On Religion (revisited)

A revisitation of an essay I wrote in the days leading up to my father’s passing. 

"May you be grounded and rooted in love" Ephesians 3:17

Wheel (chakrasana) has always been one of my favorite poses. Pushing up into wheel is like pushing back into a happy childhood memory and feeling the warmth and peace of home wash over me. It is a powerful personal grounding pose and one I find myself returning to often as I am working through my father’s death in hospice care. 

In dealing with this loss, I find myself spending a lot of time on the root chakra, on grounding and stability, on examining my foundation. I am realizing more than ever the foundation of religion that has made me who I am and am feeling grateful for the place it held in my life.

Nowadays, the words I use to explain my spirituality are vast and varied. But, there was a point in my life that I was dogmatic in my beliefs as they pertained to organized religion. Until I was betrayed and hurt within that framework of religion. After renouncing the religion I was once a part of, a lot of times it felt really good (in a really bad way) to tell myself I was a victim of all of that. It felt like justice to be angry at the notion that others could feel peace inside of a religion that did not betray them in the same way it had betrayed me and those I love. However, this was never fair and never served me or my spiritual growth.

I've struggled for many years now, in matters of spirituality, to tell myself a different story and to try to learn from the religion of my past. I have been discovering that the teachings of the Jesus, whom I loved and fully devoted myself to in my teenage years, have not disappeared from my own heart. No, they have been "born again" into new incarnations of the love and understanding for which he advocated.

Teachers appear in all facets of life and so does the potential for growth. Jesus, in particular, was a wonderful, empathic, and kind teacher. He was a profit outside of any organized religion that followed his death. 

I feel, trust, and believe in love as the ultimate catalyst for healing. The universal connection of love can be explained using any of the major world religions or through the teachings of philosophers, prophets, and poets. It can also be experienced. I believe there are many paths back to the same place.   

Perhaps the ultimate lesson Jesus taught me was one of forgiveness. I can forgive life for not always being what I expected. I can forgive myself for my own resentments. And in forgiveness, I return to love. I know that I can never have peace when I hold resentment in my heart. 

There often comes a time when the need for serenity outweighs the desire for justice. A huge lesson I’ve been learning and re-learning in the past few months is that a just life was never promised to me. Letting go of the past and, along with it, expectations of a fair and just future will only empower me.

I am not entitled to anything to return to a place of peace and tranquility. That exists only and wholly in the present moment of this precious life I have been given.

A Beautiful Mess

I left my house Friday and drove around for the first time in a couple weeks. I was hoping to find a trail to walk in the woods for a little bit. I miss the trees, the silence and loving embrace of nature. We are blessed to have balconies in our apartment, but the noises of traffic and trash in the woods are often all I can focus on when I'm trying to sit in the sunshine.

I drove to a few trailheads that I knew well. All of them were too crowded with cars. While driving, I saw people outside shopping, large groups playing basketball, children at playgrounds... I also saw the signs on the highway telling people to stay home and an elder picking up trash along the side of a busy street. I ended up at my old Elementary School because I knew there was a patch of woods and also lots of open space. I saw even more people playing basketball. I also saw kids on bikes keeping their distance and teachers wheeling an aquarium cart to their car to save their class pet.

While I sat in the woods, it was hard not to notice the mess, the trash, to want to fix it, to be angry. In particular, there was a plastic bottle whose wrapper read "tropical paradise" on it that seemed to taunt a little extra. It was hard not to get distracted by the awful din of I-95 as it echoed up from the valley. I thought about how I had spent so much of my childhood at that school with those sounds of traffic, so extra loud in the winter when most of the trees were barren of leaves. I walked the back of the field and visited the trees that were planted using the planting plan I created when I worked for the County. I thought about how each species was chosen by me and in what order and hoped that I chose well. I remembered how I used to look out across that valley past the traffic and toward the college I would one day attend, to study environmental science. I thought about how I planned most of my life to leave this place and I did. But now here I am again about to hunker down for an indeterminate amount of time. And how it cannot be any other way.

I have followed this virus very closely since it first arose in Wuhan. I have been consulting the science daily and making logical decisions based on data and what epidemiologists recommend. Because of this, I bought extra food with each trip to the store for my family weeks before the shelves at the grocery store started running low. I haven't stockpiled. I have isolated and tried to make choices that are best for my community, for humanity. I have practiced the mindfulness techniques I learned over the past ten years to get myself into a good head space. I have allowed myself to feel fear, but tried my hardest not to let it overwhelm me.

I have also been reading and listening to a lot of spiritual takes on what is happening right now with COVID-19. Spiritually, we may be dealing with how we can collectively release fear and illusion. We need to stare the truth in the face and find new ways to communicate with each other. We need new paradigms, systems, and ideas for how we heal our relationship to the earth. Of all of the species that have ever existed on earth, 99.9% of them are now extinct. We are but a blip in the timeline of the earth's history. I want to be very clear that humans are NOT killing the earth with climate change, we are killing ourselves. The earth will be here long after humans are gone. Collectively, this virus is showing us just that.

I love humans and humanity. I love the ways we are good to one another and take care of one another. I love how we fight back against oppression and oppressors and demand better, demand justice, demand truth. I love how we tell stories and give each other hope.

And yet.... any yet... right now I am STRUGGLING with others. I am struggling with myself. I want to do more. Be more. I want others to care. I am tired, so tired, of screaming into the void.

I believe that a lot of the problems and toxic systems that exist in the world are inheritances. They are what we are given as children, what we are taught, but not what we need to accept. We can and must do the work to first acknowledge and then to dismantle the hierarchical power structures that oppress and deny our connectedness. There are so many who have been/are doing this work already and who are holding new visions of how we can show up for each other and for the planet. It gives me such hope.

I don't know what the future holds. I believe everything, life as we know it, especially in the United States, is going to fundamentally change forever. I don't believe in "all good, everything is better, back to the way it was before." There will always be hardships, loss, suffering. But, there will also always be love, truth, and kindness. Life is messy, humanity is messy.

I just hope we can more fiercely take care of one another.