I think when it all comes down to it, most every religion (and philosophy often seen as religion) has two things in common. One is, there's something greater than ourselves out there. Two, you really ought to treat other people decently.
When it comes to 'something greater', everyone seems to differ on what it is. One God, many gods, both, a cosmic collective energy, spirits or energy in everything around us. I once knocked some bark off a tree by accident, and when I touched the spot underneath, it was warm from the sun and I understood, REALLY understood, that I was in contact with another living thing. I was once lying on a bench next to a still lake, and the perfect reflection of the far shore looked like an odd mossy tree, and for a few moments I was aware that Something Big was all around me.
But, when I think of "God", I still go back to the loving father God from my childhood. I'm not into the "God doesn't have a gender" concept, and it kind of irritates me when people make a huge point of believing in that concept themselves. But my mom worked and my dad stayed at home with us kids, so I got years of a loving, nurturing, protective father. Combining that with how I was taught Jesus talked about God, I had no problems whatsoever translating those properties into some all-loving father figure.
But another property of a father is to teach your children to walk on their own and to let them be their own people. So I think of that, too. A God who cares deeply about us, and understands that we are who we are, we need to make mistakes to grow, and that we're not perfect and never will be. And that's okay.
Part two - the Golden Rule. There's a variation of it in pretty much every religion and philosphy. My favorite is the Bible quotation I learned as a kid, 1 John 4:7-8. "Dear friends, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone that loves is born of God, and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is Love." That there, THAT verse, is the one I wish more people would use and spread. If I have one thing left guiding how I act as I try to figure out what I really believe, that's it.
Someday, if I see some kind of hate protest, especially ones trying to use the Bible as proof they're right, I hope I have the courage to counter with that.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Let's start from the beginning
I was born and raised Catholic. I was very proud of this as a kid. I took being an altar girl very seriously, dressed up as Saint Clare of Assisi for Halloween in 4th grade, went to Catholic school from 6th grade all the way through 12th grade. Up until I was 22 or so, I would make sure I got to Mass, even if I was too sick/depressed/busy to do anything else. Now, though, I haven't been to Mass since the day after I got married, except maybe once or twice when visiting my parents.
I don't know when I started questioning things.
I remember when I was studying for my Confirmation in 8th grade, I briefly wondered why no one taught us about other religions before expecting us to commit ourselves forever to one. There were brief moments of resentment that something that was supposed to be a choice from our hearts was a requirement pushed on us by our families and community. But I never acted on it, and thought that I really wanted it.
I remember 10th grade Theology class. The first half was Church history, the second half was morality. That's when I first learned that the list of what was and wasn't right was malleable and had changed over time. That's when I learned that Hell wasn't a place of fire and pain and torture, but rather eternal separation from God. (I did have to wonder how that could be when God is everywhere.)
I remember 12th grade Theology, when Sister Marian was my teacher. Learning World Religion from an Irish nun is second only to learning British Literature from an Irish nun for hilarity. I will never, ever forget that Jains take great pains to never harm any living thing because she sternly told us that playing a practical joke one by putting meat in their food was a Very Bad Idea. And then...the unit on Islam. I was blown away to find that Muslims, who I'd only ever learned about in history as enemies of Christians (and as people who had science in the Dark Ages), worshipped the same God we did. (To give a little perspective compared to today's hyper-awareness of Muslims, this was back in 2000, and in the Deep South, when it was a Huge Deal that there turned out to be enough Muslims in our county to buy a house and convert it into a small mosque.) I immediately wanted to know why the hell they could possibly be evil if they believed in God too - especially when I learned that they thought Jesus was a holy prophet. If the Jews, who didn't accept Jesus at all, weren't evil, how could Musilms be?
That was probably the greatest moment of epiphany among a lot of smaller ones. Once I graduated and left home, heading to the NY metro area after living in Southern suburbia for seven years, I slowly started realizing that there was thing after thing I didn't agree with the Church teachings about.
Like gay rights - after learning about cultures where one man having as many wives as he could support was normal, or brothers sharing a wife because of meager resources, or population imbalances so great there weren't enough wives for all the men, or women being in charge and stealing life energy from men (aka, sleeping with whoever they damn well pleased) to make children, the idea of 'one man, one woman' seemed like it was just a European cultural thing.
Like the idea that submitting to rape was only 'okay' if you did everything in your power to stop it - fought, screamed, everything you could POSSIBLY do, and if you could have done more but didn't, you're going to Hell. The women's self-defense classes in college put a stop to THAT real quick!
Individuals annoyed me further. The priest of the parish closest to where my fiance lived could NOT give a sermon without somehow mentioning that porn was the biggest evil in society. Didn't matter how it started, the end of the homily was about porn. Except for the week he decided to complain that the evil book "The DaVinci Code" was a best-seller but the book he'd written about faith wasn't getting any attention. The priest of the parish nearest where I live now is a really friendly guy, and he's the one that married me and my husband. But the day after my wedding, when my whole family came to Mass with me, he let a few racist remarks slip into his homily, and my mother told me she was surprised and disappointed I was going to that church. I wanted to die of embarassment because I'd told them how much I enjoyed the guy's sermons.
And that's the point where I gave up on church. I still believed, but what I believed didn't match up with what I was supposed to believe. So I kind of drifted, and absorbed information from my college classes about the details of history, and cultures, and how religions shaped cultures and then nearby cultures borrowed and adapted...I was interested, but I didn't know what to do with it.
Then my sister and I somehow had a long talk about it, and we discovered that despite the different influences we'd had, we'd come to the exact same conclusions. It dawned on me that if the two of us could do it, maybe others did too. Maybe my drifting and questioning and knowing I didn't know the whole truth but wanting to was itself a form of religion.
Maybe the only thing that stuck from high school theology was that intelligent, thoughtful questioning isn't in and of itself a bad thing.
I don't know when I started questioning things.
I remember when I was studying for my Confirmation in 8th grade, I briefly wondered why no one taught us about other religions before expecting us to commit ourselves forever to one. There were brief moments of resentment that something that was supposed to be a choice from our hearts was a requirement pushed on us by our families and community. But I never acted on it, and thought that I really wanted it.
I remember 10th grade Theology class. The first half was Church history, the second half was morality. That's when I first learned that the list of what was and wasn't right was malleable and had changed over time. That's when I learned that Hell wasn't a place of fire and pain and torture, but rather eternal separation from God. (I did have to wonder how that could be when God is everywhere.)
I remember 12th grade Theology, when Sister Marian was my teacher. Learning World Religion from an Irish nun is second only to learning British Literature from an Irish nun for hilarity. I will never, ever forget that Jains take great pains to never harm any living thing because she sternly told us that playing a practical joke one by putting meat in their food was a Very Bad Idea. And then...the unit on Islam. I was blown away to find that Muslims, who I'd only ever learned about in history as enemies of Christians (and as people who had science in the Dark Ages), worshipped the same God we did. (To give a little perspective compared to today's hyper-awareness of Muslims, this was back in 2000, and in the Deep South, when it was a Huge Deal that there turned out to be enough Muslims in our county to buy a house and convert it into a small mosque.) I immediately wanted to know why the hell they could possibly be evil if they believed in God too - especially when I learned that they thought Jesus was a holy prophet. If the Jews, who didn't accept Jesus at all, weren't evil, how could Musilms be?
That was probably the greatest moment of epiphany among a lot of smaller ones. Once I graduated and left home, heading to the NY metro area after living in Southern suburbia for seven years, I slowly started realizing that there was thing after thing I didn't agree with the Church teachings about.
Like gay rights - after learning about cultures where one man having as many wives as he could support was normal, or brothers sharing a wife because of meager resources, or population imbalances so great there weren't enough wives for all the men, or women being in charge and stealing life energy from men (aka, sleeping with whoever they damn well pleased) to make children, the idea of 'one man, one woman' seemed like it was just a European cultural thing.
Like the idea that submitting to rape was only 'okay' if you did everything in your power to stop it - fought, screamed, everything you could POSSIBLY do, and if you could have done more but didn't, you're going to Hell. The women's self-defense classes in college put a stop to THAT real quick!
Individuals annoyed me further. The priest of the parish closest to where my fiance lived could NOT give a sermon without somehow mentioning that porn was the biggest evil in society. Didn't matter how it started, the end of the homily was about porn. Except for the week he decided to complain that the evil book "The DaVinci Code" was a best-seller but the book he'd written about faith wasn't getting any attention. The priest of the parish nearest where I live now is a really friendly guy, and he's the one that married me and my husband. But the day after my wedding, when my whole family came to Mass with me, he let a few racist remarks slip into his homily, and my mother told me she was surprised and disappointed I was going to that church. I wanted to die of embarassment because I'd told them how much I enjoyed the guy's sermons.
And that's the point where I gave up on church. I still believed, but what I believed didn't match up with what I was supposed to believe. So I kind of drifted, and absorbed information from my college classes about the details of history, and cultures, and how religions shaped cultures and then nearby cultures borrowed and adapted...I was interested, but I didn't know what to do with it.
Then my sister and I somehow had a long talk about it, and we discovered that despite the different influences we'd had, we'd come to the exact same conclusions. It dawned on me that if the two of us could do it, maybe others did too. Maybe my drifting and questioning and knowing I didn't know the whole truth but wanting to was itself a form of religion.
Maybe the only thing that stuck from high school theology was that intelligent, thoughtful questioning isn't in and of itself a bad thing.
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