Growing out in the real world (Let's Start...part 3)

Making a start as a new adult is an interesting and exciting time in everyone's life. For me, it began with a rite of passage...my first airplane flight, and my first real venture outside my home state. For all intents and purposes, that first foray into the "real world" was my first exposure to real diversity.

Shortly after my 18th birthday, I packed a suitcase and rode the three airplanes it took to transport me to Charleston, West Virginia. I was a delegate to National Youth Science Camp, a 4-week program for young scientists from around the U.S. It was a transformative experience for me in more ways than I can enumerate here, but for the purposes of this blog, one thing stands out in my mind...my introduction to peers who came from diverse backgrounds: culturally, racially, and economically. It was a far cry from where I'd grown up, where everyone was white (or part-Native American), Christian, conservative, and middle- to lower-middle class. One of my closest friends there was Navajo and still practiced her native religion (the Native Americans where I grew up were all Catholics, so this was new to me). Another girl made mention of the fact that she was raised in an agnostic family, and yet other campers were Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu. It was refreshing...and for the first time, I felt like I really belonged somewhere. It was a place where there was no cultural standard to try to fit into, because everyone was different...and that was TRULY okay.

When I returned and finished out the summer at home, I was excited to start college; to move to a bigger city and really be out on my own. I was expecting an environment more like what I'd experienced at NYSC, but it turned out a little differently. While the population of the college I attended was slightly more diverse than in my home town (particularly among the faculty), I was still surrounded by mostly white, conservative, middle-class Christians.

A minor detour here, as I make a few comments about North Dakotans (lest I sound like I'm being overly critical of my home state). Generally speaking, people there are mostly good. The population is still small enough that people feel a connection with one another, and are ready and willing to lend a helping hand whenever they can. I remember telling a former coworker in Arizona about North Dakotans, and I gave this example: If you were standing at a cash register in a store and realized you were a couple dollars short for what you were purchasing, the three strangers in line behind you would be digging in their pockets to offer you their spare change and make up the difference. That's just the way people are back there (or at least that's the way the were when I left 14 years ago). North Dakotans are also very tolerant people. They tolerate people who aren't like them...you wouldn't have to worry, for example, if you were a Jewish family moving into a Christian neighborhood to have anti-semitic graffiti spray-painted on the side of your house or something. HOWEVER...they also would probably not embrace you.

While differences are TOLERATED there, they are not truly ACCEPTED. There is a big difference between tolerance and acceptance. If you don't fit into the preconceived notion of what is "normal" there, you are never truly accepted. Since the vast majority of people in the state are conservative and Christian, you have a very narrow cubbyhole in which to cram yourself if you want to be "one of them." While the people of the state have a lot of great qualities, true acceptance of diversity is not one of them (I should probably note that I am generalizing, if it's not already obvious, and that not EVERYONE in the state fits this description...lest I offend someone I know and love who still lives there).

Back to my college experience, with respect to my spiritual growth...there are a few things that stand out in my mind.

My first college boyfriend, R, was a conservative Christian. He once told me that "Rush is God" (i.e. Rush Limbaugh), and had a bumper sticker on his truck that read, "I Am the NRA." I went to church with him a couple of times, and I found it interesting (he was U.C.C., a denomination I had never encountered before...the service wasn't much different from the few United Methodist services I'd been to as a kid/teen). During my sophomore year, when R asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told him sincerely that I wanted a Bible. I'd never actually read the whole Bible, was interested in doing so, and I didn't have one of my own.

He obliged happily, and gave me a KJV "Life Application" Bible. It was very cool in that it contained tons of maps of the areas discussed, as well as historical timelines of events occurring in other areas of the world while Biblical events were taking place. On the down side (I say this in retrospect), at the bottom of each page is an interpretation of the scripture...telling you what it means, and how a good Christian can apply it to their daily lives. I honestly believe that if you have ONLY read the Bible with someone else's interpretation guiding you (either through Bible study classes or the kind of Bible I was given), you aren't really reading the Bible. You're reading someone else's interpretation and critique of the book. NOT the same. More on that in a later post...

I distinctly remember the day I "came out" to R about my agnosticism. I told him that I wasn't sure I believed any of it. His response to me is crystal-clear in my memory. He smiled the most patronizing smile, drew me close to him and said with a little chuckle, "Oh, honey, you BELIEVE! You just don't KNOW yet that you believe!" That was really the beginning of the end of our relationship (certainly not the deciding factor, or even the most significant one...but it's significant enough to deserve mention).

During my college years, I experienced the deaths of two family members. This is significant because I think that, above everything else, death is a huge motivator in faith. Death is scary. The concept of not existing is really scary for a human being. It's no wonder to me that people often turn to a higher power in difficult situations; when we have no control over what is happening, I think that even IMAGINED control (like believing in prayer and an afterlife) can offer great comfort. And I didn't have that.

One thing that I think PoF's can't conceive of is that someone would deny that kind of comfort. The reality is that (and this goes back to the "choice" debate again), I cannot CHOOSE to believe in something. I could TRY to believe or even PRETEND to believe in something, but that wouldn't be the same thing. Not by a long shot. In more recent years, I've tended to gravitate more toward acceptance; something that was expressed really well by the late, great Carl Sagan:

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring

It's hard for me to remember that I didn't always feel the same sense of being comfortable in my own atheist skin as I am now. At the time, I was desperately wishing that I could be a Person of Faith. To fit in, to find comfort...to feel like I was okay. Case in point:

Late in my freshman year in college, and early in my sophomore year, within a few months of each other, I lost both my grandmother (after a 17-year battle with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma) and my 4-year-old cousin (after her battle with widespread cancer, diagnosed with a brain tumor when she was just 18 months old). At that time I remember writing a poem about my feelings. I don't remember the whole thing, but it started out:

I want so badly to believe

There's more to life than what we see

To have the faith that some men do

Believe that God made me and you...

I was seeking...something. I was struggling to resolve the discrepancy between what I believed and what I felt I SHOULD believe. I entered a phase in my life where, while I was still agnostic, I desperately WANTED to believe. I wanted to fit in with society. I was tired of being so different. I wanted to find the comfort that so many PoF's seemed to find in their faith. I think I continued to feel that way through the rest of my college years and into graduate school...having doubts, but wanting to believe; somehow seeking proof that God *could* exist, in spite of my serious doubts.

A couple of other significant things happened during my college years. First, I met my future husband, C. While he was raised a devout Lutheran, we didn't really talk about religion. He hadn't attended church since his mother died (she was very religious, and he had attended for her sake), and it wasn't really an issue. We were both science majors (I studied Biosciences and Chemistry with a focus on ecology and evolution; he was a graduate student in the Microbiology department...a match made in "science-geek heaven"!), and were really just best friends hanging out for the next two years. I had no idea at the time that he would end up being the person I'd want to spend the rest of my life with.

The other item of note was something I saw in most of my college science classes: the apparent need professors had to resolve the "science vs. religion" issue. It boggles my mind now, as I didn't experience any of that in graduate school. In conservative, Christian North Dakota however, it seemed like it was an issue that had to be resolved at the very beginning of class before students could open their minds to accepting the curriculum. In my Zoology class, Dr. G spent an entire lecture on how science (specifically taxonomy/evolution) did not contradict the Bible, and that they could go hand-in-hand with one another. At the beginning of my Human Evolution class, I remember Dr. C spending a significant amount of time explaining how "science doesn't EXCLUDE God, it just doesn't INCLUDE one"...making the distinction that science is a study of the natural world, so it doesn't deal with the existence or nonexistence of gods; it says nothing either way. The only professor I had who didn't mince words or apologize for his curriculum was my Evolutionary Biology instructor. Dr. F even held a debate with some creationists, and told us about it in class. He definitely wasn't my favorite instructor (and I was often bored to tears by his horrible lecture style), but I have to say I respected him for that...even more so with an additional 14 years of maturity and life experience to my credit.

When I completed my degree, I had acceptance letters from two great Biology departments in two different graduate schools. One was in Iowa, and the other in Arizona. I'd personally had more than my fair share of snow and sub-zero winters...and I'd fallen in love with the desert when C and I took a road trip to Arizona the summer after my Junior year.

So I was off on my next big adventure, as I headed south for graduate school that fall...

Germinating the seeds of doubt (Let's Start...part 2)

(image from Vivio World)

The teenage years are confusing and difficult for everyone, but I think mine were compounded by my struggles with a lack of religious identity. I guess I would have characterized myself as agnostic back then (or at least my understanding of the word at the time...that I had serious questions about the existence of God, but I just wasn't sure). I spent most of my teen years thinking I was one of very few people in the world who felt this way...I felt very isolated and alone in the community (even if much of that feeling was caused by my own perceptions).

One of the many things I am grateful to my parents for is that we were raised in an environment where it was okay to ask questions about ANYTHING. Even the existence of God. We had Bibles in our house, alongside books of Zen-inspired poetry and Yoga texts; crosses next to miniature Buddha statues and ankh pendants. We listed to Ravi Shankar records alongside Genesis, Neil Diamond, and The Beatles. We didn't have money for a lot of vacations, but when we DID go places, they were focused on venues like The Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg, various zoos, tours of historical sites, planetariums, and the like. My parents made our home environment a very rich one, and great value was placed on learning and asking questions.

It stood in stark contrast to what I felt and learned in school. Remember the Bible school teacher I mentioned before? She taught me there were certain questions that were "not nice" to ask. And I was a good kid--a really good kid. I prided myself on being nice and doing what my teachers and other adults told me to do. I remember feeling completely humiliated and embarrassed because I had, in my innocence, just asked a question that was "not nice."

Something similar happened when I was in High School. I was in a home economics class, and our teacher, Mrs. B, was talking about heaven and the afterlife, etc. I asked an honest question, wondering how we know these things. She grew visibly agitated, and sounded angry as she snapped an answer back at me. I realize now that she was responding from emotion, as she told me about how she refuses to believe that her mother, who died before her kids were born, didn't get a chance to meet her own grandsons. She let me know, both verbally and with nonverbal cues, that I had just asked another one of those questions that was "not nice"; not okay. I remember feeling embarrassed and shocked...I didn't think my innocent question deserved an angry, hurt response and complete shutdown.

Talking to my dad was a huge help for me. Knowing that he felt much the same way as I did, and was willing to talk about it, was really my saving grace (for lack of better terminology)! My home was my intellectual safe haven; the place where it was okay to ask questions and explore. The one other place I felt like that was in Mr. T's classroom (no, not THAT Mr. T!).

Mr. T was my 7th and 10th grade Biology teacher, as well as my 12th grade Physics teacher. I looked forward to his class every day. He encouraged us to explore and learn outside of what the book had to say. EVERY question was okay to ask. His room was filled with jars of dead things and aquariums whose walls were so covered in algae you couldn't see what was inside them. They were just asking to be scraped and viewed under a microscope (which we did often), to explore a tiny universe of protozoans in a jungle of seaweed. There were sunny days in the spring where he'd declare we were having class outside. Some days we'd walk to a nearby slough and just spend the hour exploring. I was filled with wonder, and I felt completely in my element. He was the kind of teacher I'd wish for my kids to have (but the kind of teacher that, sadly, is going extinct thanks to "standards-based education" and "No Child Left Behind"). Mr. T's classes were like a refuge to me in an otherwise boring school day.

Unfortunately, not many kids had the same love for Mr. T's class as I had. They thought his classes were "too hard," and they thought he was "really weird." When a student would ask him a question, he wouldn't just answer...he'd make the student talk it through until she found the answer herself. I found that approach challenging and empowering (he often told us, "See? You know...you just don't KNOW you know!"...something I found myself echoing to my own students when I taught science years later). Other students felt like he was ridiculing them by putting them on the spot instead of just giving them the answer.

Mr. T was also an outspoken religious skeptic...and that made him pretty unpopular, too. I remember the kids talking about it. And I remember making a mental note to keep my mouth shut about my own beliefs. At the same time, I was silently his biggest fan (I told him so years later, just a year before he tragically died of a heart attack and complications from bypass surgery at age 56). I still miss him and think of him with admiration as my first scientific mentor.

I graduated Valedictorian of my senior class, gave a speech that a "nice girl" would give, and bit my tongue as we sat through the sermon during Baccalaureate/Commencement (I attended a public school, but it was standard to hold a church service during high school graduation). I couldn't wait to move on to the next phase of my life...I felt like I was escaping! I couldn't wait to explore the world, and I had a great springboard for it. I had been accepted to a 4-week summer program called National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia (more on that later). I was about to board a plane for the first time in my life, and see something other than the plains of North Dakota and Manitoba. I had no idea what to expect, but I was excited and ready!