You can’t speak universally about the religious epiphanies you failed to have during winter break. It’s no use; your biases would plaster themselves across your forehead and people would shake their metaphorical index fingers at you for waxing philosophical without a license. So you decide to dispense with the authoritative English major nonsense and openly possess situation-specific and entirely fallible opinions. Risky.
- Paul Wong
- Aubrey Henretty
Though you come from a mostly Catholic family (meaning most of the people in your family are currently or were at some point Catholic), you missed church on Christmas morning for the second year in a row (the second time in your life) last month, opting instead to sit at the kitchen table with your grandfather (who is Baptist) and drink tea and watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” while your parents and your brother were at Mass.
There are many reasons you might have stayed home. Perhaps you’re a walking stereotype: a bitter (and guilty – don’t forget guilty) raised-Catholic who refused to ruin this otherwise idyllic holiday morning by spending it in church. Maybe you’re an atheist. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Maybe you think religion is by definition extremely divisive and you’re starting to wonder if it’s worth all the tribulation it causes.
That afternoon, you heard about a church-bombing in Pakistan, a couple of malicious or misguided miscreants playing God with explosives. You had been slicing carrots next to the small TV in the kitchen. The blast killed a little girl. This gave you pause. You literally paused, furrowing your brow at the CNN field reporter, struck by the tragic irony of the girl who went to church to be saved and in actuality would have been safer at home.
What, you asked yourself, if you had passed on church because you thought religion was inherently and often dangerously divisive and your family had gone and been vaporized by crazy fundamentalists without you, thus proving your point on two levels and leaving you sad and lonely (and guilty) for the rest of your life? It could happen. This sort of thing happens all the time, all over the world. But why? You are not na