Mom eloped, I’m told, because her older sisters, according to custom, should have married before her. But Evelyn helped her pack the suitcases. (Evelyn had warned my mother that in arguments pertaining to science and nature, she should let my father win, if she wanted to keep the marriage strong.)
Escaping a job at a fish cannery, for adventure with a geology professor, was a story without down-sides. Bob Carson: the future…respected social norms: the past. There were no wedding pictures, and no cake, but everyone celebrated.
Libby loved my mother but worried publicly about her son, a confirmed Episcopalean, marrying a Catholic girl. Those worries were soon upstaged by my father’s interest in Judaism. “I wanted to be a Jew, because I’m passionate about doing good, and I believe in God. The Ten Commandments make sense. But when we get to the New Testament, I have a hard time. I’m not so sure about Jesus.”
“Funny, I’m the opposite,” my mother replied. “I see no reason to doubt Jesus living and dying as a subject of the Roman Empire, talking about other-worldly things and doing magic tricks. That sort of thing happens all the time. What I have trouble with is the God part.”
Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, my mother turned away from her faith in God’s non-existence. It happened like this: although our family was avowedly agnostic, we all went to Catholic schools to please Christian grandparents. When the church got into legal troubles about some land disputes, she took it upon herself to volunteer in defense of the school’s coffers, which she saw as being connected to the quality of her sons’ educations. Her status as an atheist, though, limited her sense of community with the school board and her other collaborators. At around the same time she was reading new commentary on ritual and myth and the collective unconscious, and decided Catholicism was so close to the core of her life and selfhood that it was impossible to abandon it on purely rational grounds. Once she returned to the church and started attending mass regularly, her life was enriched by a new community and a new sense of purpose.