My friend Paul had to put down Bear, his beloved 11-year-old black Lab. Bear’s lungs gave out, and Paul did the humane thing, although not without, in his words, crying hard and often. Every dog lover understands, for we know all too well how our dogs love us.
My mini bernedoodle, Sugaree, meets me at the door when she hears me on the front porch steps. She jumps in anticipation—all four legs catching air—until I enter the hallway. It’s a love that doesn’t diminish.
This is my welcome every weeknight when I come home from work. I haven’t split the atom, ended world hunger or even brought her a new chew toy, yet I am honored like Pompey the Great in his third Roman triumph.
This nightly greeting has two effects on me. First, it makes me want to be better, to be worthy of such love. This reflection, in turn, helps me to love God, whose perfect love never ceases to draw me out from my own imperfections, from the man I am to the man I should be.
Second, it reminds me how silly it is to think I can love too many people or anyone too much. If loving is willing the good of the other, then there is no upper limit to it. This insight helps me strive to love my neighbor and to be an instrument of peace. Sugaree is my role model, as Bear was Paul’s.
It’s the Christmas season, and that means I’m looking forward to going to church. On its own, that might not sound too surprising: Half of Americans plan to do the same this holiday season. But in my case, it might seem a little strange. While I still know all the prayers and when to sit and stand, from my days as an altar boy, I left my faith and churchgoing behind long ago. As a scientist, I wouldn’t be hubristic enough to claim that God doesn’t exist; that’s a question science can’t definitively answer. But neither can I find any objective evidence for God’s fingerprints in this world. So for me, church has lost its luster—except, that is, at Christmas.
When late December rolls around, I want to go to church, even though I don’t believe in much of the creed. And if recent surveys about Americans’ holiday plans are accurate, I’m not alone. Many people who don’t set foot in a church through most of the year show up at Yuletide, including 10% of nonbelieving atheists and agnostics. Why? That’s a question to which I think I’ve finally found an answer.
The Christmas mass isn’t just an entertaining thing to do, like going to see Radio City’s Christmas Spectacular. Nor is it a simple reminder of cherished family holiday traditions. For me, and I suspect many others, going to church at Christmas offers a different kind of experience, one that’s spiritual if not religious.
That might sound like an oxymoron, but in practice it’s not. Following a religion means embracing a theology and often an institution. There’s a set of beliefs laying out what God is and what God wants, and also a list of rules to follow. Spirituality, on the other hand, tends to be more experiential than cerebral. It’s a sense that there is a sacredness to life, something ineffable but not necessarily divine, that we can catch glimpses of or even commune with at times. Religion and spirituality aren’t mutually exclusive; one can often lead to the other. But they are separable.
I turned to literature like a maniac. I mean, I was – I just was reading, you know, five hours a day and memorizing all these things and convinced that nothing mattered but being a great poet, and, yeah, that’s what filled the void for 20 years. I mean, I – well, it never did it, but it certainly – I certainly tried to make it fill that void. […]
I have this hunger in me that is endless, and I think everyone probably has it. Maybe they find different ways of dealing with it, whether it’s booze or excessive exercise or excessive art or whatever. I tried to answer it with poetry for years and hit a wall with that. And finally, I decided, or rather – I didn’t decide. That’s not right. I discovered that the only answer to that hunger was God. Answer is wrong, I guess. The only solution to me was to live toward God without an answer. […]
GROSS: So – but what was your understanding of God then?
WIMAN: Well, I probably did have an understanding of God as a person in the sky, you know, or a vision of God as simply the answer to all questions, and also just a being a, like a father figure. And I suffered a real loss of that concept at some point, and to what I have now, which is God is really not an object at all, but a verb.
(GROSS: Why turn to religion and not, say, for instance, philosophy? What did religion – what did faith give you that you felt nothing else could?) […]
Oh, a living God. I mean, as philosophy, there’s nothing that loves you back. I mean, I am moved by my deepest settled belief is in the unity of existence, that there is some fundamental unity in all things. And we are part of that. And in our deepest experiences of joy or of love or suffering, there is a sense sometimes that reality is looking back at us. And it can happen to people who are not religious at all. It happens to poets all the time. They can have an experience in nature in which they’re not blending with nature. It’s as if there’s some kind of reciprocal seeing. And I think that is God. And that’s the leap that I made in my life. I think a lot of people don’t make that leap and perhaps don’t feel the need to make that leap.
Notes: Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
During communion a man played a long and beautiful piece on the piano. I asked him later what it was: Beethoven. He played correctly, and with feeling, but he is not ‘a good pianist’ and that’s why I enjoyed it so much, because it was hard come by and humbly offered.
Book Review of Helen Garner’s “One Day I”ll Remember This” by Charlotte in Book Bird. “…There are some books you slip through like water. They have a weightlessness to them, an otherworldly lack of friction…This was my experience of reading Helen Garner’s diaries. I was surprised by how immersive it was, that experience, how easy to lose my sense of time…Garner is a very sensual, instinctive writer. She feels her way through moments, days, and years, and documents those feelings as they roll and toss…”
It’s not the red car, but the black sedan behind it. Shot was taken this morning from across the cove, from a distance. At the start and end of my morning walks, I pull in here to take my first and last shots, but not today. Heavy cloud cover, and…
1013 consecutive (almost) days on this Cove Island morning walk. Like in a row.It’s brisk out, 28° F, feels like 23° F.
For the last 6 (?) months, mostly every morning, the black sedan is parked here, overnight. Car running, exhaust drifts upward, condensation drips and pools on the asphalt.
Who are you? What’s your story? Sleep here by choice (not really ‘choice’ with rents at nose bleed levels)? Bad decisions? Bad luck? Working 2 jobs, banking cash for better days ahead?Continue reading “Walking. On Sunday Morning.”→
