Religion is personal

Religion is personal….

The other night while discussing Ann La Mott’s Traveling Mercies with one of my book clubs, the subject of religion emerged. We found ourselves breaking the great American social taboo; discussing religion at a social gathering.

We had a lively and thoughtful discussion, skirting obvious stumbling blocks like intelligent design as science, whether god is male, female or other and abortion. What emerged was a fairly clear division between faith and attitudes toward religion.

When speaking of faith, we were as alike as any group of strangers with diverse religious backgrounds could be. We all recognized clear states of grace embodied in Ann La Mott’s descriptions and agreed that faith can be found and practiced outside the confines of religious boundaries.

It was when we began speaking of religion that profound differences emerged. While we all conceded that it was possible that Christianity was embodied within the wide diversity of Christian denominations, we came to an abrupt stopping point on the matter of other religions.

It was agreed by most of the group that the clear difference between Christianity and other major religions is that Christians are the only religion with a personal relationship with a living god. Although I pointed out that people of other faiths would be offended by that statement, they begged to disagree.

I am still unclear whether the disagreement was over the fact of the statement, (Christianity being the only religion with Resurrection Theology as a central core belief…),  or that people of other religious denominations wouldn’t be offended. The discussion moved on unclarified.  Though it was easy to for all to concede that each Christian, regardless of their religious affiliation, had a unique personal relationship with god…  to this group, that relationship didn’t exist outside of Christianity.

The contradictions revealed by that conversation have tumbled through my thoughts. By that definition, if a personal relationship with a living God is what creates grace, how can anyone experience grace and/or faith outside of Christianity? Why are Christians so unwilling to grant the sanctity of that relationship to others? If a personal relationship with a living God is a defining tenant of Christianity, why do so many Christians believe it is their duty to pass judgement on the quality of or truthfulness of other people’s personal religious faith, including other Christians? If a personal relationship with a living God is the defining element of a Christian, how can so many perpetrate so much hatred and violence in the name of God?

It’s obvious that I don’t have the answers, nor did the group of women in my living room. I am sure there are theologians of varying degrees of scholarship who would be glad to share their individual interpretations, but I think that the variety of those interpretations only proves what I believe to be the point. Religion is personal.

Our founding fathers believed that enough to protect the right to individual worship under the constitution. There is a clear division between church and state in our country because no man should have the right to mandate or judge the faith of any other; to violate the privacy of that relationship. That constitutional privilege, along with the one about free speech, is what allowed an evening of thought provoking exchange to happen here in a small living room in the heartland of America.

Today, as we each pursue our own personal paths towards grace, I think we should take time to remember how important this freedom is to each and every one of us and to judge not, lest we too be judged.

Optimism

Optimism…        

I was talking with my brother the other day and he told me I was an optimist… that I see life as a glass half full rather than a glass half empty.
I was rather taken aback and I think I may have started to sputter. I see myself as a pragmatist… and sometimes as a pessimist… not an optimist. I am certainly no Pollyanna.  However, as he is my brother and not the first person to comment on my optimism, I have given it some thought.  

I don’t believe I am an optimist. I hope for the best, but I don’t expect it. I am a bit of a salesman when the idea takes me, but I don’t reframe things so they are always positive. I just don’t choose to focus so much on what went wrong as I do on what I can do now that it has.

If I focused on what doesn’t work, I think I would have a tough time getting out of bed each morning. I have lived with a nasty remitting and relapsing course of fibromyalgia combined with chronic fatigue syndrome for at least 40 years: the last 14, in relapse. I get up nearly every morning feeling like I have a bad flu. Some days it’s worse. I hurt all of the time. Sometimes it seems unbearable. And yet, each day I get up and make of it what I can. I survive because I focus on what is possible each day.

My life hasn’t been easy. If something could go wrong, it did. So that too is part of my world view.  I don’t expect anything to be easy. I expect difficulties. I even plan for those I can predict. I guess I see life as a continuing set of logistical challenges.  Like a good scout, I am always prepared… not just for all contingencies but for the unexpected as well.

I am seldom so invested in a plan that I am not willing or able to change it. The best things in my life have come from taking advantage of the unexpected opportunities created by life’s mishaps… even my children.

I would say that this has worked out very well for someone with my illness, but I expect that my illness has had a great deal to do with teaching me flexibility. My illness creates the unexpected each day. The symptom most difficult to endure is the total unreliability of my condition… of my life. Yet, that is what makes each day a process of discovery.  

I have always been a curious person. I want to know what will happen when I encounter the unexpected. My inability to plan my life has kept me open to opportunity. If you can stay focused on the possibilities, the detours are what make life interesting.

Of course, it helps that I have always been more interested in what happens when you encounter the unexpected than in being able to reproduce the results. Is that a result of my illness or just some personality quirk? I don’t know. But it sure cuts down on frustration.

I guess I don’t see the glass as either half empty or half full… I just wonder what is in the glass … and what I can make with it.  In today’s world I suppose that might make me an optimist.

Perspective...

Lately I have had trouble focusing on my computer. I got new glasses. I could see much better when I drove. I moved my computer... up and down and forward and back... and finally I found the sweet spot that worked with the old computer glasses that my daughter truly wishes would be run over by a truck. But, I am back in business at least for a while.

It is a real surprise to me to be unable to see. I have worn glasses for years, but I could still see without them. Now I am looking for bright light and a magnifying glass even with these expensive no-line trifocals with their expensive prisms designed to focus as much light as possible.

My local book club laughed recently about their mother's and grandmother's progressive lack of sight. Of course, they blamed the specks left on dishes and dust bunnies by the older women on laziness when they were younger, but age has acquainted them with the truth. Their mothers and grandmothers still cared, they just couldn't see what they had missed.

It is all a matter of perspective after all. Sometimes stepping back or examining something closer can really change the way we see things.

Have you ever had the experience of reading something quickly, like a billboard as you pass and wondered why it made such little sense? It happens to me a lot. My eyes don't distinguish detail as well as they might and my brain just fills in what I didn't see. Sometimes it simply doesn't have enough information to guess adequately, sort of like a spell checker that validates spelling but has no context to see if the word actually belongs in that sentence.

I think most of us do that a lot in our lives, not just with the tremendous amount of written material we all scan each day, but with the rest of our lives as well. We glance at life as we pass and our brains register what we expected to see... not always what is really there. If we would just step back and look a little more closely, I think we would often find that things may not be what they seem.

Yet, as a society we pride ourselves on our ability to make snap judgements based on minimal information. Once we have made judgments, we take ownership of them, unwilling to let anyone challenge them.

My fuddled brain may be a blessing after all. I find that I have to take time to look closely or I literally will not see... my brain will invent some altered reality that fits it's limited perception if I don't. I have to take time to think about what I just saw or heard or felt. I have to question the basis of my judgements on a minute by minute basis. And I often find that taking a little more time to look closely greatly changes my perception.

Maybe this inability to step back and take a closer look at things we think we already understand is what is at the heart of the political division that exists in our country today. I know there is a lot more common ground than most people think exists if you just talk about the issues and not the rhetoric. It's as though everyone is seeing through some ideological filter without realizing how much it distorts what they see.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was some kind of magic that would jiggle perspective, just for a while? I'd sure like to see what would happen.

Simple tasks.....

When I was a young woman, I designed and sewed most of my own clothing. Then, life got difficult, I began to be ill more often and I forgot how to use my sewing machine. Just like that, I simply couldn't figure out how to thread it or adjust it or use any of the features. Dress patterns no longer made any sense. I quite literally didn't know what to do, so I stopped sewing. For decades, simple mending was a challenge.

Occassionally, out of the blue, I would sit down and alter or embellish something without thought, as though the memory of sewing skills still existed in my fingers, but not in my brain.

A decade or so ago, I forgot how to cook. Just like that, I couldn't follow simple recipes. I couldn't figure out how to use my appliances. It became a challenge just to reheat food. When my husband was out of town on business, my neighbor fed me.

When he wasn't, I became the master of the last minute dinner, relying heavily on prepared ingredients and take out.

Sometimes, I would find myself simply cooking without thought... effortlessly combining spices to create something new and wonderful. But I could never recreate the dish because I literally didn't know what I had done.

Recently, I forgot how to blog. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn't figure out how to get to the website, what my passwords were to get in and how I posted something new.

Fortunately, years of these episodes have taught me to write myself instructions so I have something to follow when I forget or I wouldn't be writing now. It would have helped had I left them closer to the computer so I could get in before I forgot what I wanted to say, but no system is perfect.

I have fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple chemical sensitivities and I have dealt with all three in some form for most of my life. For me, the greatest challenge has been the unreliability of my thought process when I am not doing well.

Sometimes, thinking is easy... sometimes it's more challenging. Some days I could be a rocket scientist if I wanted, other days I function just barely above retardation. The biggest challenge is figuring out just which mode I am in and whether or not I can compensate. On the rare days I can't ask or answer that question, I lay low.

If too many of those days string themselves together or if i spend weeks barely functioning, it is easy to get very discouraged. Lately though, I have rediscovered a truth about myself that gives me hope. I may forget how to do simple tasks, but I still have a grasp of the complex. Anything I have ever learned is still there if I can crack the code to access it; If I can just struggle through the initial steps.

It is a good thing that I have been a perpetual student, always interested in what I didn't know, because there is never a shortage of things for me to relearn if I just take the time and effort to push past the easy part.

I am taking up fabric art again. There will always be someone around who can help me figure out how to run my sewing machine. If not, I'll just wait for my brain to clear and follow my own instructions. If it takes so long that I can't remember my orginal design, I'll come up with another.

I am cooking again. I am a gifted but unreliable cook. On good days, I freeze meals for the days when reheating is almost more than I can do. But mostly, I give myself permission to sometimes just get it wrong. If it's inedible, we can always go out.

I am trying to give up my frustration for things I can't change so they are no longer roadblocks to doing the things I can. I can't control my illness. There are simply too many variables impacting my health. But I can continually relearn the simple tasks that keep me from the creativity I enjoy.

I suppose there is a lesson in all of this. Tomorrow or the next day, when I can see it, if I remember, I'll share it with you:) Today I am glad to just be able to post.

Bigotry....

I encountered a bigot today. Quite frankly, I was shocked. This was a woman whose personal style I admired from afar. I had anxiously awaited an opportunity to speak with her. But when she opened her mouth the most hateful bigotry spilled out.... all of that malice wrapped in such an appealing package.

I have grown accustomed to people having other political opinions than mine. After all, as an old hippy I expect to be more liberal than most.... although my liberalism does verge on consevatism. It turns out I am more pragmatic than anything else.

I have grown accustomed to people having other religious beliefs than mine. There are now so many brands of christianity that I often find I have more in common with some buddists, hindus or muslims than people said to be of my faith. I simply belong among lovers.. that is people who try to love their neighbor as they would want to be loved... and those can be found in the most unlikely places.

But I have not grown accustomed to wholesale intolerance and quite frankly I am not sure I should.

Have you looked in a dictionary lately? I looked up both bigot and prejudice before sitting down. According to Webster's, a bigot is someone who is "obstinately and intolerantly devoted to their opinions and prejudices" . Prejudice is an "adverse opionion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge". By definition, these are people who are not the least bit interested in facts.

In this case, that prejudice resulted in someone who thought that the people who were displaced by the Hurricane in New Orleans were simply too stupid or venal to leave. She felt they lived in cesspools of sin and venality before the hurricane and were now simply complaining that they didn't get their next handout quickly enough. "All they had to do was walk out." She felt conditions couldn't have been that bad for anyone willing to help themselves. What were they doing just waiting in the dome anyway?

She went on to tell of "white" foreigners who were bacpacking through America and found themselves stranded in New Orleans. She said the National Guard had told them to form a circle with baggage in the center, women in the next ring and men on the outside. At one point they became terrified because when the power went out the national guard told them they could no longer protect them.

She evidently believed that the only people in the Dome were black "trash" and that these whites were only there because they were stranded and didn't know any better. Even when told that the story was not likely to be accurate as the National Guard didn't arrive until after the power was out and that a Minnesota couple ended up in the Dome after their hotel evacuated them, she stated that we just didn't realize who "those people" were.

Evidently, the residents of nursing homes who died in record numbers in the aftermath of the hurricane were also steeped in sin and sloth since they hadn't created responsible families to remove them from danger or had selfishly outlived them. Homeowners who found themselves trapped in attics and on roofs by rising waters suffered from stupidity. I am not sure what foreigners who did not speak english suffered from other than being foreign.

Needless to say, after quietly pointing out that people without transportation really didn't have the means to leave the city and that many of the elderly and disabled were not able to walk anywhere, I backed out of that conversation. What can you say to someone who is not only unwilling to hear anything that doesn't support her opinion, but openly hostile to anyone "rude" enough to question? You can only have discourse with people who are as willing to hear your information as you are to hear theirs.

I am sure this woman is a loving mother; I heard her speak lovingly of both her children. I am sure she is charitable when she approves of the cause... certainly, she had opened her home to host a gathering of women. But her mind was closed. Is that the price of affluence?

I don't know. I have been looking at "righteous and noble" behavior lately and find that when it becomes extreme, there is often fear at it's heart. Is it simply fear at the heart of bigotry? It is not ignorance... as a little information would easily cure that. Is it some lethal combination of fear and guilt? I wish I had the answers. So much suffering could be eliminated by a little tolerance.

Dealing with disaster.....

Today I sorted through my closet and emptied about half of it into bags to donate to the local relief effort for the hurricane victims... some of those people are on their way to Minnesota's cold. To be honest, clothes horse that i am, 11 bags barely seemed to make a dent in my supply of "warmies"... longies, turtlenecks, fleece tops, sweaters, jackets and pieces of clothing too indelicate to name. Yet, it is something. That, along with the check I wrote on the spot will do something to make it easier for people who have faced the unimaginable.

I considered opening our home to someone and then realized that with my illness, that would be the unimaginable for me... a disaster in the making not only for me, but for the poor person depending on me. They could as easily become my caretaker as my guest. Sometimes it's hard to know when you have done as much as you can.

This disaster and the relief effort have made me think a lot about how people and agencies fall into categories: those who wait to see what they can get by with doing, those who will do all they can and those who will exceed even their own expectations. We have seen good examples of all three this last week.

Unfortunately, our government's response has settled into the first category.. both before and after the hurricane. Our government knew that there was a great deal that could be done in New Orleans to prevent the kind of flooding that occured long ago, but never considered it a priority. FEMA participated in a disaster preparedness teleconference on the impending hurricane days before it hit. Leading authorities warned that the gulf temperatures made a severe storm likely. Yet, there was no federal assistance to evacuate the city and relief efforts were not organized. And when it hit and it became obvious that this was a disaster on a monumental scale, the news organizations did a much better job of assessing the damage than our own government. Our military, the organization most trained to restore order and services wasn't called in until countless lives had already been lost.

I know our president has stated that nobody could have forseen that the storm would be that bad.. that noone could have forseen that the levies would fail. I suppose someone who relies on gut instincts instead of scientific evidence would fail to grasp the obvious, that such a storm and such a disaster was inevitable. However, I don't understand why it took half a week of televised coverage of the unfolding disaster in New Orleans to realize that the relief efforts were "unacceptable".

I personally think the least that should have happened was calling in the military immediately, the only organization in the United States trained to manage a disaster of these proportions. Even that was not done. I guess a culture of doing what you have to at the last minute possible to avert a political disaster is hard to overcome... it is so much easier to blame the local authorities or the people without resources or will to evacuate.

Thankfully, most of the American people fall into the second category... those that don't wait to see how big the problem is before they begin doing what they can. I have been overwhelmed with the breadth of relief efforts that have been instigated by ordinary citizens. Some, like me are donating clothing and money, others donate blood or time and resources. Almost everyone has someone in the affected area that they are following to see if there will be something they can do.

The first relief efforts in the stricken city of New Orleans were those carried out by individuals: the individuals with bass boats that quickly became an armada ferrying people to dry land, the doctors and nurses who stayed with patients after generators failed and hand pumped bellows to deliver life support, the independant truck drivers who arrived with semis to bring in supplies and evacuate stranded communities and the countless others whose personal efforts may never be recognized. Individual efforts multiplied, saving thousands of lives.

A lot of the critical work continues to be done by individuals... sometimes aided by companies or organizations. Ham radio operators have combined to provide some critical communication. A group of enthusiasts has set up pirate radio stations so that relief information reaches those trapped inside homes. Techies have banded together to gather donations of resources to literally patch together temporary communications to aid relief workers. Morticians and forensic scientists have gathered to begin identifying the dead. Even cruise ship companies have donated the use of ships for temporary housing. We can be proud of us.

A few of us have gone one step beyond: the men who flew a helicopter from Phoenix to New Orleans to aid in rescue work, the man who walked out of the superdome until he encountered news crews and drug them back to interview survivors, the countless water rescue specialists who risk their lives repeatedly to pull survivors out of the flood... that list too is endless. It seems the most effective way to deal with disaster is to do something, anything for those who are still living.

I think this is how most of us deal with disasters in our ordinary lives too, finding something, anything that can be done. Sometimes that can result in more pies and casseroles than a family can consume but it also results in the friends who are there months and years later to help that family move and and create new possibilities.

It is one thing to quote bromides and point to that rosey future waiting after all disasters, it is another to be there the day after the cameras leave and every day after until rebuilding gains enough momentum that it will continue on it's own. It is not enough to do the least we can.

It is important to learn from disasters. The poverty that fueled the human suffering in the aftermath of this hurricane is not limited to those few southern coasts. Until we deal with the crunching poverty experienced by far too much of America, every disaster will have a similar outcome. Poverty means not having the resources to recover from the most minor of accidents.. it is not enough to expect people to rebuild, we have to help them survive the process.

I hope we have learned something about preparedness. How large does the death toll have to rise before we realize that preventing these kinds of disasters is more important than currying political favor? How many preventable deaths will we consider an acceptable loss? We are a government by the people and for the people, not one by political donars to further their economic interests. It is time that our government reflected us.

As an individual, I have decided to do what I can.. today, tomorrow and the day after to create resources for those who can't create them for themselves.

As a citizen, I have decided to do what I can to encourage discussion and problem solving.

I will do what i can.. until I have built something in spite of myself. Then will I know I have done enough.

To blog or not to blog..

It seems in these days of people posting their personal journals on the web, whether or not to blog has become a moot point. But i actually did give it some thought.

I once published a small regional newsletter for people with the chronic illnesses of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. The thing i liked most was the opportunity to share my personal experience coping with the illness. The thing i liked least was the awful responsibility to get it right; to be absolutely accurate relaying medical information and to offer opinions without offending patients, doctors or other support organizations.

A blog really gives me the best of my old newsletter. I get the opportunity to share what it feels like to be me, a person living with an unpredictable chronic illness.... the opportunity to share what i know about copng with my illness and last but not least, the opportunity to share some of my passion with living.

It doesn't require editing and printing and folding and stamping and addressing and hauling it all to the post ofiice. It doesn't come from any organization, so i don't have to worry about who i offend. If you don't like what i have to say, you don't have to read me. And although i always try my best to get medical information right, i don't have to worry that my interpretation will fall into strict medical guidelines. I feel free to speculate, knowing that in a blog, speculation is expected.

Unlike writing for publication, i don't feel i have to always have a point to make.. and i won't have to worry about editors cutting the substance from the article with clever editing. I don't have to worry about grammer or punctuation....

I'm liking this better all of the time.

Of course, there will be no place to hide myself, but I really am an old hippy in the best sense of that description and perhaps it is time to just let it all hang out and find out what i have to say. Let the games begin...