So, yesterday, we got up to the point of adolescent atheistic rebellion. Today let's grow out of that stage.
I began to realize in my 20s that there were no easy answers. That's when I decided that it was incredibly arrogant of me to claim to know whether there was or was not a god, and so I became an agnostic.
Then my dad died, suddenly, at the age of 61, and my belief in unbelief was seriously shaken. My dad and I had argued the night before he died, and he was still angry with me when I left the house that morning. I remember lying in bed the night after he died, praying for the first time in my life. I prayed that I might get to see my dad again someday, that this wasn't the end. I couldn't stand the thought that I'd never get a chance to try to make things right between us.
As time passed, I thought about this a lot. I was tempted to beat myself up about it. How selfish was it for me to suddenly decide to believe in god because I wanted something! But I moved past that thinking to a new place. It was not wish-fulfillment. Instead it was more like being forced to look at the reality of death. Was my dad really gone forever? Was that possible? Was that all life was about... living as long as the body machine keeps running and then dying and that's it?
Suddenly that just didn't make sense anymore, for no reason I can put my finger on, and I had this conviction that there was something out there that I could call divine.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
What about the hole, Brother?
In my adolescence, which was rather troubled, I went through an obnoxious atheist phase. This is fairly common among intelligent, rebellious teens, I suppose. I got a real kick out of telling my grandmother that there was no God. I was such a little shit.
I remember going to a funeral during that time, probably my great-aunt Bertha's. She was a cool old lady who lived to be 99 and was in pretty good shape mentally and physically until the end. Anyway, I was in the front row of the graveside seats (the plastic folding chairs, you know) enduring the preacher's remarks and probably rolling my eyes. The casket was sitting on a contraption that would lower it into the grave but all of that was covered up by drapery and astroturf.
The preacher was droning on and on about heaven and pearly gates and meeting Jesus and all the usual stuff, and as I sat there staring at the casket the wind blew from behind me and parted the draperies covering the grave. There was the hole. That was where Bertha was going. In a hole. And she was leaving a hole in our lives. And I couldn't see how all the talk about heaven was even relevant to that.
I told this story to my friend John who was a gifted, mostly out-of-control artist/singer/actor who shared my disdain for religion. He turned it into a song. What about the hooooooooooooooooooole, brother? What about the hooooooooooole? I can still picture him holding forth like a revivalist, singing about the grave. He died at the age of 21, of AIDS. That was in 1984.
Yeah, so... what about the hole?
I remember going to a funeral during that time, probably my great-aunt Bertha's. She was a cool old lady who lived to be 99 and was in pretty good shape mentally and physically until the end. Anyway, I was in the front row of the graveside seats (the plastic folding chairs, you know) enduring the preacher's remarks and probably rolling my eyes. The casket was sitting on a contraption that would lower it into the grave but all of that was covered up by drapery and astroturf.
The preacher was droning on and on about heaven and pearly gates and meeting Jesus and all the usual stuff, and as I sat there staring at the casket the wind blew from behind me and parted the draperies covering the grave. There was the hole. That was where Bertha was going. In a hole. And she was leaving a hole in our lives. And I couldn't see how all the talk about heaven was even relevant to that.
I told this story to my friend John who was a gifted, mostly out-of-control artist/singer/actor who shared my disdain for religion. He turned it into a song. What about the hooooooooooooooooooole, brother? What about the hooooooooooole? I can still picture him holding forth like a revivalist, singing about the grave. He died at the age of 21, of AIDS. That was in 1984.
Yeah, so... what about the hole?
Hmm... Unitarian? Ok!
If you know me, you know that I don't profess to be a Christian. I don't really profess to be anything but a seeker. People who have asked me what I believe usually come away confused. For awhile my husband thought I was Jewish.
I was raised outside church. I have never been baptized. My parents never talked about God, never professed any belief in God, condemned the religion they had been brought up in as coercive and narrow-minded, but they did not condemn the religious impulse. They told me that they wanted me to find my own way to religion if that was my desire when I was old enough to understand what I was getting into.
What am I getting into?!
Of course I came into contact with religion when I was a kid, via the older generation in my family, a short stint in Catholic girls' school (my parents put "unitarian" on my application to avoid uncomfortable questions), and my friends (Jewish and Methodist).
Going to Catholic school was a real cognitive dissonance and complicated my relationship with religion in a big way. I remember distinctly sitting in my first Mass, terrified, because I didn't know whether to take communion as an unbaptized heathen and thus commit a sin, or sit there while all the other kids and the teachers took communion and admit I was different from everyone else (as if that was the only way I was different!). Of course, being different is far more appalling to a kid than sin. I mean, you'll have to pay for being different immediately afterward, when the other kids can get to you. The repayment for sin, by comparison, would be somewhat delayed. It was a no-win situation. So I took communion.
I think that may have been the first time I encountered the cruelty that sometimes manifests itself in religion. I felt humiliated and rejected, and angry for having to make that choice. I'm still angry about it.
Wow.
I was raised outside church. I have never been baptized. My parents never talked about God, never professed any belief in God, condemned the religion they had been brought up in as coercive and narrow-minded, but they did not condemn the religious impulse. They told me that they wanted me to find my own way to religion if that was my desire when I was old enough to understand what I was getting into.
What am I getting into?!
Of course I came into contact with religion when I was a kid, via the older generation in my family, a short stint in Catholic girls' school (my parents put "unitarian" on my application to avoid uncomfortable questions), and my friends (Jewish and Methodist).
Going to Catholic school was a real cognitive dissonance and complicated my relationship with religion in a big way. I remember distinctly sitting in my first Mass, terrified, because I didn't know whether to take communion as an unbaptized heathen and thus commit a sin, or sit there while all the other kids and the teachers took communion and admit I was different from everyone else (as if that was the only way I was different!). Of course, being different is far more appalling to a kid than sin. I mean, you'll have to pay for being different immediately afterward, when the other kids can get to you. The repayment for sin, by comparison, would be somewhat delayed. It was a no-win situation. So I took communion.
I think that may have been the first time I encountered the cruelty that sometimes manifests itself in religion. I felt humiliated and rejected, and angry for having to make that choice. I'm still angry about it.
Wow.
Bright Sadness
So, instead of calling my blog, 40 Days (see below), I called it Bright Sadness. What the heck is Bright Sadness?
It's an expression from the Orthodox Church. I found this sermon which expresses it beautifully:
Partly I like that quote because it's got all those fancy words in it that we don't get to use every day: antimony, oxymoron, compunction. And I love the Greek word for bright sadness: charmolype. Which incidentally would be pronounced "karmoloopay". Sounds like the name for an alternative-rock music festival.
I also feel like Schmemann could have been describing my life with these words: "the sadness of my exile, the waste I have made of my life, ... the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home."
It's an expression from the Orthodox Church. I found this sermon which expresses it beautifully:
The beautiful expression, “bright sadness,” came back to me with special poignancy during Holy Week this year. In Greek the compound noun is charmolypê, variously translated “bitter joy,” “joyful mourning,” or “affliction that leads to joy.” It expresses what the Fathers of the Church call an “antinomy,” a truth that defies normal logic. The word is an oxymoron of sorts, which describes a paradoxical spiritual state characterized by a profound mingling of joy and grief. St. John of Sinai formulates the idea in the seventh step of his Ladder of Divine Ascent, where he speaks of it as “the blessed joy-grief of holy compunction.”
In his classic work, Great Lent, Fr Alexander Schmemann describes “Sad brightness” as “the sadness of my exile, of the waste I have made of my life; the brightness of God’s presence and forgiveness, the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home.”
Partly I like that quote because it's got all those fancy words in it that we don't get to use every day: antimony, oxymoron, compunction. And I love the Greek word for bright sadness: charmolype. Which incidentally would be pronounced "karmoloopay". Sounds like the name for an alternative-rock music festival.
I also feel like Schmemann could have been describing my life with these words: "the sadness of my exile, the waste I have made of my life, ... the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home."
40 Days
Originally I was going to call this blog 40 Days. But all the possible versions of 40 Days that didn't involve strange punctuation or l33tsp3ak were taken.
Why 40 Days? Because I intend this blog to be a record of a lenten journey. Well, my lenten journey. And in the Christian calendar, Lent lasts for 40 days, the days between Ash Wednesday and Easter (minus the Sundays!), the days that Jesus spent fasting and praying in the desert before his return to Jerusalem.
As the preacher said in church last Sunday, Lent is a journey toward the resurrection. I feel like I've been on that journey for a long time. I've been meaning to write about it, clarify my thinking, try to focus on what that means. What journey exactly am I on? Why is it important? What is driving me? But I haven't until now. It seemed too hard, too painful.
Well, my husband and I went to Ash Wednesday service last night, and he asked me what I was going to give up for Lent. And I thought about it. I understand the value and symbolism of sacrificing for Lent, but somehow the idea didn't resonate with me at that moment. And then I thought... do the blog you've been talking about for Lent. Make yourself sit down, confront this desire in your heart to find a way to approach God. Every day. For forty days.
When I told my husband, I (as usual) downplayed the idea. "It's not really giving anything up." And he said, wisely: "It's giving up your time." It's also giving up my comfort zone. We'll see how it goes. I don't think I've ever done anything 40 days straight, except the things I have no control over like waking up and falling asleep.
Maybe I should just think of this as forty days of waking up.
Why 40 Days? Because I intend this blog to be a record of a lenten journey. Well, my lenten journey. And in the Christian calendar, Lent lasts for 40 days, the days between Ash Wednesday and Easter (minus the Sundays!), the days that Jesus spent fasting and praying in the desert before his return to Jerusalem.
As the preacher said in church last Sunday, Lent is a journey toward the resurrection. I feel like I've been on that journey for a long time. I've been meaning to write about it, clarify my thinking, try to focus on what that means. What journey exactly am I on? Why is it important? What is driving me? But I haven't until now. It seemed too hard, too painful.
Well, my husband and I went to Ash Wednesday service last night, and he asked me what I was going to give up for Lent. And I thought about it. I understand the value and symbolism of sacrificing for Lent, but somehow the idea didn't resonate with me at that moment. And then I thought... do the blog you've been talking about for Lent. Make yourself sit down, confront this desire in your heart to find a way to approach God. Every day. For forty days.
When I told my husband, I (as usual) downplayed the idea. "It's not really giving anything up." And he said, wisely: "It's giving up your time." It's also giving up my comfort zone. We'll see how it goes. I don't think I've ever done anything 40 days straight, except the things I have no control over like waking up and falling asleep.
Maybe I should just think of this as forty days of waking up.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)