What do you believe in? My quest for faith without religion

One of my favourite advice columns in Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar series was her response to a letter from a woman questioning the existence of God. Her six-month-old daughter had, against the odds, survived surgery to remove a brain tumour, and a lot of people had been praying for her (agnostic) family. The woman told Cheryl that the terrifying event had left her wondering whether there was such thing as God, and if so, had he saved her daughter’s life? But if God existed, she wondered, why had he let her daughter get sick in the first place? Strayed’s reply was, as always, shoulder-droppingly moving.

“What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway?”

The reason I love this passage so much is because it beautifully sums up what religion means to me – not the dedication to please a supernatural bearded man who condemns and judges, but the innate compulsion to honour the powerful spirit of love that exists around us and within us. Something we can channel to give us strength, something that inspires us to be more and give more, something reflected in the extraordinary beauty of nature, something that serves as a life raft when we are adrift in stormy seas. Something vastly more powerful than we could possibly imagine.

It’s sometimes difficult for people to understand how I can believe in angels and in God yet not conform to any church-based faith. It’s sometimes difficult for me to explain this.

I realise everyone has their own views on religion, and I don’t wish to force my views on anyone. I totally understand that there are all sorts of reasons institutional religion appeals to people – a sense of certainty, for example. I respect everyone’s right to determine their own values and faith; this is simply the expression of what feels true for me. To borrow another Cheryl quote: “My truth is not a condemnation of yours.”

Last week I went to a number of sessions at the always-brilliant Sydney Writer’s Festival; one of the standouts for me was social researcher Hugh Mackay’s talk entitled Finding Meaning Without Religion.

Around two-thirds of Australians say we believe in God or some ‘higher power’, but fewer than one in 10 of us attend church weekly. To me, that indicates that people are searching for spirituality in their lives without pledging allegiance to a church’s definition. We’re individually searching our hearts for what’s meaningful to each of us. I suspect for many people that search leads not to stories in ancient lands and gardens, but – as Strayed so eloquently put it – the “way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body”.  Or as the Dalai Lama says simply: “My religion is kindness.”

What being religious, or spiritual-but-not-religious, gives us is a sort of roadmap – albeit sketchy – to navigate this confusing and sometimes bitterly unfair world. It gives us hope and it gives us meaning. Essentially, religion is people putting their faith in something larger than themselves.

If you find that larger thing in scriptures, hymns, rituals and visits to religious buildings, that’s wonderful. If you don’t, Hugh suggests you look for your own sense of meaning “in the eyes of the people who love you, or who are at least prepared to put up with you” (lol). There’s a Maori proverb from my native New Zealand which says: He aha te mea nui o te ao. He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. That means: What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.

I’m paraphrasing here, but what Hugh is suggesting is we place our faith in the ties that bind us and the love we have for each other. That is something both tangible and intangible. We often think of religion in terms of salvation and redemption, yet when you look back to the darkest periods of your life, who saved you and who helped you find redemption? I’d wager it was the people who love you.

I’m not at all saying institutional religion is invalid, I’m simply saying that in my personal experience, matters of faith are best reduced to a framework of love and compassion. I find that in the divine, but I also find it expressed through the people around me.

Hugh explains: “It’s in our DNA to be cooperative and to form community. The way we form community is to behave in kind, tolerant and respectful ways towards each other.” Instead of what religion you belong to, he wants to know: “What kind of world are you dreaming of? And how does this affect the way you go about your life and treat other people?” Perhaps this is what Ram Dass was getting at when he suggested we “treat everyone we meet as God in drag”.

Those questions, Hugh says, are far more important that what box you tick in the religion question on your census.

In praise of writing. How to make every moment count

If you’ve read my weekly Tuesday lists, you’ll know that I am a big advocate for using writing to acknowledge and celebrate what’s going on my world. Last week I used a similar approach to tackling a feeling of flatness and general life dissatisfaction. Instead of writing about external elements, as I do on Tuesdays, I sat and wrote down all the ways that I'm a more connected, more resilient, gentler and generally more likeable person than I was a year ago. I did this because I believe, as Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner declares, that “if you can write, you can change your life”.

At the end of this experience, I felt like my compass had returned to true north. Like I had twisted the end of a kaleidoscope (kids, ask your parents) and was suddenly dazzled by captivating colours and patterns. Colours and patterns which had, of course, been there all along. But I had not seen them because I was too preoccupied by the darkness. I was looking at the hole instead of the doughnut.

Even if your washing hamper is overflowing and your fridge contains only expired mustard and a mutated chilli*, you have much to be proud of. You are doing better at life than you realise. You are succeeding in ways that you likely do not recognise. You are learning more about yourself and your place in the world. You are contributing to the lives of strangers and acquaintances in ways that you will never fully understand. You are making choices to expand yourself and your world, and, ideally, learning from them. You are caring for yourself and the people around you – and this is no small thing. This is the biggest thing of all. This is what we are here to do.

Writing is how we can bear witness to that growth and also account for the actions that might be taking us far away from the people we want to grow into. It’s through the act of recording our experiences that we recognise that at any given moment, there is always more right than there is wrong. It’s how we hit the pause button on a world that seems to spin faster every year. It’s how we celebrate all that we are and all that we have. It’s how we can make the little moments count.

In a letter to her younger self, Cheryl Strayed – aka my spirit animal – writes: “The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”

And it’s through writing that the becoming comes to light.

If you feel lost, putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, can help you find your way home. This blog does that for me. I have to be totally honest with you at this juncture: this blog is not always a joy. It steals sleep and leisure time from me, and it yields precious little in terms of bankable business. BUT the act of diarising my attempt to find meaning in my life has resulted in me discovering that meaning, every day, in ways big and small. By translating my observations and disparate thoughts into tangible and (hopefully) fluid articles, I am living more consciously and less on autopilot. Writing can do that. I highly recommend it.

*Me, currently.

I'm very sorry for your loss. How can I help?

In February I wrote a letter to a Canadian woman I had never met. I had seen an appeal on social media by the woman’s daughter asking people around the world to send letters of hope and well wishes to her mother who was nearing the end of her struggle with pancreatic cancer. Because I do volunteer work at rest homes I have seen how much a simple handwritten letter means to people who are suffering and feeling alone, so I put pen to paper.

Sadly, a fortnight ago I found a message in my ‘other’ inbox on Facebook (which I seldom check) from this lovely woman’s daughter, letting me know her mother had passed away the day before my letter arrived. She attached a photo of a wall (see below) covered with letters from around the world, and said that it had brought her some comfort to know that so many people cared so much.

Once I got over my annoyance that it had taken me three days to post my letter (!) I realised that a beautiful thing had happened in this Ontario town. In a time of immense pain, this lady was able to derive a small measure of peace from small but powerful acts of kindness by complete strangers. It was a heartwarming thing to bear witness to, as well as to have participated in, in a very tiny way. Of course, no wall of letters can protect her from the unrelenting ferocity of grief but perhaps this visible reminder of the power of hope can provide fleeting moments of shelter.

This got me thinking about the ways we can help people as they grieve. I’m not talking about strangers here, I’m talking about the people we care about. It’s heart-wrenching watching someone dear to you in absolute agony over the loss of someone dear to them. What do you say? It’s hard not to fall into well-meaning but ultimately useless clichés: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do”; “Call me if you ever want to talk”; or the woefully inadequate: “time heals all wounds…” It’s so difficult to know what you can do that will actually help.

There are Cheryl Strayed quotes for these situations, as there are for every emotional quandary. A man wrote to Cheryl (aka ‘Dear Sugar’) asking for advice on how to support his partner as she grieved the death of her mother. Nothing he did seemed to help, he wrote, and it was tearing him to pieces seeing her in so much pain. Cheryl’s response explained that we have a tendency to want to rush in and offer advice or practical solutions when someone we care about is suffering. But what counts, she says, is not *how* we show up for that person, it’s simply that we *do* show up for them, again and again and again. We keep in contact. We let them cry. We listen. What comes from our heart is more important than what comes from our mouth. Anyway, that’s what I took from Cheryl’s response. Here’s what she actually wrote: “It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what’s horribly true. But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.”

Yes, it is. Thanks, Cheryl.

 

The 'letter wall'.

PS: On a lighter note, I got chocolate smeared all over my keyboard in the process of writing this post. Totally worth it. Happy Easter, everyone.

On necessary heartbreak

"You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

I’ve never met a Rumi line I didn’t love, and this sentence is one of my absolute favourites. It reminds me of a quote I read last year by the peerless Cheryl Strayed. Someone had written a letter to her ‘Dear Sugar’ advice column (BTW if you’re not familiar with the Dear Sugar series, you are truly missing out) asking what advice she would give to her twentysomething self.
Her characteristically eloquent response included reference to her decision to divorce her husband in her mid-twenties. She had still loved him, but even though she could not say why, she knew she didn’t belong in the relationship anymore. Cheryl closed with this quote, which I have loved ever since and never forgotten: “Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

When I first read this, it leaped off the page and dug its steely fingers around my own silently shattering heart. You know that feeling, I know you do. Something resonates with you so strongly you’re sure it was written just for you, just for that moment. It is the truest thing of all the true things that have ever been before. At the time I was in the process of completely uprooting my life in New Zealand and moving to Australia for no good reason other than the fact that I could not stay. And no matter how many times people asked me why I was leaving, I could not produce a better answer than “I need a change” – as if this were sufficient to justify the wrench of leaving all the people I loved. If you’re going to leave behind the people who define you, bolster you and imbue your life with so much meaning, you’d want to have a very good reason. I didn’t. Staying meant stagnation, but leaving meant losing so much. I knew ultimately that I would gain in the long run, but in that moment, surrounded by boxes, Customs forms and piles of the objects that had amounted to my life in Auckland, I could only see the losses.

You must be strong enough to break your own heart. Friends, I held these words to my chest and I repeated them at 2am when fear and despair kept me from sleep. I uttered them when I found myself shaking in the toilets at work and in the evenings when I ran out of tissues to collect my tears. These words reminded me that I had to do the thing I did not want to do – even though it made no sense - and proffered the dimmest promise of finding hope on the other side.

We do not grow when we stay stuck, we grow when we take risks and follow our instincts, even when common sense and peer pressure do not support us in those actions. I broke my own heart and I found – as I had suspected it would – that the being strong made me even stronger. It was the right thing and the best thing to do, and it was worth all the tears and all the despair.

My affection for Cheryl’s prose is matched only by my adoration of Rumi, and I firmly believe there is Rumi line for every occasion. On the subject of necessary heartbreak, he offers this: “The wound is the place where the light enters.”

And where light enters, growth happens.

(That last sentence is mine, but you can use it.)

Have you ever broken your own heart? I’d like to give you a high-five. And a hug. Because that is an act of bravado, not to mention self-love. Email me your story here.