April, the most important month of my year
Brother, my only sibling
Cottage, where I spent every summer of my youth
Dogs, my four‑legged babies
Education, a never ending saga
Friendships
Goofs I’ve made
Happiest Day of my life
Independent Living, where I’m at now
July Fourth, my favorite holiday
Keith, of the Toby variety
Letters — so many letters
Manual for the Care of Me
Nieces and Nephews
Overtime Employment
Philosophy
Questions I Wish I’d Asked my Mom
Romance
Stories
Toys, lost and found
Unexpected Joys
Volunteering
War Music
X’s in the Margins
Yearnings
And now can I have a drum roll? My final entry is: Zen Buddhism.
According to Google, Zen Buddhism is “a Mahayana school focusing on direct experience, meditation (zazen), and mindfulness to achieve enlightenment, emphasizing that individuals already possess Buddha nature.”
Lovely. But my path to Zen didn’t start with enlightenment. It started with an allergy to Christianity. I don’t say that to offend anyone. I say it because, from the time I was in first or second grade, Christians weren’t always kind to me starting one day when a little girl in pigtails informed me she couldn’t play with me anymore because I was a heathen. We’d played at her house the day before and apparently I’d failed the neighborhood’s Litmus Test: my family not only didn’t go to the “right” church, we didn’t go to any church.
I didn’t know what a heathen was, so I asked my mom. I don’t remember her answer, but soon after that my brother and I began walking to one of the four or five churches nearby. Mom didn’t care which one and we sampled them all.
My only memory of Sunday school was sitting in a basement where a woman used a felt board and cut-outs of cows, clouds, Jesus and other figures to teach us Bible stories. I liked the stories but it was years later before I figured out why I didn’t fit in. In my high school class I was one of only four kids with brown hair and eyes in a sea of blue-eyed blondes who mostly all went to the same Christian denomination.
Eventually my brother got sick of the whole Sunday routine. Instead of church, he took me to the nearby Indian mounds. We looked for arrowheads while my parents thought we were learning about Moses. Those quiet mornings in nature—imagining ancient lives, listening to the wind—were my first taste of meditation, though I didn’t have a name for it yet.
My mother eventually discovered our little rebellion. I suspect an arrowhead in my brother’s pocket gave us away. Years later, when I asked why she’d sent us to church in the first place, she said, “You needed to know the Bible stories.” She wasn’t wrong. In America, biblical references are woven into everyday conversation whether you’re religious or not.
In high school there were the usual cliques. The cheerleaders. The drama queens. We four dark haired, brown eyed kids who didn’t fit in with the sea of blue-eyed blondes. Oddly enough, I did manage to get a date for the junior prom, a kid from a different school and the son of a deeply religious dairy farmer who beat him badly for dating outside their church. He showed up at my house a week after the prom, still black and blue with raw bruises, to tell me he had to break up with me or his father would disinherit him and give the family farm to his cousin. He love farming, and said it was the only future he could imagine himself doing.
I got over the breakup, but that set me up for searching for an answer to the question: Why would a God worth worshiping condone cruelty toward children? Between a priest pretending to throw dad into a fire for throwing spitballs, a little girl in pigtails ostracizing me on a playground and a boy beaten for liking me, I spent the better party of the next two decades trying to understand why religion so often seemed to bless the bullies, and why He tolerated wars.
Over the years, I learned a lot about many faiths. If you doubt it, click over to my satirical take on the Seven Deadly Sins. But I eventually accepted that I’m too scarred—and too cynical—to ever belong to any Christian denomination. So when the Church Question comes up, I do what I’ve always done: lie through my teeth and say I’m “between churches.”
It was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who gave me my first taste of formal Meditation, even before he became a guru to the Beatles and the Beach Boys. I was never very serious about it but somewhere in the back of my head was implanted the principles he taught about self-realization, deep meditation and the idea that stillness could be a doorway, not a punishment.Earlier this year, the Walk for Peace led by Bhikkhu Pannakara rekindled my interest. He says Buddhism isn’t a religion. Google’s AI disagrees. I’m not here to referee. What matters is that something in that walk reignited a spark I’d forgotten I carried.
A
path back to myself.
A path without gatekeepers.
A path
where no one gets beaten for loving the wrong person.
The next time someone in my City of Churches asks me where I worship, if I’m in the right mood, I might just tell them I’m studying to be a Buddhist. I know it would shock more than a few people. But more than likely I'll lie. Again.
Some things never change.
You’re probably still wearing yours socks—a joke you’ll get if you read yesterday’s post—but that’s okay. I’m just happy you got to the end of this one. ©
Note: I'll be back to my regular schedule of posting on Wednesdays. If you normally get notices by email, I'm not sure if that will resume right away, or not. I'm on the 'free' plan and it might take until the end of May for that to straighten out. Posting daily has screwed things up. I just added the follow by Google feature at the bottom of the right hand column if you're interested.
I was here and I read and I can't think of a damn thing to say as a comment so all you get is this dribble, this happens when I read stuff later in the day
ReplyDeleteHey, at least you tried and more importantly, you keep coming back and I appreciate that.
DeleteWell, I’ll come right out and say it. I’m an atheist or in polite terms, a non-believer, and I think Christianity has caused more wars, more racism, more hatred, more cruelty and more self-righteousness and greed than anything else.
ReplyDeleteJust look at the world of the past and the world today with all the white Christian nationalists, not only in Trump’s little group, but elsewhere. The father who beat his son is no surprise. I think Buddhism is the only sane belief system out there. Mary
Mary, I hear you and often with you. But I wrestle with the question of whether humanity would have been better off if religion had never been invented or not. I've concluded that the basic values its brought mankind such as those in the Ten Commandments would have come about anyway because they make sense. I just wish the hardliners who fight because they think their path to God is the only one and worth starting wars over.
DeleteEvery major religion on earth has similar stories that teach morality past down through the centuries. If they were not so bullheaded they'd see that those four hundred years when the words of Mosses and Jesus were passed down by word of mouth before they were written down all come from the same place and different cultures took them and ran with them. And some of those cultures came to enlightenment faster than others. Can that be chalked up to the influence of religion spreading those values? I think it can. Where I have trouble with Christianity is that too many denominations think their way is the only way to live. Where I've come to see religion as the history of man's development of moral principles and my hope is that one day the major religions of the world will come back to their roots and start merging instead of dividing which seems to be happening more and more as they argue of the rights of minorities groups. Where is the judge not lest you be judged concept within the walls of many Christian churches?
I have both the Google feature and the mail and it's nice having both. I really like this post -- that had to be a rugged part of your youth and I will never understand why people are that way (but then, you grew up in West Michigan, too, right? And that's a LOT more conservative than here in the middle of the mitten.) I dated a Zen buddhist once -- at least, I think he was partially one! There is much to be learned from this practice.
ReplyDeleteYes, West Michigan was not as open-minded back when I was a kid as it is now but I still hear the same kinds of bigotry frequently. For example, we had a woman who was a social worker for the county who lived in my building once say at a lunch table that she was an atheist and she was ostracized by a couple of others living here. She lived here for two years before needing to go to assisted living and several people never spoke to her or would sit next to her the whole time after her confession.
DeleteCongrats on posting the whole month! What a change from your once a week posts but you did a great job! I was raised Catholic but have no religion now. The rule I still try to follow is "treat others the way you want to be treated."
ReplyDeleteThat's a great rule to live by. My dad was Catholic until a priest picked him up and pretended he was going to throw him into a fire. After that my dad went to the Methodist church while his dad and siblings went to the Catholic church. My mom's history with religion is totally unknown to me...one of those questions I wished I'd asked. But she and my dad never went to church expect for weddings and funerals. My whole extended family on my dad's side were devoted Catholics but among my mom's siblings I never got a sense if they were church goers or not.
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