One of these days they will try to hush me and I will raise my voice...

“Well, you know my feelings on the matter,” he said, “you have to leave religion behind if you want to find truth. That’s not what these people are looking for.”

Sometimes I wonder if my brother really comprehends just how strongly I qualify as one of “those people” or just how much I resent the fact that he seems to sense no irony in his belittling of the religious mainly on the grounds that people shouldn’t need someone to tell them how to think about the world. Did you make your own science then, bother? Or was it handed to you as doctrine…

It is the family’s dirty secret that I have a faith—a strong one no less—and that *gasp* I even belong to an organized religion.

  How could this happen? I hear them think. She’s not undereducated, or hateful, or irresponsible. I can see it in their eyes when they stare at me in those odd moments where I bring it up. She wasn’t raised in this, she wasn’t spoon fed a stream of lies as a child—how could this happen?

My faith makes them intensely uncomfortable. Not because of its nature—the magic and the polytheism— but because I deign have one at all. Period. Because I was shown the rational, because I was immersed in the “truth” of the scientific world, and because I even accept science as valid and use it to inform my political decisions and my practice of my profession. This leaves me with no excuse, no  valid reason (by their standards) to reject living a quiet, sensible life among the faithless. Yet, they find me happily coloring outside those lines and shake their heads at the strangeness of it. They tolerate it, in a way— in-so-much as they do not disown me or speak harshly to me or openly discourage me.

But when I speak of religious things, I am punished with silence. No one cares. That’s the message. Keep your craziness to yourself. No matter how big a role some spiritual bit plays for me in my life, it is unimportant. All of their triumphs and their failures, all of their joys and their heartaches, those are all allowed to matter, whether big or small, all discussed and applauded or reassured—but only because they are all devoid of faith. Even the greatest of my joys or the most devastating of my fears cannot be spoken of in their presence if tainted by my dirty and forsaken “religiousness”.  

“I’m just not interested in that.” they say, “You know my feelings about that”, and “I just don’t want to hear about it.” The subject changes lightning fast and I am expected to go along with it and pretend it didn’t just happen. I am expected to accept that very large parts of me are permanently off limits for discussion merely because it makes them uncomfortable.

Those are fine, peacemaking things to say to a stranger. But when said to a family member, it falls very far short of tolerance. Only the faithless parts of you matter, it says. And how do I tell them there are no faithless parts of me? And that I am tired of lying by omission to protect their sheltered world-view that only ignorant people take religion seriously and that those among the educated simply feign it because their families expect them to. I challenge that assumption. And I am silenced.

They do not know of my RPD. They do not know of my name. They do not know why I won’t answer the phone on Wednesday nights or why I ask to call them back if they ring me just before 4pm on Sundays. They do not know how much mom likes the flowers on the ancestor altar. They do not get to see my awesome modification of a Ma’at statue to make an image of Nebt-het. Nor do they get to see my winged Set animal statue. They are unaware that Ra drives my art; that His light shines from within the beading they so admire and that His hand presses lightly behind my bush as I learn to paint. My father, so intent on seeing me continue to write, cannot feel the quiet presence of my gods in my writing, even though he knows that my prose, in his own words, is “a gift”.

A gift from whom father? You stood at my mother’s bed side and looked into the eyes of the woman you loved as she lay dying and whispered “See you on the other side.” What other side, father? My brother talks of finding truth, but science won’t give him anything but a litany of facts with expiration dates. Surely he knows that there is no everlasting truth in science, that no theory, no matter how elegant, can be taken as sacred or above questioning, that most will be rewritten or redefined within his lifetime…so what "truth" does he speak of? What "truth" does he hope to find "someday" as he says? And what will he whisper, years from now, when his future wife passes? Why are those parts of them acceptable and yet I, standing before my shrine and offering to gods whose love I feel in very real terms, am somehow out of line?

I try so very hard not to be prejudiced, and it at times, it is very hard to manage. But gods help me…whenever they say things like that, I find myself saying a little prayer: “Please do not let me make my mother’s mistake, please do not let me fall in love with an atheist…” and it bothers me and angers me that I feel that way largely because of how they treat me.