Speaking of mine. When people get diagnosed with terminal illnesses, other people tend to ask them if they believe in God, etc. So I will spell it out, for any curious onlookers wondering what I believe, and more importantly, why I don't believe what they believe.
We will have to back up a spell because first off, the verb "believe" is a literary conundrum for me. Simply put, I believe nothing. I do not believe anything. I wonder. I prefer. I hope. I imagine. I thoroughly enjoying doing all of those actions with my brain, but believing is not a thing I do anymore. I stopped doing it in 2004. It was a conscious, pragmatic decision.
Religious belief has never served me well and as far as I have seen, on the whole, it is the root of many evils. Fanaticism. Fundamentalism. Evangelism. Pushing your ideas onto others, pushing your values onto others. It's always done in the name of God or some prophet or messiah. Yet time and time again, those systematic, zealous beliefs do more harm than good and breed a great deal of cherry-picking and hypocrisy. No, thank you. I've never had any use for it. Religion, that is.
Now that that's been said, there was a time that I spent nearly three years of my life living monastically. It began a month after my fifteenth birthday and ended a month before my eighteenth birthday. It was within the sanctuary of the Shiloh Youth Revival Centers. I became curious about the Jesus People Movement when I happened upon an article in a small town newspaper when I was fourteen. The headline grabbed me. The concept had me spellbound for months, but I was not one to run away and join the circus! It merely filled me with questions and wonder, so that when I eventually met two young men who identified themselves in a way that made me realize they were part of that movement, I sat with them under a tree in a public park and listened for five hours. I shared very little about myself. They were eager to tell me all sorts of stories about their lives, how they came to know Jesus as their lord, and the differences between churches, religions, and having a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus as their savior. It was riveting. Especially to someone who had been traumatically traumatized the night before and violated in the most humiliating way possible for one human being to betray another's trust. No details needed. Everyone has been through some kind of trauma, you know how it shakes you to the core.
What attracted me most was their peacefulness. Peace sounded mighty nice. So I started going to their bible studies. And it was in the Shiloh houses that I learned so many things that have served me well, but most of all, I learned to really love being at peace. Feeling calm, relatively safe, steadied. The structure, the routines, the loving one another like brothers and sisters--it was very cool indeed. I have such fond memories. The watermelon fight after a long hot day unloading a truck of watermelons at the Farmer's Market. The camping trips in the Uintah mountains. Learning to play the banjo and guitar. Learning how to make curry and how to bake biscuits and make yogurt from milk. It was there I learned to love the simple pleasure of polishing wood furniture and keeping the bath houses pristine. The bath houses at the Land in Oregon, where every small act felt sacred, were like new. Outside they looked like small log cabins. Inside they were gloriously modern, sparkling clean as if brand new because everyone who had lived at the Land had had a week or two of bathroom duty and kept it spotless. Not a trace of mold or mildew or rust or grime. It was a pleasure to be alone in the bathhouse, cleaning it, in the impeccable silence of a dense forest where moss and ferns muffle every sound. It was a pleasure to walk on the paths of damp pine needles. I'll never forget that sound or the feel of it.
We studied the King James Version from Genesis 1:1 to Revelations 22:21, each year. We took turns reading the verses. Our pastors or their delegate led group discussions about it. And we studied parts of the bible on our own in our spare time. We read nothing else. We did not go to movies or watch television. We had no TV, and we could not care less about it. We listened to no radio, no records. The only music in our lives were the songs we sang to and with each other, while we worked, before and after we studied, or sitting around a campfire. Yeah. A real life, honest, sweet and good kumbaya experience. A monastic lifestyle. I miss aspects of it.
In high school, me and my friends from Shiloh were taunted as "Jesus freaks" by the LDS teens who thought it was really godlike, if actions speak louder than words, to throw their food scraps at us in the cafeteria. Hmm. That was puzzling. Are we not worshipping the same teacher? You know...the one that stood up for a woman who was about to be stoned to death for committing adultery? The one that overthrew the moneychangers' tables at the temple? The one that sat with pagans and outcasts, lepers and criminals? C'est la vie.
Well, that was all grand, a truly magnificent time in my life, overall, in spite of the poo-throwing neanderthals.
Then all kinds of bad things happened no matter how much or often or fervently I prayed. Some would say God has a reason. Some would tell me his ways are mysterious. All sorts of platitudes were offered. But there was no security to be had. Nothing could be counted on for protection, for guidance, for light. Some would say I was in the wrong religion, that I should convert to this or that. Some would silently question my faith or morality. Perhaps I deserved to be beaten, eh? Perhaps I deserved to be cheated on, lied to, used and abused? Perhaps it was my karma!!!
Eventually, I walked away from it all...faith, the bible, the hymns, the tight little circle of believers, the praying and especially the trusting God. I would not live my life that way anymore. Wisdom. That is what preserves and guards you. And so I sought wisdom. I studied other teachers. I learned the way of Zen, the Tao. And I found that peace again. It is a different kind of peace. Less like a result of believing in fairy godmothers, more like the natural state of understanding human nature and the suffering caused by ego and emotional attachment to things staying as they are--in a universe that is constantly changing. The peace of going with the flow, detaching from a particular outcome, not resisting the boulders in my path...being as a drop of rain on the river of life.
Do I have any ideas about what happens after these molecules expire? What happens to the "me"--the ego--the personality that goes with this stuff in this space and time? Does it merge with a collective consciousness? Do "I" become one with the universe?
Zen is recognizing "I" am already one with the source of all life and creativity. Separateness is an illusion. "I" is a construct.
Does this "I" that is me, Carma, aka Herzenity, believe in reincarnation? There's that verb again. Believe. See the problem? There is no way to know whether or not reincarnation is a real thing that happens in this universe, or any other plane of being. No way to know. All we can do is wonder, hope, imagine--and if there is something else after Earth, after being human, what could it be? Again, we all get to wonder, hope and imagine.
Do you see the problem with believing that you know the absolute truth about life, the universe and everything? Perhaps we are meant to imagine possibilities. Perhaps by evangelizing, you are not doing the will of the creator, but rather thwarting another's opportunity to wonder, hope and imagine.
As I face my mortality, at age 68, with bone marrow 50% malignant and lymph nodes all over the body swollen with cancer cells, aware that the treatment for this could extend life many years--that something else could terminate this body before this cancer does. See?
When I was in my early twenties, I read Jim Morrison's biography. Perhaps attracted by the fact that he was a poet and I was a poet. But mostly the attraction was a damn good, irresistible title: No One Here Gets Out Alive. Compelling, is it not?
I never forgot that lesson.
 |
| Credit: By http://pictures.abebooks.com/FLORENCEFROGER/735642554.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31321363 |
 |
| Peace be with you. Hug a tree. |
No comments:
Post a Comment