Field Trip City

Home sweet home, all right. I'm in Peterborough for the weekend. I wasn't home for fifteen minutes and my dad starts waving this book on Armageddon in my face that he had just finished reading. A Bible scholar's take on the middle east, the rise of the antichrist, the end of the world. My dad likes to give me religious books. I asked him why he always saw it fit to dwell on the rapture, why he's always looking forward to the end of things, and he said he did it because I was his son, and he wanted to offer me salvation. He has faith that his beliefs are facts, that the rapture will happen in my lifetime. His faith is the most important thing in his life.

Usually, I take his words in complete silence. I let him speak them, let them hang in the air and dissipate into something else. They almost seem to affect him like spells. He's a perfectly great guy a lot of the time. Today he kept pushing me, because I was resisting him. He told me that he wanted to know my thoughts, even if I disagreed. And I told him that I can't talk to him when he preaches to me. He's talking at me, not engaging me in conversation. He sermonizes instead of offering an outlook. I told him I didn't want his book. But I thanked him for his offer of salvation, from a son to a father.

I'm fairly certain it's not going to be smooth sailing for my dad and me entirely from now on, because he's getting older and more panicky about his mortality. He may say he wants to hear what I think, but my dad isn't the type who listens, he's the type who waits for that pause in a dialogue to inform him that he can start speaking again. I've heard ministers speak and they don't speak like my dad. I asked him why he didn't become involved with the Church, why he didn't become a priest given that Catholicism was obviously his leading lot in life, and he told me that he didn't agree with their anti-marriage stance. That he's too busy working and taking care of his family to attend mass. My father is in a difficult position because Catholicism was so ingrained on him as a child, and even though he's left it he still carries a tremendous amount of guilt. He won't call himself a Protestant or Methodist or subscribe to any of the other hundred sects of Christianity due to his stubbornness, so he's taken the parts of Catholicism that he likes and has said to hell with the rest. Literally.

It's funny that this had to happen while I'm feeling so conflicted about my feelings towards God. There's an unflinching, brutal honesty in talking to my dad about how I really feel about religion. It's one of the hardest things I can ever remember doing in my life, probably some sort of leftover childhood desire not to let the old man down. But I'm my own man now. I'm going to be nothing but honest from now on, and not as tactful as I have been in the past. We'll see how his charity holds out. In the meantime I'll pray for him, in my own way. I won't stop loving my father, and I have to give him a chance to follow suit.