Before I start, here is a little Feed Forward:
My Mom and I get along swimmingly. The comments below are restricted to this One issue between us. Also,there are slight bits of religious sarcasm in this post. No offence meant.

This afternoon I had a conversation with my mother who lives in Jamaica. She had been hit with a sudden inspiration. Why didn't she make the arrangements for my grandson (her great-grandson's)"Blessing" from down there, before she came up for her annual visit?

A little background: my mom lives most of the year in JA, and comes up to Toronto usually in late spring, staying till summer ends. She is a Seventh Day Adventist...a fairly committed one as are most of my large extended family. SDAs do not "christen" babies as is common in say, the Catholic faith. They do what is called a Dedication; a ceremony where the family members attend church together and gather around the baby with the Pastor who prays for the baby and asks God's blessings on the child. Sounds good. The only issue is that there is a component to the ceremony wherein the mother, father and other close relatives need to promise to raise the child in the ways of the church. This is fine if you make that promise sincerely and mean to keep it.
A little more background: my son and his wife are NOT Seventh Day Adventist, nor do they subscribe to the tenets of the faith. Respectful, yes, but not subscribers.
My mom knows this. Yet, every so often she gets into this Mood...this Fit, where she is determined to get us to "see the light", break us down, exhaust us, so we can finally admit that Jesus is God, He died for our sins and through Him and only Him can the Kingdom of Heaven be attained, etc...... No matter how many conversations we have she will not retain any of my clear, thoughtful responses to her views. Whenever we have a talk like this, she behaves as if she is hearing me for the first time. It is totally crazy making.
So this afternoon, she calls and offers to make the baby dedication arrangements. To be fair, my son and daughter in law DID go along with the whole church dedication thing with their first child. So, she was not totally out of order by thinking that she would get the pleasure of seeing her second great grandson dedicated to the SDA Lord in this way. I responded by letting her know that I would surely speak with the parents and they would get back to her but that I was fairly sure they were not planning to do the dedication this time around. Getting indignant, she asks me why and I answered her honestly that they simply do not believe in this Thing as a Necessary Thing to do. She asks me ""Why don't they believe!? Why CAN'T they just BELIEVE?!"
What's the answer to this? They cant believe because they just cant. Or to put it quite frankly, because God doesn't want them to! That what I believe.
Anyway, what ensues after that is her questioning Me vehemently to make sure that I am not an Atheist, the worst possible thing you can be...which I am not....not that there's anything wrong with that.....
I try so hard to keep my voice clam and loving 'cause what I am telling her (over and over...) is that my religion is LOVE; that what I truly believe is that all religions have this as their core message. But that we have surely perverted religion to mean self righteousness and hatred in so many ways. But I am preaching LOVE and need to sound loving. I hear my mother's voice getting tighter with a thread of hysteria running through it. [To be honest, my own son told me today that he hates the tinny, shrill way I speak to them when I am mad...whatever...that's a whole other ball game....]
She is deathly afraid that I will be heading to Hell when I die and well, according to her belief system, she's right. I am hell-bound. If not for the countless number of major "sins" I have committed this week alone, then my non belief in the J Man as my Personal Saviour is enough to buy me a one way ticket to the Hot Zone.
It takes a lot of effort on my part (and probably hers too) to maintain an even keel during these conversations. I know she is worried about my soul...the Eternal nature of which I do believe in. She will never accept my mixed bag of spiritual beliefs. Her faith teaches that Salvation is the only goal worth striving for and the only path to that can be nothing less than a full scale dunk into the holy waters of SDAism. To show that she is not 100% intolerable to ALL religious beliefs different from her own, she did tell me last year (in our '08 Religion Discussion) that she would "even accept it" if I chose to attend a "Sunday church", so long as I was washed in the blood of the Lamb (you know who that is...) I think it is darned flexible minded of me to remain tolerant of her intolerance. She loves me dearly. I know this. I gotta keep this fact at the front of my head and on the tip of my tongue when we speak about religion. I love her too. But does her love for me have to be directly proportionate to the amount of irritation she causes me during these conversations?