Heaven and the Lack Thereof

First, I apologize for saying nothing for over three weeks. I honestly don't know where the time goes.

Next, if you follow all my comings and goings to NC, I will report that my visit with Mother lasted 24 hours. I used impending rain as the excuse and got out as she was walking to dinner on the second day I was there. I have two statements to make about the visit: 1) She's doing remarkably well; and 2) There's no cure for narcissism. I'm hopeful that I won't have to make that trip again until March.

And now—ta da—a current post!

I heard an interview with Carolyn S. Briggs on one or another talk show I listen to during my workdays. She wrote "Higher Ground: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost" in 2002. She adapted it to a screenplay, and the movie was released this year, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm waiting for it to hit Netflix or Amazon.

Her interview captured my interest because of my own lack of relationship with faith, or with Christianity, or with religion. Who knows what to call it these days?!

Ms. Briggs is five years younger than I, but much of her religious life in the 70s paralleled that of mine in the same time period. There were praise sessions and home churches and speaking in tongues and other charismatic, evangelical manifestations. The major difference, though, was that she seemed to fully embrace the practices and beliefs. I, on the other hand, went along.

The pattern of much of my life has been to go along. Go along to get along. Go along so people might like you. Go along to ensure a stable and accepted place in the world. The bottom line: do anything to avoid being given away again. And so I gave myself away again and again and again.

Because our life during my first marriage was so wrapped up in church, I lost all my friends when I left my husband to regain any vestige of sanity that I ever had. In that environment, one doesn't leave her husband, regardless of how miserable she's been or how many times she's tried to escape by any means. Oh, but maybe they weren't really friends.

An example of how little I was known or understood by these people occurred after I reconciled with my husband following a three-month separation. I came back because I missed my children so terribly, and I thought he had woken up to his part in causing the separation.

During that brief period we were back together, I attended a women's bible study and prayer group in Ft. Worth, hosted by a woman in the church we had been attending. The bible study included foot washing.

<Sidebar On>
As I was growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist church, communion was observed four times a year ("quarterly") and always included a foot washing ceremony. ("Rite"? "Ritual"? "Procedure"? Whatever.) I always hated it. It seemed so artificial and contrived to me. I didn't like it any better as an adult. What was the point? But then, I've never had any use for the communion ritual, either. It's merely something we're told to do. And I've always been averse to being told what to do.
<Sidebar Off>

As I was washing the feet of a woman named Cookie (oh, the things one can still remember 30 years later), she said to me, "I hope you can be as gentle with your sons as you have been with me."

<Rant On>
Whuck? Woman, you know nothing about me. You've never been inside my home. You've never seen me with my children except in the artificial environment of two-hours-a-week church and occasional church-related social events. You don't know what it's like to run a family where the husband won't look for a real job besides selling Amway. You don't know what it's like to live with a "loving" husband who tells you that you shouldn't even take an aspirin for your many—and sometimes daily—headaches because God is trying to teach you something. You don't know what it's like to have been emotionally abused by that "loving" husband for ten years.
<Rant Off>

Who knows what my husband told Cookie about me. He certainly didn't tell her anything about "us". When we were just a few weeks into our marriage and I realized I had made the biggest mistake of my life, I begged him to go to marriage counseling. He told me, "We don't talk about things like that to strangers." Well, we didn't talk about it among ourselves either, so there you go. And there the marriage went after ten miserable years.

I enjoyed Ms. Briggs' writing. I especially appreciated how she bared her soul in writing this book. I wish she had spent a little more time dealing with how she coped with her new Weltanschauung once she broke away from the hyper-religionism. I felt that 90% of the book dealt with the religion, and very little with the aftermath. But it's her book. When I write my book, I can handle it the way I want.

I look forward to watching the movie, as I feel it will help/force me to look inside myself a little farther.

And digressing—my sister-in-law said something to me recently about praying for someone, and paused before saying it. Then she said, "I know you don't agree with that."

What I agree with or believe or condone has not one thing to do with what you agree with or believe or condone. I salute your right to believe whatever resonates with you. But, at the same time, I cling for dear life to my right to believe whatever resonates with me.

You can believe in foot washing or communion or saying the rosary or smoking peyote or staying in bed with your bedmate on Sunday morning. You can believe in anything you want. And you can know for a surety that I will not tell you you're wrong.

But in the same vein, you owe me the respect and courtesy to not.not.not try to get me to relinquish my beliefs in order to adopt yours.

You may think you have all the answers, but—I assure you—you don't. I don't. Nobody does.

You have your beliefs, and that's all they are. Your beliefs.

If we go someplace after this existence (the topic for another post), we may or may not find out there what the correct answer was. And then again, maybe there's no correct answer at all.

We'll see . . .