Religions and cults

When visiting Tucson, I almost always make one trip south of town to San Xavier del Bac, the White Dove of the Desert. It was a mission church built in the 1700s when Father Kino came to this area and built this mission (using Native American labor). The church tower was not finished to avoid paying taxes to Rome. It still has regular masses and serves the people of the Tohono O'odham as well as any who come with spiritual needs.

One year, I lit a candle (many years after having left the Catholic Church) near the figure of St. Francis asking that my daughter's pregnancy would go well and her baby be born healthy. She had been bleeding too much, did not feel well, and the baby was not due for 5 more months. Although I am not religious, as such, I am a mystic and I felt there was power in this place.

That same week, my daughter began to feel better. Was it due to a candle lit near Saint Francis's figure? Was I wrong to feel this area had a sacred power? I cannot say but she bore a healthy son in July; and the next year, I lit a candle of thanks. I have never pinned a request on the cloth covering the symbolic figure but always look at them with respect and an understanding of the hopes or gratitude that they represent.

In the small chapel alongside the church, a vandal, angry at the church, at god, at who knows what, came in and smashed all of the figures there. There were some beautiful small sculptures, very old, gifted by various families. The chapel is where there are relics from two saints buried in the floor. The community heartbreak over the assault on religious belief was widespread. The religious figurines were replaced with new ones, but vandalism returned this year to attack a small shrine on the side of the hill above the church. The anger again went deep and seemed pointless.

The ground on which San Xavier stands was a Tohono O'odham ceremonial place. Often churches have been built on land that already had been deemed sacred. Was this to break the traditions of the people who lived there or a recognition of the existing sacredness?

I write about this because of the recent religious accusations being heaved against Barack Obama. His church has been referred to as a cult because its pastor, Reverend Wright, has made some condemning remarks about America's racist past, throwing out wild accusations that America created AIDS to destroy the black man. Some people panicked, the same ones who didn't panic because Bush or McCain paid homage to Pat Robertson or went respectfully to Bob Jones University, pastors who have said equally ridiculous things for instance that Katrina was punishment for America tolerating homosexuality or abortion.

Because of this pastor's comments, a few out of many sermons, there are those who ignore everything Barack Obama has said himself, and instead believe he's a puppet in the hands of this pastor, who he had said did lead him to religion, married him and baptized his children, who was like an uncle to the family.

It doesn't take much to make some people fear that someone of another race is different than them, and that the stranger is somehow susceptible in a way that they would not be themselves. To them Obama has been in a racist cult. By this thinking, anyone in any church is responsible for what their pastor teaches and might be considered a pawn of that religious leader.

So the sacredness that I feel when I enter San Xavier has to be held in context of all the right or wrong things that have been taught and done by the Catholic Church? Where do we consider something a cult and where it is simply a church that we attend which we may go home and bitch over what was taught that Sunday but keep going back because we love the community and what it is doing overall?

Having left two churches over doctrinal differences, over my own feeling I didn't want to be in a church that taught what I considered to be wrong spiritually, I definitely understand the price you pay for such leaving. You lose community. I left (and not as soon as I realized the problem) because I felt it was the right thing for me to do, but I know a lot of good people who stayed because they felt it was the right thing for them to do. To them, pastors come and go, but community remains. I don't think either of us are wrong. We did what we felt was right.

Being in a church does not require you believe every word of the pastor. That belongs to the world of cults and churches are not all cults. When people look beyond the pastor's words and believe he has a good heart, they may overlook the fact that he seems to have missed the point of the scriptures. I have several old pastors who have been dear to me, but I sure don't think they are right in how they interpret spirituality.

In the case of Obama, people should read his own words in his books, his speeches and see what he believes. And keep in mind two things. One that Bill Clinton, when he was supposedly suffering from sexual addiction, chose Reverend Wright as one of the pastors he asked for spiritual counseling.

The other is this door. It's to San Xavier, but many people regard church as the door to God, to spiritual truth. I might not agree with them, but do understand how they might feel.

(San Xavier is being repaired and that's why screening over half of it. Photos from March 18)