Chapter V continued

Where my father went,or what he did on those Sunday mornings when we were in church,I don't know.But I can say that he almost never came with us.Certainly some mornings he must have been very tired,having just gotten of the midnight shift and traveled the eighty miles home.But I don't really know why,on those Sundays he wasn't working,he chose not to worship with his family.It caused me to wonder from an early age what he thought about God,and why whatever he thought was so different from what my mother thought.In fact,to this day,my father's beliefs remain largely a mystery to me,simply because so little of that belief was openly stated.And yet I'm certain he had beliefs,and that they were religious in nature.

My father's religious behavior also caused me some puzzlement when it came to my mother and her beliefs.If to her,God and Jesus and being a Christian was so important,why had she married someone to whom those things seemed not to matter?There was something very unsettling about this,though I could not have voiced those concerns then.It was not nearly the same thing as disagreeing about what color to paint the house or whether to have fish,rather than chicken for dinner.I knew that even as a small kid.Religion,what you though about God was important in governing what sort of things you did,and who you would become.That's the message I got,but only from one side of our home.

None of this is to say that my father was an unbeliever. Neither does it mean that my mother was not living an exemplary Christian life.But those two things seemed very odd to me at the time.Today I would call it cognitive dissonance.That's surely what it was.But interpreting how anyone believes,or lives out belief is,by the nature of belief a difficult,if not impossible task.That may not be true  where belief is openly stated and similar things are believed by all,but it was never like that in our home.