Recently in religion Category

We grow in fits and starts. 

The weather is amazing this week. Today we all wore shorts and t-shirts. I broke out my $1 new pair of flip-flops and we spent most of the day outdoors. This means that every single errand and household chore takes the back burner. This includes blogging. I simply can not squander that much sunshine. Despite sun block applied in the morning before the park, our winter paled skin (even Sage's) are all a bit flushed about the faces. 

My religion--if it can even be called that--is a patchwork quilt of wisdom, words, experiences, and feelings that I add to as I grow older. I don't have a church, a temple, a particular creed, holy law, book, or list of commandments. It's a feeling in my gut, a moral compass meets insatiable scholar. I know in my core that there are certain rights and wrongs and truths, but I'm always hungry to learn more and add to what I believe and what is important to me. 

I remember being pregnant with River and sitting at the laundromat as I was often wont to do having no washer or drier and being a stickler for clean clothing. There was always a well thumbed stack of magazines on one of the side tables. The parenting and mothering and babies, babies, babies magazines were suddenly flip-able. I was soon to join the club of reproducing and raising young. Any first time mom is proud of her bulging gut--her membership card of a grotesquely enlarged uterus filled with fluid and blossoming life.

I was probably contently rubbing my belly as I read through a parenting magazine....that is until I read a disturbing article on how parenting does not make parents happy. In fact, studies of happiness before children verses after children showed that parents were depressed, stressed, over worked, and horribly unhappy after having children. Who wants to hear that when a baby is an incoming like a projectile missile? One that blows up in your face.

But life really can be split into two sections, B.C. and A.C. Before Child and After Child. Nothing is the same. You certainty will not be, can not be, will probably not even remember what it was like to not have a child but in the hazy dream-like quality of a day dream, a high, a crazy night on the town where you might have passed out in a parking garage.

Jason was telling me how fast we grew up and how completely we have changed since we had River. You can see the fault line clearly forming in the weeks after he was born. As my attention went from my husband to solely rest on my son and Jason became weighed down with the responsibilities of providing for a child and being yanked between that need and the need to be home with that same child. We circled River, occasionally crashing together, remembering to embrace to ask how the other person was doing, to really look at each other and see.

Children must be, hands-down, the hardest part of a marriage. Here you have created something you love more than anything else. You created it together because you love each other so much. You created this child from pure love and want nothing more than to continue to feed it with everything you are, have, can, should, and imagine you ought to. It's very easy to neglect the love that came first, the one that created the child. To go from being a partnership working together to two people working apart for the same cause. Occasionally raising tired eyes to a face that used to hold much more regard and thinking, "Ah, yes you. I forgot about you."


I'm the annoying optimist you want to throw things at. Shit, I used to despise optimists when I wasn't one--when I was a sour pessimist with a pin in hand waiting to pop my and others' balloons. But steadily I've been moving towards optimism--first forced, than tried on like shoes, then held onto like a raft when lost at sea. Bryan dying has made me a stronger person. Which seems horribly wrong, doesn't it? Unfair. Like dancing on someone's grave. But really think about it. It took that pain, that knowledge, this never ending hole that is his absence to make me look around and fiercely want to treasure what I have been given. I have something to prove. That something is that I want my grief to transcend myself. I want Bryan's death to mean more than pain and anger and a pointless waste. I want his death to move like ripples in a pond, through me, to make the world I touch somehow better. As if I could spread my love for him instead of letting it turn me inwards--to my own sadness. Because nothing so good should become so tainted because it has changed--a horrible, unfair, agonizing change, true. But love just the same.


So blame it on my optimism that I can look at my husband and assure him that things will get better and easier (and believe it). Believe that I embrace my moment in time because I know it will change and fade. My children will grow and I will miss those days when they cuddled in my arms, threw tantrums, pissed themselves in public, and cried with fever. I will miss this time, I know I will. Sometimes it is harder for Jason to feel that. He might know it, but he can't feel it as clearly as I can. He's more logical. More in the moment. More fixed in time.  

I don't believe that the changes we have gone through means love has changed. Though I am older and wiser and have experienced more of life, I am still that same girl who flung myself into my husband's arms shrieking every time he walked in the door. I can summon up those memories and feel what I felt then and in that way I still am then.

I feel like time if fluid. That my memories make that so. That somewhere I am nineteen kissing Jason till my lips feel raw. That somewhere my brother is jumping off the roof into the pool while my mother isn't home--against her orders not to ever do that again. That somewhere my father and mother stare down at my newborn face until their necks ache.

I believe that there is usually some seed of good, of great, of grand amidst all the crap that might of spawned from it. If I can remember that, I can move on with faith that more good things are to come.

And I know they are.

Do you?

River learned a few new things during our travels. The first being that it is okay to run away from his mother in airports to flirt with old women. The second is how great it is to hit his mother in the face. The third was that Baptist churches involve a lot of clapping.

We arrived in Georgia in the early hours feeling quite hung over with a baby that had finally passed out for the second time after waking up in D.C. He awoke just in time to harass us for the expensive airport Mexican food we had bought to split in the two seconds before we had to board our next flight.

Georgia is as remembered. Not quite as cold. Not quite as cloudy with slightly different looking greenery and a suspicious number of Waffle House signs rising yellow into the sky. We enjoyed light jackets, grits, and visiting with my husband's mother and elder brother. His twin brother (a whole 4 minutes older than Jason) is a giant turd and did not come.

Perhaps the most interesting part was attending a Baptist Church Mass. The first mass I have attended since I decided that 1. I didn't believe in the Christian/Jewish/Muslim god 2. That it was morally wrong to attend a church service I otherwise enjoyed if I was pretending to believe in something I didn't.

As background- I was raised Catholic. Roman Catholic. Made my communion. Sat with a nun and prayed round a rosary, dressed as a small bride to Christ, and prayed on my knees before bed every night. Religion was never forced down my throat. In fact, I was dosed in a good dose of liberal thinking that was at odds with Catholicism so that I pushed against it and found it just didn't fit me right. I thought maybe I didn't believe in god at all. Then I, OF MY OWN TEENAGE VOLITION, began to attend a Methodist Church and sing in the choir with a good friend of mine. I really enjoyed this and found it gave me a good deal of spiritual healing. I continued this, OF MY OWN VOLITION, in my college town at another church. But religion kept scrapping on me even as I tried to shove my arms in. Like attempting to fit yourself into a coat three times too damn small. I concluded that the God of these churches was something of a misogynistic a-hole and I didn't want anything to do with him. I still think Jesus was the man.

After a time, I felt like yelling things out while I bowed my head during prayers. I thought I was becoming disrespectful to be silently deceptive with all those believers around me. I gave up church long after I have up god. For this very reason I refuse to Baptise my son. I would find it incrediably rude to lie just to appease relations. I'm not going to tell a "holy man (or woman)" to his face that I will raise my son in a religion in which I will not. 

Still, I like church. I like the sense of people coming together for good. Although it still urks me that that good is often attributed to God when it should be attributed to one's own efforts and responsibility as a living being sharing a home with other living beings. Also- LIBERAL. So of course I'm waving the flag for women's choice and gay rights. Send me a memo when any Christain religion says it's okay for two dudes to hump each other and/or a woman to make her own choice what to do to her body and I'll reconsider a few things.

This past weekend I went to a black Baptist church. I was one of maybe 4 other white/whiter people present. I LIKED it. I liked sitting there and seeing all those brown faces.  I liked the swaying, clapping children of the choir. I liked the strange candence of the preacher's voice, the shouted out 'Amens', the vocal agreements from the congregation, and the sweat that ran down the preacher's brow.  It was beautiful.

People need something to unite them, I understand. Some people need God to focus and add a meaning to their lives, a goal, a way to be. There is a stronge goodness in religion that has always drawn me. Soothed me. I've often by envious of faith. But now I'm just glad that those who have it are satisified. I was content with just spending time with family. I see their God in love. I don't need to pray to him. He isn't listening. That good is in each of us.

AMEN!  

Nothing makes me feel more queasy than a Christian preaching right and wrong and dammit, I love going to Christian church services. What I don't like is someone pointing at someone else and saying "You ARE WRONG and I AM RIGHT. You and going to HELL and I am being A GOOD PERSON, because A BOOK TOLD ME TOO. I am going to heaven."

As an ex-christian myself I know what it is like to have faith in god. A faith I stopped having as I grew up. I can't say enough that I didn't stop believing in "God" out of rebellion, anger, or bitterness. I certainly am not pointing at Christians and laughing because they believe in something I don't. In fact, I respect the peace people find in their religions and the simple love they share in a church service. For a time going to masses soothed something in me and I often tried not to cry at the gentle words and that feeling of unity that happens when loving, good people sit in one space and their collective prayers brew like a storm in the rafters. There is power and energy in religion.

But it is wrong to point your finger at others and tell them they are wrong. It is horrible to raise yourself above others. The wicked power of religion is that it easily convinces others that they are BETTER. Think of all the atrocities done in the name of Gods. It is wrong to despise women that have abortions and men and women who have sex and loving relationships with members of their own sex. Why? (because Autumn says so?) No, because these people are human like YOU and it isn't right to shove people into categories of right and wrong.

Do you know what your God really wants you to do? Do you know what Jesus died for?

Sometimes I think people forget that God=love. It is as simple as that. You want to claim to be a good Christian or even a GOOD PERSON than love and stop hating.

Peace, yo.

Honesty I don't really believe in God and I haven't for a long time.

I believe that we should strive for good, help the community, and better ourselves because we are all human, and capable of higher thought. (though most people don't seem to be :P) I'm all into the love nature thing and each other. But I don't believe in some all mighty being that goes through the lists of dead and says whose heaven or hell bound. No, I really don't believe in God or the teaching of the bibles. I go to church as an unbeliever. I love the faith of others, their commitment, the goodness they show. That is why I go to church, to feel that faith beating against my skin. So their is my confession. I don't believe in a God but I have been trying to ever since I lost my faith when I grew up. But it won't happen, ever.

Eat an apple that fits in the palm of my hand
The skin breaks and floods my mouth

sing sing singing in church. My white robe, the green sash. My arm aching from holding up that damn book. Sing out to the stained glass window. The folds of the robes in red and purple. Feeling like I'm going to faint, my belly pressed against the wood. The congregation far far below looking up at me. The glass is so deep, the red and the purple. The organ pulses sound under my feet.
Sitting on the stone steps, watching the Virginia Creepers spotted red and green, trembling over the walls. The world is awash with colors.

Sing until I shake from trying to hold the note. Sing and brush my eyes around the crowd trying to find faces that are not there.

Phone call from Karen sitting in the window. Sound of her voice so fimilar and so different.

Cursing in the hallway, in a frenzy, pacing. Flinging myself on the bed and crying with my face to the wall and my knees drawn up, trying to push it all out. A few quick breaths, a roll of tears over my nose and cheeks, but not enough. Never enough anymore. Why can't I just cry like I want to?

"O' Fortuna" "O' Fortune" I will listen and lay on the floor again, staring at the ceiling and waiting for me to rebecome the person I enjoy.