My maternal grandmother was born Lutheran. She was not many generations removed from the German speaking immigrants who formed the largest European ethnic group to settle the midwestern United States in the late eighteen hundreds. They brought their faith with them and built communities on top of it, faith that defined their identity and could not be done without. After leaving the town in Minnesota that his Volga German mother had decided to call home, my great grandfather built the Lutheran chapel in the small California town that would become my grandmother’s birthplace.
When my grandparents met in college, religious difference was the hinge on which the outcome of their courtship turned. Each was certain their interpretation of Christ’s gospel was the correct one, and had determined to marry a spouse who felt the same. In a fair trade, they agreed to be proselyted by the other’s religious representatives.
My grandmother met the Mormon missionaries, while the local Lutheran minister forgot to meet my grandfather. The minister lost the theological debate, as well as a member of his congregation.
My grandmother’s change of faith was difficult. Mormonism is unique enough as a faith tradition that it has arguably become it’s own ethnicity, and certainly it’s own subculture in the American West. Even for those who are already strictly religious, situating yourself into the social fabric, learning the terminology sewn into it, and meeting the unspoken expectations it designs for you is a challenge. She persisted, motivated by her conviction that the Mormon church taught the truth, conviction born of what she felt was a strong spiritual witness.
The challenge of faith transition was added to by the skepticism and wariness that her parents brought to their interaction with my grandfather and his family. How could their daughter be serious about this nascent American take on Christianity? So many of it’s assertions were downright blasphemy. It took some persuasion and a few railroad trips, but they were eventually won over by the character of their daughter’s future husband. They reluctantly accepted her decisions.
Those decisions didn’t all pan out beautifully. When my grandmother asked to be married in the Lutheran church that her father had built, the minister refused to allow it. She was not Lutheran. At her temple sealing, a Mormon ceremony signifying that the marriage would be recognized not only in this life but also in the next, her parents could not attend. Religious difference went on to color her family ties and continued to do so through the following generations. More than one of her children would later distance themselves from the faith she had embraced. Many of her grandchildren would as well, myself among them.
There aren’t many aspects of German culture that survived integration, though there are a few. Ahead of marrying into my family, every prospective spouse is treated to an obligatory meal of pork roast, sauerkraut, and kneophla, which is a type of Russian-German potato dumpling. It’s true salt-of-the-earth peasant fair, but a meal that has many of my own fond memories wrapped up in it. Occasionally some hymns from my Grandmother’s Lutheran childhood will make an appearance at family events. But most of the German influence that affected my mother’s childhood came down to attitudes surrounding religious and family life, especially parenting.
The stereotypes applied to German culture exist for a reason, at least for my ancestors. They were a gritty, tough group with a knack for creating and strictly adhering to rules and authority. Sure, they probably allowed moderate alcohol consumption to lighten the mood on occasion, but the life of a displaced German peasant farmer is not exactly luxurious. Hard work and discipline come with the territory. The Mormon culture my grandfather brought to his marriage shared many of the same values, and added strict sobriety to them. Who needs to be happy anyway, right?
In my mother’s childhood home things were to be done right. Failure to do so brought consequences with it, consequences that were given structured definition and used as a fundamental parenting tool.
One of the things my mother was expected to do was learn the piano. Music was an important part of Lutheranism and just as important in Mormonism. In an effort to prevent mistakes, her piano teacher would slap my mother’s fingers with a ruler when they were made. As a result she developed the habit of pulling her fingers from the keyboard to avoid the ruler when she knew she’d hit an incorrect key. My mother loves music, but she did not go on to play the piano.
My life is many generations and years removed from the sliver of family line running back to German-speaking Russia and present day Ukraine. The great depression, two world wars, a change of faith, the hippie movement, the civil rights movement, and the cold war have all tempered the influence of German culture on my own childhood.
My mother is not German. But remnants of my German heritage were certainly felt. When I began learning the piano she replaced the ruler with her own intolerant voice, raised in frustration at my incompetence. Often I would cry below her frustration. I also did not go on to play the piano. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but when you condition a child to fear the keyboard, is anyone really surprised?
Thankfully, corporal punishment was meted out sparingly in my own home. While I grew up hearing stories of the paddles and belts that often accompanied punishment for the generations before mine, my mother had made a conscious effort to substantially reduce her usage of physical discipline on me and my siblings. Even so, the biblical proverb that warns parents not to “spare the rod and spoil the child” was repeated often enough that I remember it by heart. I also remember seeing the conflicted feelings in my mother’s eyes whenever she said it or acted on its advice.
Parents do the best they can. My mother and father did, and I appreciate the effort that they gave to their role as mine. I’m grateful to say I do believe I received much more from them than many children get. I don’t resent my cultural background, Mormon, German, or otherwise. But could it not still have been better?
The great paradox of the parent-child relationship is that parents are almost guaranteed to fail in spite of doing their best, because a parent’s unfinished internal work will be felt by the child. And so, in an earnest attempt at righteous Christian parenting, the emotional wounds of my German ancestry were visited on my Grandmother, my mother, and then on me.
In Christianity the great evil to overcome is sin, and this is done by growing in faith and righteousness until you no longer have any desire to act on unholy impulse. Sin encompasses all action or inaction that runs contrary to the will of God. It’s a central concept in all Western doctrine. When I began to learn about Buddhism I was beyond confused to discover that Buddhist theology does not emphasize the Western idea of sin. How could there be no such thing as sin?
Buddhism does have a moral code. There is a universal karmic law that dictates what is good and what is bad. But the act of doing bad things, what a Christian would call sinning, is not the great evil that humanity must conquer in Eastern religion. It’s a bit of an afterthought. What matters to the Buddhist is not the specific actions you take, but the consequences of those actions.