Tomorrow I'm going to a shul for the first time in a few years, to see my 8-year-old godson Jonathan participate in a Chumash reading (apparently this is something his synagogue has instituted to keep youngsters interested in services and such). Now, I'm not big on Shabbos services, I slept through more than my fair share of them growing up, but I love Jon and feel as though, as his godmother, it's my spiritual obligation to be a low-key presence for as many of these moments as possible.
This is more or less how I practice religion - not as an anal obsession in order to score points against others, but as a favor to people I love, or as comfortable rituals to make me feel connected to something larger than myself. There's little qualitative difference to my mind between lighting Chanukah candles or fasting on Yom Kippur and, say, Thanksgiving dinner or bubble & squeak on Boxing Day. I just don't go overboard, y'know, because my version of God cares more about the spirit behind the rituals than impulsively or unthinkingly following them to the letter. To me, religion or spirituality is something that's best practiced between the practitioner and their God, in the privacy of one's home or designated community holy spot (church, mosque, etc.), and making an unwanted public display out of it can be at best tacky and at worse dangerous.
There's a woman in my office who sees herself as a very devout Christian, which would be fine if she weren't so in-your-face about it all the time. She's constantly blessing people instead of simply thanking them, making a show out of her charitable efforts at distributing incoming faxes or pages sitting on the network printer, and befriending homeless people whom she invites into our office to make liberal use of the kitchen or bathroom. Now I know she means well and she's mostly harmless. But her God isn't my God, so I'd rather not have that blessing every single time I pass along a phone number to her (seeing as how the more times you repeat something like that by rote, the less meaning it has anyway). And she distributes the papers to the wrong people half the time anyway, so back they go to the fax or printer to be retrieved by the people who are actually expecting them. And this building's security tends to be lax enough without having to worry about invited strangers casing the joint.
I couldn't help but think about my coworker when hearing about the Elizabeth Smart case. Her mom felt such Christian charity toward this total stranger that she employed him in her house, not knowing anything about him or bothering to do any sort of background check. 'Cause, you know, God loves everyone, I guess. The total stranger, for his part, considered himself even closer to God, which delusion allowed him to carry through anything his unhinged psyche came up with - a sort of made-to-order spiritual immunity from the consideration of Man's law (like, oh, you don't friggin' kidnap 14-year-old kids and "marry" them you asshole). So in short, if it weren't for certain wacky religious impulses, this girl would probably have remained safe at home. (Although if the family is Mormon, which seems likely, I suppose one could argue that if it weren't for certain wacky religious impulses like hyper-procreation she might not have been born in the first place...)
And if not for those impulses, one can easily extrapolate, we wouldn't have this new fundie-evangelical crusade to immanentize the eschaton, as RA Wilson put it. And we wouldn't have other fundie idiots steering planes into towers either. I know there's more than one side to this, there are a lot of good spiritual folks who seek to uphold their personal beliefs via charitable actions rather than by pushing them onto others - but at times like this it's not easy to remember that. All I know is I want these folks, well meaning or no, to just get their God out of my face and back into their hearts, where God belongs.
[A propos of nothing, I notice far too many posts on Anne Zook's Peevish, link at sidebar, with no comments attached. She's done such a
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