Question Two

Again - I'm interrupting the news coverage to ask and answer a few questions about myself. Self-indulgent? Maybe. The goal is full disclosure. The roundup will return in about a week.

Here's the question for the day:

Where do you come from?

Is this really a "query" - a good question to come back to more than once?

Yes and no. Of course, there are all the hard facts about how I came to be here. Immigrant father, American mother. Raised in conservative corners of wacky California. Years of living abroad, school, then traveling and working in the US. Those don't change.

But I'm beginning to realize that the story of your life and your family grows up as you do - develops interesting twists seen from the distance of years. Especially the question of parents, once such reliably fixed figures, who become more and more enigmatic as you unbelievably reach the same age they were when they reared you. Who are they? For this reason, I think "Where do I come from?" is a touchstone.

Especially from the standpoint of what I take for granted about faith.

My mother was the one focused on getting us "churched," which here meant dragging my brother and I to a Methodist service near the public library for the big holy days. I think it was architecture that got us there more than anything else - the place had a stony, rough-hewn look that appealed to a Californian's fetish for history, real or imagined.

As a kid, mom had been in charge of her own religious schooling. Her parents were two wild, hard-working children of the post-war years: her dad managed a Sears store, his wife kept the house. They were probably Christians if you pressed them - I don't know if anyone did. Cocktails with friends and bridge were more of a religion than anything else - Sundays were devoted to quiet hangovers by the pool.

My mother took herself to church as a young girl - the closest one she could walk to in her nice clothes was a Baptist church. She says she fell in love with the singing and the vibrant voices. She went regularly. The services also kept her out of the house during morning hours when making much noise was flirting with disaster.

The sermons perplexed her though - all of the rules for clean living, and the hell and brimstone for unbelievers. When her father died young, and she heard her preacher's take on the fate of drinkers and bon-vivants, she flat-out stopped being a Baptist. She became her own breed of Christian and didn't really return to church until we were old enough to need some God in our lives.

Some Sundays that effort would get a little more exotic - my family would pack up and head south to the nearest Greek Orthodox church. It took about an hour. We did this maybe a dozen or so times growing up. We'd arrive hours after the orthos had begun, which always seemed embarassing to me, though very common (we weren't raised Greek - arriving late wasn't second nature to us). We also didn't speak Greek, so the divine liturgy went on and on mysteriously for hours, eis tous aionas ton aionon, steeped in incense, with aerobic stretches of standing, kneeling, and intoning prayers. Still, as a kid, I preferred this to the Methodists - the jeweled robes, the ceiling painted sky-blue and filled with saints, and a big chunk of leavened bread with wine as your reward.

He never insisted on going regularly - my dad isn't that type. He also wasn't hungry for the fellowship of the other Greeks, a big reason to go to church in immigrant communities. He came over to America as a refugee at age 18, married an American, and rarely looked back.

His religious upbringing was... unusual.

My grandfather was executed during WWII by the Germans while my dad was just a child. In the hard years that followed the war, when Greece was torn apart by a communist uprising, his mother was faced with keeping four children safe while running a small farm in the hills of the Peloponnese. She took an extraordinary step, taken so often by parents in areas of poverty and unrest - she sent her sons away.

They were very young. There was a high-school in Tripolis, the regional capitol, but she had no way to pay for their room and board. So one day she marched them up the mountain to a remote monastery, where her husband's oldest brother had taken orders as a monk. He was called "Parthenios," the Virgin. "These are your nephews," she said to him, holding my father and uncle by their scrawny arms. "You sit up here on the mountain while people are starving below. I want you to take them in and help them go to school. A Christian would help me care for them."

The monastery had a small community house in Tripolis, and she wanted the boys to live there while they went to high school. In return, they would work at the monastery, keeping the stables and cleaning, running errands for the bishop. She would look after their clothes and washing and bring what she could from the farm. In addition, my grandmother said, Parthenios could leave the mountain and perform weddings and funerals in the surrounding villages, which paid in cash and barter. A deal was struck.

My father is enigmatic about those years. Growing up among the monks gave him an eyeful, that's for sure - priests who accepted the last lamb or sheaf of grain from a poor widow who wanted a blessing. Bishops who proscribed fasting but ate well behind closed doors. Sexual goings-on in the ranks. He chuckles and shakes his head when he talks about them.

But his eyes light up when he talks about Parthenios. "He was a holy man," my father says, gravely. "The other monks made fun of him - he would just laugh. Winter and summer, he would wear a simple monk's robe. He loved God. And his passion was music."

Parthenios composed Byzantine chants, an ancient tradition in the eastern church. "Come and give me your young ear," he would say, and sing a phrase in the old scale: Pa, Ni, Pa, Vu. True to his word, Parthenios shuffled away from the cell where he spent all of his time and made the rounds of the villages, blessing weddings and the bereaved.

After high school my father was finally sponsored to come to Boston, as a refugee. When he came, the Greeks in America were still torn by the ideas that had laid waste to Greece - forward to a socialist atheism, or back into the grips of a powerful church? Although he had spent years as the personal secretary to the bishop, he had no firm answers to these questions.

To this day, he is humble when he talks about right and wrong. Like my mother, he is content to believe in God, without being firm on the specifics. But I gave him a tape of Byzantine chants a few years ago, and he'll play it in the truck as he heads to work. He says it makes him happy.

My parents met and raised their kids in California. For a taste of what that's like, check out The Visionary State, a photo book from last year which rounds up images from the temples, cathedrals and retreats that show up the largest diversity and tolerance of the religious mind in the west. It suited them.

Though they were technically an interfaith marriage, I think they still have more in common about what they believe than otherwise. They'll still make it to a service or two. Our town is conservative and devout; Sunday traffic is impossible in the mornings, and every new flavor of "contemporary worship" gets its premier there. But their faith is based on something more fixed and personal, I'm coming to believe. Both of them are drawn to God, but skeptical of his franchises on earth.

They were a little relieved when my brother and I started to explore in our teens - I sniffed around eastern religions, and my brother began to embrace a scientific rationalism. Better to ask, better to seek. Despite all of the gaps in our formal religious education, they taught my brother and I the importance of being, first and foremost good people - and that this, somehow, what being a Christian means to them.

My mother gets flack at her office for being one of Barna's 33% of the "unchurched." "God knows my heart," my mother will say - end of the discussion.

That's where I'm from.

Tune in tomorrow.