Dear Mom…

Dear Mom…

Ya, you the woman I don’t know any­more.  Some­one I’ve not had any kind of mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion with in twenty years.  TWENTY YEARS!!!  I can date the date! I still have the let­ter you wrote me.  It would take me two min­utes to dig it out of my lock box, May 1991!  You can for­give, but you’ll NEVER for­get.  Ya, I guess we wrote each other off.

This past week, my hus­band fin­ished a fish pond for me.  There is still land­scap­ing to do around the whole project. Back­fill­ing and dig­ging out of a drainage ditch.  The good news is that the fish are safe in their new home, the water is being pumped and kept oxye­nated, and when all is said and done, we’ll have a quiet, and peace­ful place to sit and med­i­tate in the evenings.  We watch fish, we watch the birds, we talk to each other, we enjoy our sur­round­ings– we enjoy our life.

The lit­tle golden statue from Uncle Tom’s place now resides inside my pond. Bou­quet by Viki Ann Snyder.

I’ve already placed some water plants in the ‘upper’ pond on a shelf that he cre­ated in the mid­dle for me.  In the Corkscrew Rush that I had kept alive inside a cement mix­ing tub for a year prior, as I waited for this fish pond to become.… I placed a golden idol. This lit­tle statue is prob­a­bly a garage sale spe­cial, a Hindu God or God­dess. It sits in the typ­i­cal lotus med­i­ta­tion pose.  It once sat in my Uncle Tom’s front yard.  Once he passed,  I took it.  When  I made the deci­sion to take it, my mother asked, “What are you going to do with that?”  A sim­ple ques­tion that was asked in a tone of voice that I still rec­og­nize even after twenty years of not talk­ing.  There was a judge­ment state­ment mixed into that ques­tion. I choose to ignore it at the time, but I hear her voice when I look at that lit­tle statue. Some­thing that should remind me to lis­ten for the silence between my thoughts is instead set­ting off feel­ings of hurt, because she still doesn’t under­stand. Some­thing that should remind me of the love of my uncle, instead reminds me of the small mind­ed­ness of my mother, and oth­ers like her. Instead of remind­ing me that ALL IS DIVINE, I am hear­ing the record­ing of her voice.  For some rea­son, the past few days I can’t shake it.  And so I write.…

When I was grow­ing up, my mom was an athe­ist.  My assump­tion is that she is still is.  I know she has heard that I attend church, and am a mem­ber even.  I was raised athe­ist by her.  Dad was raised a Sev­enth Day Adven­tist.  His mother did not believe, his father did. My father believed. He stated so, though he did not attend church.  In this spir­i­tual mess, I have had to find my own way.  I was not taken to church even once as a child, my lessons came from a Catholic neigh­bor girl who told me I’d go to hell if I wasn’t baptized.

My guess is that my mother pic­tures me a small minded per­son.  It’s all I can think fits that judge­ment in her voice.  She must pic­ture me a South­ern Bap­tist, or a mem­ber of some other fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian Sect.   I feel a pro­jec­tion of her­self falls onto me, I must be a fol­lower who reads direc­tions and gets a good result, but doesn’t think beyond the result or it’s con­se­quences as I move along through life.

Note to mom:  The gal you gave birth to is actu­ally a very deep thinker who does a LOT of research before she set­tles into much of any­thing.  I look at a lot of sources of infor­ma­tion before I make a com­mit­ment.  This is MY spir­i­tual quest.

By the late 1980’s I’d already shopped around for churches.  I’d owned a con­cor­dance, a bible, and had taken sev­eral bible study courses.  I knew all about Jesus, the Trin­ity, proph­esy, Daniel, the Rev­e­la­tions, etc. etc. etc.  I so wanted to be a Sev­enth Day Adven­tist like my father.  I did try out a South­ern Bap­tist Church.  But, I could not buy into their idea of GOD.  Depend­ing on whom you talked to there was  a judge­ment on the books of hell and damna­tion for most of human kind.  What was the point of even try­ing if that was the ulti­mate out­come??  And the flip side of that was that GOD loved(s) us like a father (i.e. a par­ent) loves his child.  If this is the case, how could he doom most of the the human race to hell?  It didn’t make sense to me.

While attend­ing col­lege at Santa Rose Junior Col­lege, I took a com­par­a­tive mythol­ogy class, and Native Amer­i­can Art Classes. It is amaz­ing how much spir­i­tu­al­ism is tied up in human art­work. I also took psy­chol­ogy classes.  I read, I read, I read. I read stud­ies and found out that one way or another the human brain is struc­tured to believe and the brain is health­ier when it BELIEVES.  All of this was to add to knowl­edge I’d already got­ten on my own from sources such as Alan Watts, and Joseph Camp­bell, etc.,  etc.  In it’s most sim­plis­tic form, reli­gion is in a way, human kind’s way of explain­ing their envi­ro­ment and exis­tence.   But, it is not that cut and dried.  Dur­ing this time, while in the process of a divorce, I also entered AA and Alanon, not because I was an alco­holic but because I was attracted to them and I saw it as a way to edu­cate myself.  I worked the 12-steps.  At this point, I was tak­ing my very first baby-steps to belief in the Divine.

In 1998, I started attend­ing a Dis­ci­ples of Christ Church in Gey­serville, CA.  My ini­tial moti­va­tion was my son.  I was try­ing to instill some “good stuff.” In the begin­ning, because I was so shy, and because I have had bad expe­ri­ences with judg­men­tal fundi­men­tal­ists, I went in, sat there politely, and ran out when the ser­vice was over.   Yes, over the long run it was there I met peo­ple who became my fam­ily, and a pas­tor who could finally explain things to me in a way that I under­stood, and could accept. Dis­ci­ples of Christ is an “OPEN AND AFFIRMING” church and way of life.  I could not have found a more lov­ing home.

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Just a lit­tle side note here:
No, I do not believe that civ­i­liza­tion was built in seven lit­eral days.  Yes, I believe in metaphor for the sake of teach­ing.
To para­phrase, “Open thy mind, & heart & all will be yours…”

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In my process of find­ing GOD, I have learned that there is DIVINE in every­thing.  Divin­ity is within us, as we were made in It’s image.  The fact that we breath at all is Divine, because at the very least we can cel­e­brate each day the fact that we ARE ALIVE.  No mat­ter what YOU call GOD, be it Shiva, Bud­dha, Mohammed, Jesus, the Eter­nal, the Blessed, The Word –no mat­ter what you choose to call it, the bot­tom line is LOVE and Accep­tance.  The mes­sage of most of the world’s reli­gions (or myths as some believe) all share that com­mon mes­sage that all is DIVINE and LOVE is the answer.

The con­clu­sion of all these expe­ri­ences is that I have found that the Divine resides in and around all things.  How sim­ple is it to take that thought and look at a lit­tle golden Hindu statue , and know that it sym­bol­izes someone’s idea of The Divine?  Know­ing this, could I not use it to remind myself to keep seek­ing a peace­ful life, a peace­ful mind, and a peace­ful and lov­ing spirit?   How could look­ing at that lit­tle statue not remind me of my uncle’s love which was so gen­er­ously pro­vided — and indeed, one of the more beau­ti­ful and lov­ing expe­ri­ences of my life.

I’m very happy feel­ing peace­ful, know­ing that what­ever GOD is, in soul and spirit that It’s bot­tom line is Love, and Accep­tance.  And that this God is big enough to real­ize that humans need to see him/her in many dif­fer­ent forms, and fol­low on many dif­fer­ent paths.  Dif­fer­ent but not wrong.  Your path is dif­fer­ent from mine, but it does not ele­vate you over me.