Getting My Religion From Facebook

     I grew up surrounded by a lot of good, god fearing people.  These days, I mainly see them on Facebook, except on Wednesdays and Sundays when they're at church and I'm not.  But growing up, I was one of them.  Catholics on the left, Baptists on the right, and me sitting in the back pew of the United Methodist church seeing how many cuss words I could string together in one sentence.
     I've been uttering that sentence again lately--every time I log onto Facebook and find a big old revival tent set up on my homepage.
     I'm part of the new demographic--the 50 or older Facebook user.  Or, as I like to call us, Facebook users with less than 100 friends. We must be a discriminating group, because I see friend lists of 48 and 67 and 12 (take note, Robert Sloan).  When I signed up, my goal was to break 100.
     But I had my rules.  Don't embarrass my daughters by befriending their friends. Don't befriend old boyfriends.  Or their wives. Don't befriend anyone who might say, "Jeanne who?"  Don't befriend anyone who might want to chat on a regular basis.  Because, really, I just want to lurk and look at your pictures.  There's only one rule that I backed away from.  It was the one that didn't let me befriend anyone who I might turn down a different aisle from if I saw them at the local IGA grocery store.  That one left me languishing at about  10.
     I ended up with a group of friends heavy on people from my hometown--a small, Southern Illinois town that sits just outside of the unofficial boundaries of the Bible Belt. But, if my Facebook page is any indication, somebody needs to move that boundary due North, posthaste, because I can't log on without a flock of old friends quoting me scripture and lifting me up with prayer.
     Not to mention sending me personal "Messages from God."
     I don't know if anyone else gets these, but they show up on my wall in a picture of a blue sky, with "Message from God" written in white clouds, followed by a pithy little message. Morgan Freeman's voice booms out in my head every time I see one.  "MESSAGE FROM GOD!!!!"  It's a little intimidating.  The other day the message said, "God gives us a clean sheet of paper every morning to write on.  It's up to us what we put on it."  That little missive put this blog post on the back burner for quite some time.
     It's beginning to irritate me.  Almost to the point where I look forward to the posts telling me how to win a free iPad.  Because I get a lot of those too. My Facebook friends also seem to be a little gullible.  Not that I'm suggesting a link between gullibility and religion.  I'm just saying.
     I'm more of a skeptic.  Particularly about religion.
     I trace it to my childhood. My best friend back then was my next door neighbor, Donald. We got along most of the time, but occasionally he'd cheat at hopscotch and I'd hit him with a stick. He'd run home crying, and five minutes later I'd get pulled over to his house to apologize.  The next day, sure enough, he'd hit me back.  But come Saturday, he'd get to go to confession, say two Hail Mary's, and be forgiven.
     "Whoah!" I'd whine. "What's with that?  I'm the one that got hit with the stick."  It hardly seemed fair.  Particularly to us Methodists who didn't have access to a confessional.
     As we got a little older and quit hitting each other, we'd sit on my front porch and play all day Monopoly games.  Donald slowly took my money while telling me how I was going to be stuck in Limbo for all of eternity since I wasn't Catholic.  I kind of believed him since we Methodists were pretty laid back compared to the Catholics.  But I knew something was up when he told me that even the Baptists couldn't get out of Limbo. For my money, the Baptists deserved a place in heaven a whole lot more than the non-apologetic Catholics. Which isn't to say that the Baptists didn't have their own problems since their eternity, wherever it might be, was going to feel pretty endless without any music or dancing.
     I think the Catholics eventually backed away from the whole Limbo business, which makes me happy. Still, it's unsettling that it took so long. And, personally, I think they closed Limbo because it just got a little more popular than heaven.  It has me worried that some day they'll decide to close purgatory too.  And I really hope they don't, because I think I'd get along with a lot of the people there.
     Not that it helped me a lot back then though, since, according to Donald, I was facing two separate damnations--I wasn't Catholic and I wasn't baptized.  "Double damned," he gloated.
     I'm a little safer these days because my parents finally got around to baptizing me.   But not until I was 13 and none too happy to be standing next to a screaming baby in front of every Methodist in town. My pink corduroy jumper was the perfect compliment to my red face.  Part of me understood my parents' thinking--that something as important as baptism shouldn't be done until I was old enough to understand it.   But I was 13.  I didn't understand anything.  Especially why they thought it was a good idea to let me spend an hour curling my hair that morning when they knew someone was going to drop water on it. But, also, how baptism could be so darn important  if they felt perfectly comfortable leaving me unsaved and unprotected for 13 years.
     It was all pretty confusing, and I eventually resolved that confusion by walking away--got up out of that back pew and moved just far enough away to get out from under the Bible Belt that encircled my little town so tightly.
     My Facebook friends have mostly stayed put. And while they seem to have maintained clarity on the whole religion business, I'm still languishing in my own personal limbo, trying to figure out how so many people could ever fit into heaven anyway.
     Sometimes I think that my problem is that I don't pray enough.  Because I don't really pray at all.  Well..., occasionally I'll pray when I'm in one of my own foxholes of trouble.  Like when I had pimples in junior high. "God answers all prayers," they said.  But, apparently, in his own sweet time, because that prayer wasn't answered until well into my adult years.
      I'm pretty sure that if my Facebook friends got pimples, they'd be lifting those pock marks right up with prayer.  Someone with a 48 hour bug last week had 37 "lifting you up with prayers" on her wall. I felt like yelling. "GET OUT THE VICKS.  LOAD UP ON TYLENOL! Has anyone heard of PENICILLIN?."  But I ended up saying something lame like, "Wishing you well." I think I heard snickering when I pressed send. "That girl just never got it."
      Although I'm certainly getting it on Facebook, with a homepage that feels like the new "front door" for the devout.  No one's converted me yet, but they have got me thinking.  I can't even press "SAVED" on my computer without thinking, "Nope, not yet."
     I know I might feel more comfortable if I quit befriending the bible thumpers.  But I really wanted to break that glass ceiling of 100 friends without breaking any of my rules, none of which mentioned religion.  If I excluded everyone likely to be vocal about religion, I'd have less friends than god has commandments.
     And it's not like I have anything against my faithful friends.  They're good people.  I ate a lot of fish sticks at their Formica tables and we had some good times in those back pews. There's even a part of me that envies their certainty and believes they might be right.  Or--like the eight year old who's beginning to doubt Santa--a part of me that wants to believe. Just in case.
     If only I could get over that "heaven has to be awfully crowded" problem.  Because I really hate crowds.
     So I'll keep right on befriending the devout even though it means skipping over parables and scrolling past scripture to get to their pictures.  After all, in their own way, they really have lifted me up with prayer.  I climbed through that glass ceiling of 100 friends one god fearing friend at a time.
    "Godspeed," as they say.