Faith

"Faith is taking that first step even when you can't see the staircase..." I watched a show tonight that I had recorded this week... and one of the lines in it said that... I like that... and for some reason the image that appears in my head is a spiral staircase... not a narrow spiral, but a wide spiral staircase with small steps that go up and simply keep going, to what destination? The staircase is white with silveryish tints...I can see the color of the stairs and their railing, but it is dark...hmm... I like that a line from a show generated this image in my mind... I suppose it would take more faith to step down onto a staircase whose destination you couldn't see... so why do I picture it going up... I don't know.

The show I watched is called "The Cleaner." It's plot revolved around William banks, a reformed drug addict who saves the lives of other addicts... supposedly based on a real man. He and his crew get hired to get people clean... this guy, Banks, he has an ongoing conversation with God... with whom he had struck a deal when he was at his rock bottom. He promised God that he would save people from themselves.... and throughout the show, throughout William's own challenges in his daily life and throughout his role in saving the lives of others, he talks with God.

Religion is one of those topics that is often taboo... like politics. Revealing your religion subjects you to judgement, not by your god of choosing, but by others... what with other people think about your religion? It's a topic that intrigues me. As a child we attended a Baptist church... and somewhere along the way stopped going... my memory says it is because the church encouraged my parents to have my sister and I baptized and my parents wanted my sister and I to be baptized when we had figured out through what religion we wanted to be baptized... pretty progressive, my parents. It's possible that that's not how it happened at all, but that's the scenario I have in my head.

As I got older, I was curious about other religions. Some friends I knew were Catholic and were involved in youth groups and went away on weekend trips together... but I questioned a lot of things about those friends... some of them made choices that I didn't perceive to be very... well... religious... they talked about what was forbidden in their religion and yet they were engaging in those very behaviors... I listened to a friend of my mother's explain and defend Catholicism from time to time and it often seemed to come up when defending something... it was odd to me that if religion was such an important part of people's lives that it was only referred to when conflict had arisen... yet... all the holiday decorations that referenced religion referred to peace and love... yet the two often seemed incongruent to me. My grandmother attended a congregational church and I would ask to go with her from time to time.

I would get distracted from the sermon and sense of community because before the service began I would sit quietly and listen to the other people in attendance. People were talking.... about each other... what people were wearing, whether it was appropriate or not... who had heard what about whom and ... people almost trying to one-up one another about something... I watched people and when I was caught looking at them I received a practiced smile of acknowledgement... and wondered why those people were at church... were they there as a way to get more gossip? Were they there to ease their guilt about their judgmental tendencies? Were they there because it was expected, or were they there to find God? It just didn't feel like that was what religion should be. I stopped going to church... but would attend Christmas Eve services with my grandmother when she chose to go... but I wasn't there for the religion.

In college I took a class on world religion... was fascinated by the commonalities and differences within religion. By that point in my life I had beliefs... but I was unable to find a religion with which my beliefs completely aligned. One summer when I was still in college I experienced a lot of difficult things...my first night returning to my summer job a coworker left his shift, uncharacteristic behavior, because he wasn't feeling well and died from a heart attack.... a woman coworker with whom I had grown close with the previous summer was diagnosed with cancer and was told she would die...my friends and I were driving around our town in the middle of the night and came upon a woman whose car was stuck in the cemetery ... she asked us to help get her car out and we offered to get the police for her... at which point she freaked out and we realized she was covered in blood, not mud as we had thought, and then she ran off.... come to find out, as the police relayed to us later, she had driven to the cemetery to kill herself, had tried to do it, then thought of her four year old son and couldn't do it.. she survived...then... as if that wasn't enough... I was working a midnight shift and a coworker, young guy who had just gotten married... was killed in one of the machines close to where I was working... These events unfolded in a matter of a few weeks...

That's when I really questioned God... at least a just god. How could God let my coworker get killed in a machine when he was so full of life and loved life so much yet save the life of this woman who wanted to die? Why was death everywhere that summer? Why did God let people suffer? It was a traumatizing summer, about which I did much writing and probably should have had therapy... but I couldn't find God in any of that. It wasn't the first time I had experienced people dying, but the other deaths had been more natural... older people... So I kind of gave up on God for a while.

In 1999, my beloved grandfather died, which still makes me cry. And I truly believe through his death came life... 40 weeks later my oldest nephew was born... to parents who had significantly struggled to start a family.... in the hospital after he was born, my sister and I had some time just she and I and this beautiful baby boy... We both looked at my nephew and his tiny fingers were intertwined, the same way my grandfather often intertwined his fingers while telling his stories... and something... happened... I saw my grandfather in my nephew somehow....and my sister saw it too... we both saw it and tears came down our faces... somehow knowing that Grampie had been watching out for that little baby the whole time. We asked each other if we had seen what we thought we had seen... I had to attribute that to God... I didn't know how else to explain it.

Since then I have visited various churches from time to time... but never found one that "fit" me or that I fit into... I thought of myself more as a spiritual person than religious. I read the first book in the "Conversations with God" series by Neale Donald Walsh, (Which I HIGHLY recommend.) Many of the ideas in that book agreed with the ideas I have about God... Throughout my life I have felt closest to God when I am in nature... kayaking with moose, watching the sunset, hearing the wind blow the leaves... while being at peace... and I do believe that during those moments I am communicating with God. What I have determined however is that I don't define God in the way that most people do... I find it impossible for me to articulate how I define God, but it isn't this being who passes judgement on us all... but I believe there is something more than this existence. I have faith in that.

With all that has happened in recent months I realized that I do believe in God... because I have been so angry with God... and if that anger is so intense at something, than that something must exist... A few weeks ago I took a survey about religion... you can find anything online. It was a survey that asked questions about my beliefs and then, for lack of a better word, diagnosed me as a specific religion... actually it generates a list and percentages on how much you match which religions...interesting... the results don't need to be shared here, but I was intrigues by the results and am considering exploring some of the religions with which it suggested I would match.

I admire people who are religious, my mom being one of those people... my dad too, though he is more silent in his religion. Ironically my mother's strong faith was one of the reasons that I was so angry at God... for striking one of his/her most loyal subjects... has my mom's faith wavered through all this... I can't see how it wouldn't... but she believes... she has faith and finds comfort in that. My mom has more faith than anyone I know... she would step up or down without knowing where the staircase was leading, because she has faith that things will be okay. so how do we teach ourselves that lesson? We are taught to look both ways when crossing the street.... to test the temperature of the water before getting into the bath... to read all the fine print before signing anything.... are we naturally people with faith and do we teach ourselves to be cautious and not trust? Or are we naturally cautious and teach ourselves when and where it is safe to have faith? I don't know. Do we get to choose the areas in our lives about which we have faith and areas upon which we are foolish to bestow that faith?

Faith... in ourselves.... why does that seem so hard to have? I have faith that my friends can do anything they want, achieve the things they desire... yet when it comes to myself I doubt... doubt that my life will ever be what I hope it will be... does that doubt become punitive and end up pushing those very things away from myself? Would faith invite those very things to me? I don't know. What I do know... is faith, even blind faith, is beautiful... to believe in something, without questioning it... is beautiful.