy in order to bring balance back into her life. Her and I discuss this balancing of energy often along with the goddess and the moon and in that way we have come to better understand ourselves as women and each other.
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'Sunday Service' wasn’t the only thing we have practiced on that porch with Dad. I have had some of the best moments with him sitting there, looking at that view. Everything from drinking coffee and sharing a cigarette while discussing my future to dancing, laughing, and drinking our asses off to mourning over a divorce, a dog, a grandfather. That is my family’s religion. We are the people of the porch and we come together to find joy, company, solace, and mourning.

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