Gotta Have Faith

I’ve been so awful about writing this past week, and I’m sorry, mostly to myself. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed it until just now. I guess in following up with my last post, I was a little anxious about diving into those topics, and so part of me just avoided it all together. I’m still not quite at the point where I’m ready to talk about them here. Perhaps just before I leave I’ll write about it all, without the lingering fear of having to face my thoughts with the people I know who read this. It’s strange how timid I’ve suddenly become.

It snowed today for pretty much the first time all winter. It was a beautiful snow. I watched it begin from the solitude of the office, watched it dance outside my window as I sat inside stuffing envelopes. I was suddenly miserable. Not necessarily to be doing something so mundane, but to be doing it while the world outside was creating something so extraordinary. So I gave up, packed up my things to finish at home, and went out to dance with the universe.

It was the best kind of snow, not that mixture of grey slush, but poignantly grand flakes that somehow reassured my belief in miracles. I walked to my car, each tiny miracle landing on the pavement just before my feet, marking the trail I was to follow. It made me feel so watched over, so taken care of.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about God and about what I do and don’t believe. I was joking at work the other day with one of my bosses, telling him not to take the lord’s name in vain. He told me that was rich coming from “miss atheist” and I found myself shocked. “I’m not an atheist,” I told him, “I believe in God.” He seemed a little thrown and added “well, but you don’t practice religion.”

All throughout high school I joked about religion because it wasn’t part of my life. In so many ways, I thought religious people were really narrow minded, which was of course, ironically narrow minded of me. I wasn’t raised as any one religion and I wasn’t ever really asked what I believed. I never really thought about it. I never really needed to.

In fact, the first time I remember ever really considering it was in my freshman seminar at college when one of my classmates addressed the question to the class. The only other out-of-stater raised his hand and said he believed in God but not in organized religion. I liked the answer and agreed, eventually adapting it as my own response to the question.

My sophomore year, at a new school, I took two amazing religion classes and some not so inspiring English classes, which was what I had intended on majoring in since I was about fourteen. At the end of my sophomore year, I switched my major to religion. Everyone, including me, laughed with my decision. It was a fairly ridiculous choice considering my past of little to no religious education and my current beliefs, or lack thereof. For someone who claimed not to believe in organized religion, spending the next two to three years studying it seemed pretty illogical.

It’s only been in these past few months when I’ve realized what drew me to those classes. It was the open mindedness of them. It was the way each teacher and classmate didn’t condemn or promote one religion, but spoke of it as theory. Every subject became a discussion of this is what some people believe, what does that make you think? And I loved it. I loved the question because it MADE me think, it made me pause to consider what I do and don’t believe.

And I do believe in God. I do believe in organized religion, even if I don’t believe it’s right for me. I understand why people are drawn to it. I understand that we are each entitled to believe what we want to believe in every facet of life. I understand that learning about religion hasn’t made me more narrow-minded but has, paradoxically, opened me up to a greater knowledge of acceptance and faith in following our hearts.

I was never very good at science. I convinced myself that it just wasn’t a subject that clicked with me, that I didn’t enjoy it and therefore couldn’t do well in it, but that was never the case. The truth is, I could have studied the material and learned how everything works and where everything comes from, but part of me didn’t want to know. Part of me still wanted to see every flower as having a soul, every life as having a purpose, every snowflake as being a miracle. I wanted to see the world through the eyes of a dreamer, and I think I still have faith in that belief.

I suppose my boss was right in that I don't "practice" religion in a conventional sense, but I do practice it. I worship each and every day and person as a gift. I worship the ground I walk on and the sky I live under. I worship life. Maybe that's all that religion is for me, but maybe that's all it needs to be. Maybe I'm more religious than anyone would have ever guessed.