As the Spirit Moves You

I read that Sarah Palin was baptized as an infant as Catholic, then raised in the Assembly of God Church. I'm reminded of my mother and her lovable but wacky sister, Aunt Zora, who were raised as staunch Catholics:

In the old days in our rural area, "tent revivals" were common. These were large tents pitched on the outskirt of town by traveling evangelical-Protestant ministers for the purpose of conducting a few nights of spiritual-revival preaching for the locals. One night, my future mother, then a teenager, and her boyfriend wandered with curiosity into the back of such a tent during the preaching. The service was of the "holy roller" type with the preacher shouting, and the congregation shouting with upraised hands, and some members literally rolling in the aisle. "You have to catch the Holy Ghost! You have to catch the Holy Ghost!" the preacher kept screaming. My mother had a brown paper bag with her empty from the cookies they had eaten. She filled the bag with her breath, then began waving the bag in the air while shouting, "I've caught Him! I've caught Him! Look, I've caught the Holy Ghost!" The boy and my mother were, of course, promptly and angrily expelled from the tent and the grounds.

Years later, my mother was ill one Sunday, so she asked Aunt Zora to take me and my brother, who were young boys at the time, to church. Aunt Zora didn't have her car, so she called a taxi for us. When we entered the cab, she told the driver, "Take us to church, please." "The Catholic church?" the driver asked. "Is there any other?" Aunt Zora retorted.

If my mother and Aunt Zora would've even heard of the word "ecumenism," they probably would've thought it was a strange disease or the name of a new planet.

-Old Doc