Grace Without God by Katherine Ozment

Author:Katherine Ozment
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN I WAS eight years old, my parents called my brothers and me into the living room for an unprecedented “family meeting” to announce that they were separating. I ran to my room, buried my head in my pillow, and cried. It was 1976, and though our parents were the first in our neighborhood to divorce, we were at the leading edge of a national trend that would remake the American family. We went from being a single unit coalescing under one roof to a collection of disjointed pieces flung in different directions. The result was a custody agreement that stipulated my shuttling between two homes, taking a twenty-minute car ride in my father’s orange Subaru to New Haven and back each weekend. My brothers were teenagers, with parties and football games to attend on weekends, so more often than not they chose to stay home with our mother. But I learned to straddle the two worlds, and when it came to religion, they soon diverged.

My mother took a job as a secretary and started meditating after work each day, retreating to her basement office to burn incense and sit for twenty minutes during which we had to take the phone off the hook so it wouldn’t ring and disturb her. Like many other Ameri cans, she was experimenting with Eastern forms of spirituality, including transcendental meditation, yoga, and EST. She was more likely to spend Sunday mornings listening to James Taylor LPs on her headphones (which looked like two halves of a brown coconut), knotting her macramé wall hangings, or planting Johnny-jump-ups in her garden than packing us all off to church.

If we worshipped anything in our chaotic household it was our creativity. Instead of going to church, we spent our time creating the art projects that sprawled across our dining room table, tending the fat tomatoes and thick zucchini in our vegetable garden, or making soap from bacon fat, and candles from colored wax that we melted and laid in bright stripes across the bottom halves of milk cartons cut in two. Authority came not from a preacher or sacred text but from our own instincts. We kids were left to our own devices most days, which was great when it came to running through the woods out behind our house, but not as much fun when it came to making our own dinner.

My father’s house was a different world. Soon after my parents’ divorce, he married a woman he’d met at work. She was more religious than our family had ever been, and I started to attend services at the Episcopal Church on the New Haven Green with them on weekend visits. Though my voice warbled over the hymns, never hitting the right notes, the sweet songs of the boys’ choir mesmerized me. I’d sit in the pew listening to the alternating roar and lull of the organ music and gazing at the colorful stained-glass windows depicting biblical stories. For communion, I’d kneel on the maroon velvet

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