Losing her religion -- and finding herself, ZT

Losing her religion -- and finding herself

Friday, November 09, 2007
BY PETER FILICHIA
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW JERSEY STAGE

And to think that when she was a kid, Julia Sweeney wanted to be a nun
Sweeney, 48, now has a much different take on religion. On Friday at the South Orange Performing Arts Center, she\'ll talk about how she became an atheist in her one-woman show titled Letting Go of God.
I called it that so people wouldn\'t have any unpleasant surprises if they attended, Sweeney says on the phone from her Hollywood home. When I started doing the show three years ago, I had a screamer in the audience. So, like a movie that advertises it XXX-rating, I warn people in advance.
Some of Sweeney\'s material comes from her cover-to-cover reading of the Bible.
I don\'t think anyone can read that book and think it\'s true, she says. Even Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell the same stories in different ways. I\'m a storyteller who shapes stories, so I\'m sure they did, too. After all, telling stories was the movies of their times.
While Sweeney was raised a Roman Catholic, she is not taking aim at the religion. I\'m not annoyed with the Catholic church, or disgruntled from a bad experience, she says. When my friends tell me about being beaten by nuns or abused by priests, all I can say is, \'Nothing like that ever happened to me.\'
Many unfortunate things did happen to Sweeney, though, as she detailed in her previous one-woman show, which made it to Broadway in 1996. It also included the name of the Supreme Being in its title: God Said \'Ha!\' In that show, she talked about her rise to fame on Saturday Night Live in 1990, her blissful marriage and lovely new home.
By 1994, though, she was divorced from the show and her husband. She wasn\'t alone, however -- because her brother was diagnosed with cancer, so he and her parents came to live with her. Then Sweeney got cancer, too, and her brother died.
The comedian says that these circumstances themselves didn\'t cause her to abandon her faith.
At the time, she recalls, I said, \'This is what God has in store for me. \'God will decide. It\'s all up to God.\' I saw God as a friendly uncle who\'s as surprised as you that a bad thing happened. Then I realized that my religiosity was making me passive. Now, not believing in God has made me more proactive about myself.
It did cause a rift with her staunch Catholic parents. Ironically, Sweeney\'s father played a priest in her 1994 film, It\'s Pat, which showcased her androgynous character from Saturday Night Live.
Dad has since died, but for a while, he and my mother weren\'t speaking to me. She still doesn\'t want a daughter who\'s an atheist, Sweeney says. She cares about God from a social point of view. \'The Morgans are expecting to see you at 10 o\'clock mass,\' she\'ll say, and I\'ll tell her, \'I can\'t pretend. If I went to church and there is a God, wouldn\'t he punish me for going and not believing?\'
However, others have been more accepting.
I\'ve received thousands of letters and e-mails, and could make a book of people\'s stories on their loss of faith, she says. One man who wrote was a priest who said that he agreed with me, but that he was 62, and what was he going to do now -- work at the post office? He said, \'I\'m helping people -- I think.\'
Sweeney does want to stress that becoming an atheist hasn\'t been an automatically soothing experience.
In a way, I\'m mourning my loss of faith. I think it\'s better to not believe, but I don\'t trivialize religion or faith. I totally understand why people believe.
Peter Filichia may be reached at [e-mail] or at [phone].

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