Recently, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of religion – specifically whether to impart any to my daughter. A neighbor of mine told me that though she was indifferent to religion, she converted from what she considered a dreadful Catholic upbringing to Judaism when she got married, not because of pressure from her husband, but as protection for her children.

They would be growing up in New York City, she has reasoned, where they would be exposed to all sorts of religions and philosophies, and she never wanted him to feel pressured to join anything because he was raised in a religious vacuum. Even if he eventually chose to denounce Judaism for some other belief, or became agnostic or atheist, he would still have the security of a faith to fall back on.

The conversation has stayed with me. My husband is a lapsed Catholic, and I didn’t have much of a religious upbringing. I was baptized, and my mother tried to keep me in Sunday school at a Methodist church for about a year, sometime around age 5.

My cousin, on the other hand, attended a Catholic church and Sunday school regularly. On many occasions, I tagged along with her and my aunt. Catholic church service was intriguing to me – far more so than the uneventful Methodist sessions I had attended sporadically as a child. The host and the wine (well, grape juice) — body and blood of Christ — were both fascinating and creepy.

When I was a little older, I started hanging out with my best friend’s church group, a nondenominational congregation that I later learned was tied to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Now these people knew how to have fun! I would take off with Sonia on weekend retreats where we would sing and dance and put on plays. There was candy and music and boys. I would just tell my mom I was going to a church picnic or some event, and she would think nothing of it – figuring, I guess, that since she had failed to bring me religion, why not let someone else have a try?

But what she didn’t know — and looking back, what she SHOULD have known — was that embedded in these kid-friendly escapades was a dark, frightening message for young children. After one particularly disturbing weekend in which, at age 10, I witnessed people speaking in tongues without any explanation about what was happening AND was relayed the story of Revelations in graphic detail and then told that if I didn’t “open my heart to Jesus” I would end up in that horror show of hell they had depicted, I finally broke down and told my mom what had taken place. Suffice to say I was never allowed to go to church with Sonia anymore. And that was the end of my religious experience until I moved to New York and attended a few Quaker meetings for about a month.

Remembering this chapter of my life illuminated my neighbor’s point to me. I had been potential prey for a religious organization, in part, because I had no faith of my own. As an adult, still with no faith, I long for it – yet as an adult it can be so much harder to find. Children don’t intellectualize everything; they’re willing to take a leap of faith (pun intended), whereas my inner checklist starts crossing off potential belief systems based on various principles or doctrine that I simply can’t force myself to align with. Yet when I cut through our neighborhood church to get from one side of the street to the other, I envy the women kneeling alone praying in the resounding quiet.

And when I see the groups of happy families filing out after Sunday baptisms, I feel a little pinch in my heart. I want Nina to have that, not just as an inoculation against those who would prey on her, but also for the comforts and the bonds that faith seems to bring. I’m still not sure what faith that will be, but I’m ready to start exploring. I figure we can explore together. In a best-case scenario we’ll find something that both enlightens us individually and brings us closer as mother and daughter. Worst-case scenario, we jettison it for something else or nothing at all.

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