prev # Wednesday, Jun. 30, 2004 3:49 p.m. # next

A long time coming

One of Faith's (the Buddhist nun - yes that is really her name!) primary occupations as a nun was to be mindful. Mindful of absolutely everything she did, felt, or thought. At meals, she would think "wanting to take a bite, seeing dish, seeing spoon, lifting spoon, putting spoon in mouth, chewing, chewing, chewing, swallowing" etc etc. All the time, all day. In The Purpose-Driven Life, the author tells us to do everything for God, to honor Her :) with every activity (eating, washing dishes, exercising, etc). This appears to be essentially the same thing, with a quite different focus. Either simply noticing and increasing your awareness, or noticing and sending that somewhere else. This fascinates me.

As I wonder about my own faith, I ponder which makes more sense to me. I find that I like the idea of offering all that I do to something outside of myself. Being aware is a start, but I need more than that. It may be that I don't sufficiently understand Buddhism. I dunno. It's a toughie. In any case, believing in God was never something I considered until the past couple of years. These days, I like and can get passionate about the idea of a Creator. I like thinking that this earth, this universe, everything was created. That thought is more interesting and inspiring to me than thinking it all just happened somehow, in chaos. Don't get me wrong, I still go for the big bang and evolution and all that (I haven't gone off the deep end here, folks), but I like thinking that there's something beyond all that, making it happen, "seeing" all of time in one glance. It's a new concept for me. Maybe that's why I like it so much. I've been reading the Narnia books, and recently read The Magician's Nephew, the story of how Aslan created Narnia. It was damn near the most gorgeous thing I've ever read. Anyway, my only real problem with believing in God is that I can't seem to divorce the word itself from the American pop-culture image of "God": the old white guy with a beard stuff. I simply can't take that image seriously; it even offends me. I'm slowly moving away from that automatic association, but it's making me realize how deeply ingrained certain images can be with certain words, particularly if those words have no personal meaning. Growing up, the word "God" had no other meaning to me than that old white guy, and that's hard to ditch. In the Madeleine L'Engle book I read a couple months ago, she uses the pronoun "el" instead of he or she for God. I love that - it makes so mcuh more sense to me to avoid gender-classifying. I wish it was more widespread. All the "He"s in church really bother me.

Lately I've found myself wanting something to believe in, looking for a way to focus my life. It's not like I need a reason to be a good person; through making some big mistakes and just plain growing up, I've found a strong motivation within myself to be as giving and selfless as I can. I never really succeed, but I spend more and more time trying. I don't need a heaven/hell thing to scare me into that. But I do find myself looking for somewhere to direct that urge to do good work, instead of out into the void. I'd rather be the best person I can be "for God" than for just myself, for others, or for a vague "making the world a better place" idea (which is good, just not enough).

This is not something I talk about. At all. With anyone. Many of my friends and family being indifferent or less-than-enthusiastic about such things makes me very quiet and private about it. But for some reason I woke up today wanting to express all of this, and explain to my friends what I've been thinking lately.

For my entire life, I've been neutral, with an open-minded but non-committal world view. That served me well up to a point, but I've changed a bit.

So that's that. If you've stuck with me this far, thanks. You're in the home stretch. This is a bigger part of my life than I realized until I put it in words and discovered how much I've gone through in the past year or so. It kinda got started last summer at the Mount Republic Chapel of Peace - up in the mountains of Silver Gate, Montana - where I went to sing in the choir and stayed. Almost every Sunday, all summer! I loved that place. I was inspired there. I've gone to a few churches since then, and many are way too stuffy and boring, but it's been an interesting exploration. I've come to feel that if you're gonna go to church and say you believe in something, believe STRONGLY. I HATE this lukewarm, I'm-here-because-it-looks-good-but-I-have-no-passion-for-it bullshit. What's the point of that?? Maybe cause nobody ever made me go to chruch I just can't understand going when you just don't care. To me, there's no point to faith unless it's powerfully moving to you.

So yeah. Wow. Sometimes you don't know what you think until you put it in writing. Didn't mean to say this much, but there 'tis.

I'm gonna do something else now. Thanks for "listening".

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