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.”