Yesterday I went to a citizenship class. Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement recently received a grant to start a citizenship program and the class I attended yesterday is one of the things we're doing with the grant. Tomorrow I'll start spending some of my time working with people who are applying for citizenship.
In the class, we played bingo with words that are on the test for reading and writing. The words are also included in the 100 questions so it's easy to incorporate the vocabulary into studying for the civics test.. Some examples of words/phrases we used were Washington, Maryland, The Constitution, Adams, 1787, freedom of religion, and John Jay. I did not know who John Jay was, but apparently he was one of three men who wrote the Federalist Papers (the other two are Madison and Hamilton, which I did know).
The class only had seven people in it and the age range was somewhere from around 20 to 60. Everyone in the class had obviously studied from the week before (this was the second class out of five) and were working hard to learn. I don't know if I've ever been in a class with such motivated students. I was surprised at how motivated they were considering it was a Saturday morning and the room we were in was about fifty degrees (everyone wore their jackets the whole time). Then again, maybe I'd be motivated too if I'd been waiting to apply for citizenship for five years and wanted to have some small say in how the place I was living was run.
To me, the most interesting thing that happened was when we talked about freedom of religion and what it means—freedom to practice any religion you choose or to choose not to have a religion.
While I was pondering how I'd missed ever learning about John Jay in my seventeen years of formal (I swear I'd never heard of him until yesterday), there was a young man who was pondering something much deeper. He was maybe a year or two younger than I am and sitting directly across the table from me. He was frowning and he said, “excuse me, teacher, there are people who have no religion?”
“Yes, some people don't have any religion,” said the woman teaching the class.
“No religion? None at all? How can that be? How do they live?”
I think I was nearly as surprised by his his confusion as he was that some people don't have a religion. I was also sad because of how confused and sad he looked. He kept shaking his head and after the class had moved on, he said quietly, “I didn't know it was possible not to have a religion. How is that?”
His neighbor—a lady who was probably about his mother's age—said, “why don't you ask them?”
“Oh,” he said, “I've never met anybody like that.”
Even though I didn't know how he could live in the United States for at least five years and not realize that not everyone is religious, I could imagine the confusion he felt. After I thought about it for a little bit, I found myself sharing some of his wonderment: I understand not believe in anything specific or having any particular religion, but I find it hard to imagine not having any type of spirituality. When I look at the beauty of nature or witness someone doing something truly kind for another human being I don't know how anyone could look at that and see only a beautiful coincidence.
I know that not having a religion is different from not having any kind of spirituality, but what I started thinking about was kind of an extension from the young man's reaction.
With all of the violence in the world, all the hatred, all the poverty and oppression, and all of the random natural disasters it's easy to see why someone might not believe in the loving God that I believe in. Still, not to believe in anything at all? That makes the world seem even more hopeless. Of course, then it can be argued that people believe in God only to make themselves feel better when things go wrong or to explain things they can't explain themselves. Even if that's true and people live happier, more hopeful, and more generous lives because of those false ideas, is that such a bad thing?
No comments:
Post a Comment