This past weekend, while many of my friends switched over to kosher dietary restrictions or caught the train to New York for Passover Seder, I packed my brother and a backpack into my car for a drive to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our parents were simultaneously driving over from Vermont to meet us there. The plan was to surprise our grandmother by showing up uninvited to her Cambridge apartment, cooking her brunch, and taking her to the Easter Sunday service at Harvard Memorial Church.
My grandmother is a German immigrant who, while having now spent more than half of her life in the United States, still speaks English with a dazzling German accent. She can’t pronounce the word “squirrel” to save her life, refuses to touch non-European cuisine, is eternally unsatisfied with both crop-tops and room temperature, and has a unique ability to pull my entire family towards the liquor cabinet. She also raised my mother alone in an unfamiliar country and has faced more hardship than nearly anyone else I know.
Last Sunday in Cambridge, I spent a good two hours moving my grandmother out of her apartment, into the car, out of the car, across Harvard Yard, up the entryway steps, and finally into a church pew not too close and not too far away from the altar, per her preferences. Together with my parents and brother, we went through the whole operation: sitting for the Easter story, standing for the “sharing of the peace,” sitting again for a sermon, and standing again to pretend to know some hymn lyrics. It was the first time I had been inside a church since Christmas, and, as always, it left me feeling some type of way.
I would never say I was raised in a devoutly religious household, but there were undeniable elements of Christianity sprinkled throughout my childhood. Up until I was 11 or 12, I attended services every Sunday. We used to hold hands and sing “In the Breaking of the Bread” around the dinner table. I can recite the Lord’s Prayer by heart. My grandfather—my father’s father, unrelated to my German grandmother—was a minister. He raised his children on leftover casseroles from church potlucks. Some of my own earliest memories are my father in his yellow choir robes, a sea of congregation knees at my eye-level, and a swing set in the shadow of a steeple.
In all that time, the whole “belief” part never really occurred to me. Church was just what we did: a tradition and a routine, but never a requirement—never all that important. My position on God was similar to my position on Santa Claus: somewhere between excited and ambivalent. I wasn’t skeptical because I didn’t know skepticism was an option, but I don’t think I quite accepted the factual truth of the thing either. Until I was older, I didn’t give it much thought either way.
That changed on a long car ride with my mother around Easter several years ago. We were going home together from Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, and I was young enough that it still felt new to be sitting beside her in the front seat, rather than carefully buckled in the back. The radio was on and the mountains outside were just starting to turn green at the base, a telltale sign of spring. Our conversation casually turned somehow to laundry and the dress I was supposed to wear that Sunday for Easter services. Suddenly worried, I said, “Mom, I don’t think I believe in God.”
There was a long pause and she smiled a little, keeping her eyes on the road. “Neither do I,” she told me.
I was aghast. And offended. And a little bit impressed.
She went on very gently, and explained in the simplest of terms that a belief in God is not actually a requirement to wear a dress for Easter Sunday services. I didn’t even have to go to Easter Sunday services if I didn’t want to. She liked to go because she enjoyed the community and routine, but she didn’t take the biblical stories at face value. When it came to the whole “God” thing, she chose to believe in people instead. Nature, compassion, gratitude, and individual agency were her gods. Looking back, she definitely found our whole conversation lovably naive, but it changed everything for me. My response to the news about Santa Claus a few months later was unfortunately not so delightful.
My philosophy on religion has changed countless times over the course of the intervening years. As I grew older, we went to church less and less and eventually stopped going entirely. I suppose if I had to give myself a label I would be agnostic, but only because “atheist” feels presumptuous. In my head, it’s dangerous to be all that sure about anything.
It’s remarkably confusing for me to walk into a church, stand before an altar, and shake hands with the clergy as if I wholeheartedly condone the whole operation. But I do it. The confusion—all the contradictions between my lived religious experience, its political context, and the basic truth of the thing in general—is hard to avoid. But there’s also this other existential, undeniable sense of something grand for me that comes with leaning in.
In 1907, a physician from Massachusetts named Duncan MacDougall conducted an experiment to determine whether human souls have physical weight. He weighed human bodies in the seconds right before and right after the moment of death, and found a 21-gram mass change. He concluded that yes, the human soul does have weight, and that weight is 21 grams. MacDougall’s experiment was flawed, and fraud, in all kinds of ways, but it always comes back to me when I start thinking too much about God. Think Frankenstein: even after assembling all the biological body parts, Victor still has to animate the body. So when it comes to people, there has to be an animating force too, some mystical source of life. Maybe it’s the soul, maybe God, maybe nature, but it’s not nothing. For me, in some subversive and cosmic way, that feels like proof.
When I say going to church makes me feel “some type of way,” it’s because I don’t quite have the language to describe it. I’ve found it most potently in the old European cathedrals around where my grandmother grew up, when the light catches just right through stained glass windows or my footsteps echo on stone floors. I like to sit in the pews and people watch when the sanctuary is open to the public, lighting candles or coming in with prayer beads. I imagine my ancestors doing the same. I try to practice love. Maybe I’m just drawn to history and tradition, but religion in this context feels bigger to me. There’s some magic in it.
Sophie Jager can be reached at sjager@wesleyan.edu.