Our heritage is our destiny. My maternal grandparents were virulent atheists. Both born in the late 1880s, they were ahead of their time in their disdain for religion. But my mother is a mystic and devoted to the readings of the Jesuit mystic, philosopher Teilhard du Chardin; my paternal grandparents were churchgoing Methodists; my great-grandfather a lay minister. (I have a copy of one of his--very long--sermons, in which he repeatedly admonishes his listeners to not be ashamed to proclaim the gospel. Three generations later, this shame is something I have indeed felt.)
My husband was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. This meant that I became a part of a fundamentalist Christian family. This caused me big problems in my faith. On the one hand, I was having these very real spiritual experiences. On the other, the words "God" and "Christian" became associated in my mind not with love, but with guilt, tension, fear, narrowmindedness, and judgment. My father-in-law was filled with all these things, whereas my mother-in-law was just fearful (although they both had wonderful qualities as well--generosity and loyalty in my fil, sweetness and humor in my mil).
Like I said, "Christian" had a bad vibe. This vibe was mirrored in the leftist culture in which I traveled. So, there I was, feeling that my faith was some kind of ugly secret, while simultaneously feeling it was the healthiest thing about me. Dear Great-grandfather, I was ashamed, and you are right--I shouldn't have been.
How I am losing that shame is for the next blog.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Why blog? and religion.
I want to blog to relieve my teeming brain of some of its contents. I look at a blog as a sort of Pensieve, Dumbledore's wonderful pot of thoughts. And tonight, those contents have to do with community and religion and me.
My religious journey--which has ended with a devotion to both active church membership and daily personal spiritual practice--came in three phases:
Phase 1. Why I started believing. For a young (in the early 70s) well-left-of-center woman, the cool thing was not to be religious at all. Jokes ridiculing religion were abundant, and I chortled along with the rest of us well-educated folk. What a bunch of ridiculous superstition!
And then I had a religious experience. Well, actually I had a bunch of them. They weren't dramatic or magical, but they were undeniable. There was advice that popped into my head that was very clearly not anything I could have dreamed up. And it was good advice, that worked. I began noticing a certain energy around the word "Jesus." And then those experiences reminded me of other, earlier and similar experiences I had had as a child--a wave of something delicious, for example, when singing "Kumbaya"--, experiences I discounted because now I was grownup, but what if you're grownup and have the same experiences?
The great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes that true faith is based on experience. It is not blind faith, nor is it faith that you are told about by someone else. You must have the experience, and it must be replicated, and then you start having true faith, faith based on experience. So that's how I started being a believer.
Phase 2. Why I became a Christian. I became a believer because of experience, but I shied away from calling myself "Christian." It had a bad vibe.
Then I hit a very bad time in my life. I was in despair most of the time. My (secular) support group had shunned me and my family; one of my children had serious problems; my marriage was floundering; I had no friends; I was tremendously lonely. Desperate for help, I began reading Thich Nhat Hanh, and I was struck by this: "If your roots are Christian, don't try to be Buddhist. Return to your roots. If you don't, you will suffer."
My roots were Christian. My great-grandfather was a minister; I went to church as a child. Virulently atheistic grandparents aside, the Christian church was my ancestry. I began to see not claiming my Christian heritage as a form of arrogance. Did I really think I was smarter and better than a church that had survived for 2000 years? (Answer: yes I did.) I changed my mind. I was not a "spriitual seeker." I was a Christian. I needed a sangha, a community, and that community needed to be connected to my roots--I needed a church.
Phase 3. Thich Nhat Hanh goes on to say: "Find a sangha [a community of support and practice]. It won't be a perfect sangha, but you can try to make it the best sangha you possibly can. . . . If you try to practice [being a good and loving person] by your own, you may fail without the support of a sangha." I was, indeed, failing at being a good and loving person. My marriage was still in something of a shambles--I was irregular in my care of my children--I was desperately unhappy most of the time.
I needed a sangha, a community of support--a church. I needed a place where I could practice being loving, with others who were also practicing and would both support my practice and forgive my failings, and who would expect me to do likewise.
And that is how I became a believing church-goer.
My religious journey--which has ended with a devotion to both active church membership and daily personal spiritual practice--came in three phases:
Phase 1. Why I started believing. For a young (in the early 70s) well-left-of-center woman, the cool thing was not to be religious at all. Jokes ridiculing religion were abundant, and I chortled along with the rest of us well-educated folk. What a bunch of ridiculous superstition!
And then I had a religious experience. Well, actually I had a bunch of them. They weren't dramatic or magical, but they were undeniable. There was advice that popped into my head that was very clearly not anything I could have dreamed up. And it was good advice, that worked. I began noticing a certain energy around the word "Jesus." And then those experiences reminded me of other, earlier and similar experiences I had had as a child--a wave of something delicious, for example, when singing "Kumbaya"--, experiences I discounted because now I was grownup, but what if you're grownup and have the same experiences?
The great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes that true faith is based on experience. It is not blind faith, nor is it faith that you are told about by someone else. You must have the experience, and it must be replicated, and then you start having true faith, faith based on experience. So that's how I started being a believer.
Phase 2. Why I became a Christian. I became a believer because of experience, but I shied away from calling myself "Christian." It had a bad vibe.
Then I hit a very bad time in my life. I was in despair most of the time. My (secular) support group had shunned me and my family; one of my children had serious problems; my marriage was floundering; I had no friends; I was tremendously lonely. Desperate for help, I began reading Thich Nhat Hanh, and I was struck by this: "If your roots are Christian, don't try to be Buddhist. Return to your roots. If you don't, you will suffer."
My roots were Christian. My great-grandfather was a minister; I went to church as a child. Virulently atheistic grandparents aside, the Christian church was my ancestry. I began to see not claiming my Christian heritage as a form of arrogance. Did I really think I was smarter and better than a church that had survived for 2000 years? (Answer: yes I did.) I changed my mind. I was not a "spriitual seeker." I was a Christian. I needed a sangha, a community, and that community needed to be connected to my roots--I needed a church.
Phase 3. Thich Nhat Hanh goes on to say: "Find a sangha [a community of support and practice]. It won't be a perfect sangha, but you can try to make it the best sangha you possibly can. . . . If you try to practice [being a good and loving person] by your own, you may fail without the support of a sangha." I was, indeed, failing at being a good and loving person. My marriage was still in something of a shambles--I was irregular in my care of my children--I was desperately unhappy most of the time.
I needed a sangha, a community of support--a church. I needed a place where I could practice being loving, with others who were also practicing and would both support my practice and forgive my failings, and who would expect me to do likewise.
And that is how I became a believing church-goer.
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