When we did attend church, it was always a Catholic church. In raising me, my mother gave me all the love and resources she had available to her. And the resource my ethnically Jewish mother had available to her in the area of religion was a Catholic tradition handed down to her from her step-mother. In conversations with my mother, I get the sense that she too was raised without any specific religious identification.
Although my mother’s parents were both raised by Jewish parents and in a Jewish neighborhood in New York City, they didn’t keep the traditions into their adult lives. My grandfather wears a necklace with a heh pendent (heh, pronounced like a guttural ”kai”, is a Hebrew letter and signifies life), but I’ve never seen him participate in any Jewish rites, rituals or traditions. So, it was Catholic traditions that my mother picked-up from her observantly Catholic step-mother that, in part, were passed down to me.
In-part only because while we may have attended Mass twice a year, I never understood why we, my mother and I or the congregation as a whole, were there or what we were doing. So without being handed-down any religious notion of myself, I’ve been wandering in the desert, a recurring theme in the Bible signifying not only being lost, but also being separated, from one’s people and from God.
