By Juliana Eriksson
Faith...faith. I'm going to need a
word association game to get me started:
Faith. Leap of faith. Faith Hill.
Damn.
Three associations in and I'm singing
"The Way You Love Me" and no closer to actually writing about
"faith." I guess that's because, honestly, I don't have many thoughts
on the subject.
Well, that's not entirely true.
I do have thoughts on faith. I just don't have much faith. I
didn't grow up in a faith-filled house. My parents probably aren't devoid
of faith. That's going a bit far. But despite my mom being in the
church choir through high school and my dad being an alter boy, we only went
when visiting the grandparents.
Perhaps it was because of my dad's
being an alter boy that we didn't go - or at least that we weren't Catholic.
Nothing untoward implied there. My dad just remembers very clearly
helping to give out the holy sacrament during the service and it being the
blood of Christ, and then, when you were "behind the curtain," it was
cheap wine that the alter boys got drunk on. A bit hypocritical from his
perspective.
My memories of church, or at least my
first ones, are going to the Catholic masses that were said for my grandfather
who passed away when I was almost 3. Pop-Pop and I were close. Not great
associations either.
And one of my earliest memories of
independent and critical thinking was considering my grandmother in church.
My grandmother who, 6 days a week, is a bitter, defeated, spiteful and
hurtful person, and who magically gets absolved of these personality flaws
because, 1 day a week, she munches on a cracker, drinks a little wine and says,
"sorry!" Obviously it's not that easy or clean and I don't mean
to be glib, but the hypocrisy of that has been with me for as long as I can
remember. It’s shaped my relationship
with the Church and therefore with God.
But I guess here, I'm confusing
religion with faith. And they're not the same and shouldn't be confused.
It's easy to do though - one should go hand in hand with the other.
And I think, for some people, they very much do. Not growing up
faithful or religious, I never gave much credence to those who had both.
It's always looked a bit like a show or a put-on to me. So staged.
So theatrical. But for many people, religion seems to be a vehicle for
their faith. I don't and don't think I ever will, own that particular
brand of car, but I sometimes do covet it. It seems like it would be easier to
walk through life with faith - with certainty in a "something else"
that tells you how to be good and when you're being bad and what the
consequences of either of those actions will be.
At the same time, I get defensive and
sometimes downright angry when I hear the faithful discuss ethics and morality
as being God-given. Because I don't believe that they were given by God
to me, but you better believe I think I have them. And I feel that the
argument that morals and ethics are given by God somehow belittles my morals
and ethics - makes them lesser than other peoples. I won't concede
that. I won’t try to argue that mine are better and belittle the origin of
someone else’s, but having them innately or learning them from my parents or
society (or however I got them), shouldn’t make my morals and ethics lesser
either.
But here I am again – conflating
faith with other things – morality, ethics, religion. Maybe it’s because I don’t really know what
faith is, what faith feels like, at least in the God sense. I’ve never been absolutely certain, one way
or the other, about Him. I’ve never had
faith that He exists. I’ve never had
faith that He doesn’t. I’ve never had
faith in His books or His son or His prophets.
That the prophets lived, that others have believed strongly enough in
their ideas to die for them, and that they give others strength…that I can
believe in. But that they were preaching
the words of a higher, all-knowing being…that I can’t get behind.
Too bad too. It would be nice to have so many built-in
friends from church. And it would be
nice to know what I should rally and rail against. I feel like, without this faith, I have to
figure it out on my own and that’s a bit more difficult. A bit more complicated. A bit less black and white than some people
that I’ve encountered who are faithful.
And I could use a bit of black and white sometimes. A bit of absolute truth. But I’m a shades of grey person, which could
explain my difficulty getting to faith in the first place.
Sigh.
The vicious cycle continues.
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