week of 4/3/02
 
 
 

Daring to go to new places
By Scott McLeod
The Easter hats were like spring sprigs in an otherwise solemn garden of drab dresses, khaki slacks and plain shirts. It was a Saturday night Easter vigil, and three ladies in the choir who had not forgotten what it meant to dress up for special occasions were beacons. Their singing was as buoyant as their outfits.

The hats, I imagined, were left sitting on closet shelves throughout the year, brought down at Easter and bent, shaped and re-worked until they looked new again. Perhaps they were freshly purchased, plucked like a single wildflower from a pastel pasture of color lining the wall of a women’s store. All I know is they worked — the women shone, all three of them.

They had dressed up, I guessed, out respect for the religious holiday or, perhaps,because they had simply been raised that way. For whatever reason, they were following tradition. I found myself wondering about their motives: were they all about show, dressing to impress, or was it a personal tribute of respect for the occasion.

Perhaps my questioning was motivated by thoughts about my brother. We were in a Catholic church in downtown Swansboro, a small village situated on an inlet of Bogue Sound. My brother, 46 years old, guitarist-singer in a garage rock n’ roll band, tattooed and pierced, had decided in mid-life to become a Catholic. On that night he was baptized.

We were raised as occasional churchgoers in a nomadic military family. Larry’s decision wasn’t preceded by any single life-changing event, but rather I think it was the culmination of many episodes that deeply affected him. Like anyone who has reached middle age, he’s struggled to find the right path among the minefield of decisions we are all forced to make concerning love, duty, family and work.

But there was no tradition of church attendance for him to follow. This was not a re-affirmation of something he had learned about in childhood. His wife was raised Catholic, and so when they decided to start attending church that is where they went.

The fact that he chose Catholicism is not as important as the fact that he chose spirituality. We are constantly barraged these days by cultural critics who tell us we have abandoned our eternal verities, that we don’t know right from wrong and have given up on the concept that wrong choices have consequences. A mid-life baptism renounces that world view.

As I mulled Larry’s baptism and his decision, thoughts about the hypocrisy of many so-called religious people flooded my thoughts. For many people raised in a particular church, much of life is spent merely going through the motions. As a young boy, it struck me how so many people who attended church every Sunday had no intentions of striving to be Christ-like in everyday life. Instead, it was merely what they did. They went to church on Sundays but never put into practice what they heard and saw.

There is something life-affirming about people who soul search and then are not afraid to take new and important steps in their lives. Moving along that path often requires momentous changes. Along the way, we often discover that age, occupation and all the accumulated toys don’t really matter in the end, and this past weekend my brother helped me to see this more clearly. It’s all about the journey, not the destination.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)