Elliot’s Homework

 The teenage son of a friend was assigned by his Unitarian Church to ask questions about core beliefs of an older person. I qualified as old.

He had a questionnaire, of which I have retained only the first two questions for this essay.

1.     1  What were your core beliefs during childhood?

I went to a Baptist church Sunday School, and I swallowed the Jesus story whole, including the promise of heaven and the fear of hell.

In Sunday School, we observed birthdays and sang the Baptist birthday song:

“Happy Birthday to you,

Only one will not do.

Born again means salvation.

How many have you?”

I gave my life to Jesus I do not know how many times when I was a child, hoping I was sufficiently born again not to go to hell.

Fire insurance.

I said later that Jesus was the nicest guy I knew as a child. Maybe I said that because Jesus never hit, hurt, swore at, or molested me. So that made him nicer that most of the adults into whose hands I fell.

 I was one of those girls who loved horses. I don’t know if I “believed” in them, but seeing them, real or models or toys, made me happy, and when I was 12 or 13, my uncle, the same one who would soon molest me, gave me a horse.

Good old Sultan. I appreciate him more and more as time goes by. He was just hell to catch, but he wasn’t mean or aggressive. My father said, “Either you’re the boss or he’s the boss,” meaning, take a hard line with the horse. I think Sultan was the boss most of the time.

 2.     What about your teenage years?

I don’t exactly remember believing in anything in my teen years. I stopped going to Sunday school because my brother dropped out of church when he was sixteen, so I figured I could do that, too.

So, at 16, I stopped going and put Jesus on hold. I was busy trying to survive as a very square peg in a very round hole in high school.

After high school I became a hippie while in and out of college.

That’s when I learned that getting drunk or high is not for me. I have lived a fairly teetotal life. None of that stuff made me feel good, which it was supposed to do, and seemed to work for people I knew, but not for me. I felt bad, and scared, by being out of control. Also, all that stuff cost money, and I did not want to spend money on something that was not any fun.

A dear friend on an LSD trip one night danced into the schizophrenia which had been coming on for months, but nobody saw it coming. I grieve for him still. I don't know if he is still alive.

Yeah. Getting high or drunk is NOT my jam.

 In my late 30s I felt a strong call back to Christianity. I had put Jesus on hold, but he had never left me. I entered into what I call my “Adult Conversion.”

I became an Episcopalian. I realized that I love liturgical church services, and concise Episcopal sermons.

Some Protestant clergy can drone on for 45 minutes or more. I believe that if you can’t state something succinctly, going on and on is not going to make it any more intelligible or inspiring.

3.     Core belief now:

If there is a god, or divine spark or intelligence underlying reality, it is literally light years beyond my comprehension. I am okay with that.

I think all the human religions are right, except the fear-mongering ones or the ones relying on man-made dogma, which, in the final analysis, I think may be all of them. Darn. I continue to think of myself as a Christian, but I do not say so often because the very word is toxic to many.

It is people who mistake themselves for God or represent themselves as a conduit of God’s wisdom and rules, allowing them to also be a conduit of physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse, who have done, and are doing, terrible damage to people.

It’s easier to follow a leader or a rulebook than to take responsibility for your actions, do the work, and form a good moral core and a living theology. That is hard.

We human beings tend to look for the easy ways to live our lives. Unfortunately, life is not easy. What a bummer, huh?

Which brings me to heaven and hell: if we go around once, as many people believe, I think we have heaven and hell right here, right now.

At some point I stopped believing in hell as eternal punishment after you die. That is an old and perhaps Catholic idea, along with Purgatory, a man-made idea of an in-between place where you work off your sins, OR you can buy your way out. I think they called that “indulgences.”

I also stopped believing that God is an old man with a beard in the sky, even though Michelangelo did great art based on that concept.

It is hard to imagine that God is something you can’t imagine. 

Indulge me and read that sentence again. 

I believe the word, “god,” is a human sized concept, a little box if you will, that signifies the illimitable, infinitely vast reality that is beyond our ability to imagine, much less grasp.

I refer you to photographs relayed to earth from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes. Those pictures were what really sold me on the infinite unknown. I really can't wrap my mind around reality.

 At some point I realized that something did not have to be a fact to be the truth, and that realization has served me well. That is the power and blessing of myth, I think.

 

4.     My parents’ beliefs: I am sure my beliefs are far different from my parents’ beliefs. Mind you, I don’t know what their beliefs were. They did not go to church, and they never talked about their beliefs. When I asked my mother to go to church, she said, “I got enough of that when I was a child.”

Sometimes I think that Sunday School was free childcare where she hoped I might learn some moral rules. Maybe. I do not know.

 

5.     Biggest belief I have changed my belief about: I was raised to believe that Jesus died on the cross to wash away our sins, so we could stop sacrificing children and animals to appease our gods and devils, but it’s not a done deal – we can still screw up and go to hell, which I feared. Better walk that line, little sinful human. And give some money to the church.

6.      I have run into people who think they know who is going to hell, and delight in the thought. I think that is spiritual “stinking thinking.” My biggest change is letting go of what I think of as superstitious fear, which some people use to manipulate and control other people. That gets in the way of reality.

Platitudes I do not believe: “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Hah. Plenty of people are dealing with more than they can handle, every day.

“God has a plan and there’s a reason for everything.” No, I really do not believe either of those statements. I have seen too much randomness.

 My newest belief is that this, too, shall pass, and I won’t live to see that. I don’t know if it will pass to better or worse! I never imagined the world going through the clusterfuck which is our current condition, or our country going upside-down in my lifetime. But I hope humans survive and learn and maybe even do better. I always hope, and I pray. I pray because I believe in Jung’s collective unconscious. We are all connected. I believe that deeply. Praying is not like putting in an order for takeout, nor is it magic. But it helps me to converse with the infinite mystery, at least.

8.     Which beliefs are hardest to stay true to:

Not whining! And kindness. Kindness is everything, but I am a lifelong smart-ass, and I don’t always stifle my braying.

9.     Core beliefs that have brought me joy: I believe that I was born to sing and write. Doing those two things keeps me semi-sane, and not fighting who I am. My third purpose seems to be listening to people, being present, usually in long phone calls.

10 Still a square peg in a round hole. I am learning about ADHD and how being "neurospicy" affects me. I am profoundly happy knowing that my sons have grown up to be good people despite my parenting.

11 Life is full of surprises, and in the words of Tom Lehrer, among many others, “You never know.”

Letter to a Friend in Los Angeles

 

Part one 1/14/25

Hi,

Hope your blood draw was easy.

Needles can be challenging - I have veins that roll, and are hard to find, and I used to be freaked out by having blood taken. I ended up with a lot of hematomas. The trouble was that I would tell the vampires (blood draw techs) and I think it threw them off their game. 

Then Benny was diagnosed with diabetes and had to start injecting insulin. He used to be afraid of needles. Not anymore. Watching him I thought, who am I to be afraid of needles? 

So for some reason I stopped telling vampires about my rolling, hard to find veins. Miraculously, blood draws became easier, and the vampires were successful almost every time.

There was that one time my veins defeated several nurses in the hospital phlebotomy clinic. 

Blood draws are part of life, because I must have my A1C tested, among other things. So I am a lot more blasé about blood draws now. Benny now wears an insulin pump that constantly monitors his blood sugar and puts insulin into his blood as needed. We live in an age of miracles. At least for diabetics.

So I hope your blood draw went well.

 While driving to Tacoma and back, I was listening to NPR, and the news was full of the LA fires. They are reporting more on the emotional, mental, and financial wounds people have suffered now, as well as the fires. The grief.

And they did say repeatedly that the Santa Ana winds would be starting up again.

  Finding a place to live now is easier if you have money than it is for the less financially well endowed, the working people. And the homeless. 

Landlords are price-gouging renters. Well, of course. We're talking about human beings here.

Sad, though.

 Your metaphor of a soot-covered LA being similar to a coal heated London sounds apt. Sorry to hear about the polluted air. That is also sad, and I am sure it is making people ill and making people who were already having respiratory problems worse.

I wonder what efforts it will take to clean the air, and how long it will take.

 When I lived there (55 years ago) the smog was at its worst. One fourth of July weekend, when I was driving up north to observe the holiday with my family, I was crawling along through the San Fernando Valley on 101 with all the other people getting out of town, I looked up and in the sky above the mountains it looked like there was a solid dirt island in the sky. A big one.

Sometime in the last few years I was listening to a program about air pollution, perhaps specifically about LA, and doggone - that exact date was mentioned as the day of the worst smog recorded in the Los Angeles basin, and how clean up actions began after that.

You'd think that having to tell people not to let their children play outside because of the poor air quality would have been a tip-off that something needed to be done, but oh well, it takes what it takes.

 Part two 1/15/25 Martin Luther King's birthday

 NY Times email subject this morning: "Why Biden might matter."

Geez. Of course, he matters, you morons.

Jimmy Carter, who has lately been praised to the skies for his decency, was disdained as "the worst president we ever had" in the past. People badmouthed him something awful. My take was that he was too decent and honest, a good guy who walked the Christian talk (you know, love, forgiveness, compassion, working for the greater good), and that's why he had to go. All it took was a little treason and Ronald Reagan. 

Carter was vilified. I think the rabbit incident did him a lot of harm - what kind of president was scared of "a harmless bunny rabbit?" Hah. If you never lived with rabbits, or never saw "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," you might not know that bunny rabbits can be vicious. Yes, some are lovely pets, but some are like Marvel villains with blood on their claws and teeth. Your blood. 

I watched a documentary last night about immigrants who succeeded in America: Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, a guy from Iran who supplies most of NASA's hardware (or something - made him rich, anyway), Hedy Lamarr who has been dead for decades but is now getting credit for a system she designed during WW2 to confuse torpedoes. Not that the Navy was smart enough to use it. They weren't and they didn't. Now that system is the basis of the internet, cell phones, and computers. So Hedy Lamarr is now getting credit for her work. In her lifetime she did not get credit, or money. Not that she needs money wherever she is now.

More immigrants: a Ukrainian woman who is now in Congress, a Chinese woman who lived through Mao's cultural revolution (which set China back a few centuries) and doesn't want to see it happen here, a man who was an economic adviser to Republican presidents from Nixon on. 

And so on. All immigrants who came here a long time ago (Nixon was 50 years ago😐), and whose hard work paid off for them.

Over and over again, the immigrants said that America is the greatest country in the world, that the freedom here attracts people trying to make better lives for themselves, and in America anyone who works hard can succeed (i.e., become rich).

It sure sounded like the kind of thing I was taught in the 50s - greatest country, hard work will take you anywhere you want to go, etc. You might remember.

The stories of the people they highlighted were interesting, but the rah rah  propaganda element made me uncomfortable. At the end, I read in the credits that the narrator was Newt Gingrich.

Oh, PBS, I thought. You are going to the dark side.

I should not be surprised. We have seen the erosion of our stated morality in so many ways, and it's all part of whitewashing Trumpism - making it sound like it's okay, and patriotic, and normal.

It is none of those things. Just my opinion.

The LA fire tragedy is ongoing, and no less tragic for the fact that the news cycle is moving on. "Deadly car crash in San Benito."

Gawd. We have the attention span of gnats.

Fortunately, I am not in the position of being responsible for changing all the things that I see as wrong. I know I'd make a (bigger) mess and fail. But this being America, the greatest country in the world, I am allowed to gripe.

So there.

love

m

 Oh - and here's a picture of Rick and me singing, probably at the Strawberry Festival, probably in 1981.