The Virgin Mary-Buddha Combo

The Archbishop gave the graduating seniors of St. Michael’s High School his well wishes in the form of anecdotes of teenage heroism—young people who had risked their lives to save those in danger. A young man who had rescued an elderly woman about to be struck by a train, a young lady who had applied a tourniquet to a bleeding man, just in the nick of time. The Archbishop jockeyed grim and hopeful to remind the young graduates that they too can be heroes in the moment.

I hadn’t been to a Catholic mass in a quite a while, and so his homily struck me as odd. Why would one chose to inspire young minds with gruesome tales of near-death? Then I remembered that’s what religion—especially Catholicism—is supposed to do: scare the bejesus out of you in hopes you’ll do right.

As a father of two curious young minds, I’m torn whether to provide them a religious upbringing. While Christianity solidified love and compassion in my heart, the need to sit in church once a week didn’t stick, plus, I stopped praying to Jesus and the Father God a long time ago. My prayer now is half beseeching the Virgin Mary and half Buddhist mind-cleansing. I consider my veneration of the Virgin Mary an artifact of my dormant Catholic faith combined with an instinctual connection to Mother Earth that, in effect, provides a passageway to Buddhism, which, as a philosophy, not necessarily a religion, is more in line with who I am at my core.

So, do I pass these “religi-osophies” to my children? I sometimes consider not doing it all.

We’ve seen the dangers of religious extremism. It’s all around us these days, and the victims are the most innocent, whether they’re killed in an attack, or taught to discriminate. Religion is a weapon, and there is an on-going war of ideologies because of it. So how does it stop?

By giving our children guidance on how to honor their fellow human being without a scripted guidebook. Whether that’s via a Virgin Mary-Buddha combo, or whatever your flavor, we have to lead by example, teaching our little disciples that there are many ways to climb the mountain, and that we are all headed for the same summit.

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Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker.

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