Religious Roots: "We're all Catholics and Atheists Now"

When I think of "my roots" I think of food.  I'm sure my ancestors did things other than eat, but what they passed down to me, be it genetically or environmentally, was a preference for certain foods and a love of food overall.
If pressed, I could come up with some other cultural roots: my people are farmers and gardeners (food again), we are Midwestern Americans who speak with a Rockford dialect (as evidenced by several attempts on the New York Times Quiz*), we take road trips, we are geographically savvy, we value education, we vote, we root for the Cubs, most of us are workaholics with a healthy dose of Protestant Work Ethic and, as such, we are Protestants.

So it was a little shocking when my maternal grandfather, a year or two before he died, commented, "Well, it seems as if the family is half Catholic and half atheists now."  The statement is decidedly inaccurate: there are more Catholics in the family now than in his generation (a few men marrying Catholic women had a great impact on the religious practices of my cousins and nieces), but there are still many church-going Protestants, and there are no avowed atheists.  I didn't argue with him at the time: one doesn't tell one's grandfather that his daughter quit attending church because of disagreements with Newt Gingrich, not God.  And I certainly couldn't describe the scientist, empiricist, skeptic, Jesus-following, it's a good idea to serve the church, views, that are seemingly held by many of us  Who could?  My roots are that we don't talk about religion.

Maybe it was Grandpa's statement that rankled.  Maybe it was contrasting my family (becoming more Catholic) with the Mister's (becoming less).  Maybe it was realizing that my (paternal) Irish Catholic great grandmother, whose son married my Italian Catholic grandmother was actually an Ulster Protestant.  Maybe it's the Pope.  But I have been thinking a lot about Catholicism.  Watching video of my brother's family in full length frog costumes cheering as they stood for hours watching a Rosenmontag parade on Monday felt so foreign.  Days off for Fastnacht/Mardi Gras/Carnival is not something we do.

As my Roots Year officially ended last night, I had Lenten ashes on my forehead for the first time.  Even though I received them from my Presbyterian/United Church of Christ/Disciples of Christ church, receiving ashes felt like an out-of-place Catholic thing to do.  My religious roots don't involve Ash Wednesday ashes.  The actual words of the ceremony, however, stunned me with their aptness: "From dust you are made and to dust you shall return."

I know where my roots are.  My roots are in the ground.  And to the ground I shall return.

That's as good a place as any to end roots.  Today we are roots become ashes.  Tomorrow we glow.


*The must recent attempt, in which I picked "crawdad" over "crayfish" (I use them both, as well as "crawfish", in different contexts) and "truck" over "semi" landed me with a Wichita/Kansas City/Overland Park accent!  I speak like a suburban Kansan?