A Second Crunchie Proposition

A Second Crunchie Proposition
© Melina Magdalena (2008)

It’s becoming crunchier to own up to having and valuing some kind of spiritual belief system. When I say crunchier, I don’t just mean fashionable, trendier or more hip. Of course what I’m observing could be a flash in the pan, but I have a feeling that it reflects a deeper shift in understanding and appreciation of what it is to be human, and live in this world.

It’s hard to think in terms of generations, but if I consider the folk I grew up with, there were two main camps – those youth groupers who were openly and joyously religious, and the rest of us, who were not. That’s not a fair dichotomy, because many of us were in fact raised to be believers of one sort or another, but those who belonged to the youth groups were a special breed of youngster. I remember being irritated whenever I came into contact with them – and I received a number of invitations to join various social groups, notably the Mormons and Assemblies of God. Why on earth were they were so happy all the time? What was there to be happy about in this severely depressing scary big world we all inhabited? How could they be so insular and blind to all of the faults and dangers?

I remember being furious at the idea that everything bad in the world had somehow been cancelled out because of the death of a certain somebody 2000 years earlier. Not only did it seem grossly unjust for people to claim that his death set them free forever, but I didn’t understand why his death should seem so much more glorified than his life. I was not about to claim sinless status by letting him bear the brunt of my imperfections.

So I was not a youth grouper, but I was a believer and as I grew up into a ratbag activist my belief systems were knocked around pretty badly. It was not then and is still less fashionable now, to be Jewish of course, because the facile mentality of many left-wing political activists of my Australia says that Jewish means supporting Israel. Even naming our firstborn after one of Israel’s most famous traitors was insufficient to rid me of the taint of being both Jewish and American by heritage.

I denied my beliefs completely for a few years, tucking them away into the recesses of my snail shell along with all that other baggage, until I abandoned all hope of belonging to the activist community and felt safe in my isolation, to bring them out into the open once again.

Those activists I hung out with were for the most part not actively religious. There may have been one or two who expressed fond memories of their childhood church-going, and who persisted in identifying with some brand or denomination or other, and there were certainly those who were into alternative beliefs, but it was hard to see how these manifested in the way they lived their lives. Their values and beliefs were as underground as mine. What we emanated was anger and fear, for the most part. We were simply outraged at the state of the world and dismayed that THEY weren’t letting US fix things. The pressure we put ourselves under, to change the world left no room for considering, developing or practising living in the kind of world we wanted it to be.

We felt we had to take action against social conventions and institutions, and we were unsupported and aimless, rootless railers against injustice, without any place to call our own. We didn’t celebrate or worship. We didn’t talk about God. We barely talked about community, unless we were the co-counselling feminists who insisted on discussing process ad infinitum and trying for consensus decision-making in our meetings. At that point I really didn’t relate to feminists at all.

As we began to start families, some of us actively chose to raise our children differently from the way we had been raised. I was charged more than once, with the sin of giving my children too clear a picture of the ills of the world. Give them time to just be kids, my mother urged. They don’t need to know about all that horrible stuff. Don’t deny them the magic you were given, growing up – that feeling that everything is all right, and that even the mysterious can be acceptable. You don’t have to give them answers to everything. Don’t weigh them down with the cares and burdens of the world.

There was a lot of magic in my childhood. I had Santa Claus, I had the Tooth Fairy, I had angels and spirits and fairies and witches and goblins and mermaids and unicorns. I disbelieved those people who told me I was a fool to think any of this was real. I was the credulous kind of little girls whose mother had to tactfully take aside aged 11 and make sure I knew there wasn’t really a Santa. And of course, I also had God.

My God is not and has never been a personal God. Putting into words my ideas about God, I reveal myself to be almost completely a child of my time. Nature words come most easily to mind – wind, air, sky, leaves, rainbows, water, earth, seeds, and life itself. I have a particular affinity to sky. My sophisticated emotionally intelligent self might say that my God is not a vengeful God but rather my God is Joy.

There are two kinds of situations when I feel close to God. I usually have those moments of joy when I am at one with, or having a (usually solitary) encounter with nature. I stop in my tracks and marvel at the utter beauty, fascination and intricate magic of one small aspect of this world we live in. It’s like opening a window to God’s presence. Secondly, I feel joy when I am experiencing the warmth, closeness and connection of my life interwoven with the lives of those around me. This happens frequently in my classroom, with family members and with those rare kindred spirits I encounter from time to time, as well as with my love. In those moments of joy, I feel God is active within and around me.

I need to point out that in the absence of Joy I feel great Fear much of the time. That Fear points to the absence of my awareness of God in those times. I was heavily influenced by my mother’s and my mother’s mother’s beliefs about love, fear and all other such jampolskyesque miracles; (not that simply believing or thinking about these can ever equate to the conscious choice to practice such beliefs).

To my way of thinking, the generation that lives between my parents and me is less god-focused than the generations that embrace it at either end. Many people of that vintage have made concerted efforts to divest themselves of the useless superstitions of their own parents, and to free their offspring from the burdens of belief. I don’t think this was good for the children or their parents. The current pendulum swing back towards beliefs evidences a shift in thinking about the ramifications of spiritual health and emotional well being.

It will be interesting to see how my children become adults. Their parents both come from backgrounds of belief, but while I have explicitly exposed them to my belief system, and worked towards fostering their own spiritual growth, their father chose not to do this. In the last eighteen months one child has moved from the label atheist to agnostic. The other refuses to enter into discussion about beliefs or religion.

Within this new chapter of my life in partnership, I am simply revelling in being encouraged to open up and explore my spiritual side again. It’s amazing and affirming to be encouraged to let those aspects of my identity come out and play. I feel very excited at the prospect of putting concerted effort into revealing and establishing life-giving connections and enacting these meaningfully, whether through liturgy, prayer and ritual, or through conscious choices in our everyday lives.

The second proposition is of course, the ritual that we are creating as a signpost that we are joining one another as we journey through life. It’s fun, and it’s joyful work. Although we come from different traditions and perspectives, there are plenty of ding ding ding moments where we look at one another in frankly quizzical disbelief as if to say ‘you mean this is important to you, too?’ And then there are the head into brick wall moments of ‘Huh?’ All of these are strands in the rich tapestry of life.

Never boring, is it…