A Kind Of Faith

We’ve been dealing with the weather in our California way, with some worry and annoyance, but mostly a sense of wonder as hailstones pound the deck, the creeks and rain gauges rise, and sunlight through sparkle paints pale rainbows in the sky. We drove into the Valley the other day to see snow on the local mountains behind iridescent green hills, echoed by white blossoms on fruit trees. Somehow I have landed in heaven.

But I still get into a slump sometimes, uninspired and weary. It happens especially when I haven’t slept well or can’t get outside for a walk. (Honestly, I’m like a dog in that way. I need to be walked.) Rather than spiraling into depression, though, I decided to do some tangible chores around the house and take a stab at my to-do list. Eventually this fizzled into looking at knee-length flower print dresses online, of the sort I used to favor but have very little use for now. I did, however, purchase a trio of vegetable peelers in pretty colors, which cheered me up more than I care to admit, and once again, I was amazed by the fact that I can sit in front of a screen, conjure up a material wish, and with a few taps on the keyboard, have it sent straight to my mailbox.

It wasn’t enough. Most of my reading material lately has consisted of topics such as “The War in Ukraine Is the End of a World”, “How Marjorie Taylor Greene Got That Way”, and “The People Cheering for Humanity’s End”…which makes me think I should have subscribed to lighter fare than The Atlantic. But as the writer Lauren Groff puts it, “I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”

Meanwhile, there’s been a small uprising of the ghosts in my head, incited by a family member who wants to keep talking to me about our beloved dead sister, and it’s hard to push all that away without feeling, as one friend put it, a sense of “self-loathing”…and this is a long, painful story for another time, but it violates my resolve to let myself be happy in the present.

Nevertheless, I often succeed. In fact, it’s funny how shallow I am. Before the rain came, I rode my bicycle in the Valley with my buddy Diane, and I can never explain it, but simply coasting along a gentle country road on two wheels lifts my spirits immeasurably. Afterwards, we sat in her backyard drinking tea and gabbing, just a couple of New York girls who must have done something right. Monte brought home pizza, and I was ecstatic. Another time, he and I walked in a creek bed, as carefree as ten-year-old kids. And I found several excellent books for my grandson in a thrift shop, fifty cents each! A colorful stack is piling up, awaiting the prince, and I envision us building a pillow house in the little room upstairs and reading quietly together, which might be naive. But Felix is an expert at saying yes to joy, and thus a very good influence and guru.

I met my Bestie Cornelia in Santa Barbara last week, and we walked from the Mission and had lunch in town at a restaurant with outdoor seating. Our server, a young man with long hair and a polite demeanor, showed us a book he had written with his mother—called “The Infinity Loop for Women: Spiritual, Communication, and Leadership Development for Every Woman to Change the World” and he informed us in all earnestness that if we could tune into the feminine divine within ourselves, there is nothing we cannot achieve. I wondered if he thought we were in special need of this message, or if it were just a regular line he uses to promote the book, but it seemed like a very Santa Barbara sort of interaction.

Yesterday was my friend Cyd’s birthday, and we were overdue for a catch-up conversation, so after figuring out which of the six phone numbers I have for her was current, I dialed her up. Cyd and I met in Chicago in 1971, both of us on leave from college, the lowliest of employees in a big downtown office. We have known each other through divorces and new beginnings, sorrow and triumph, adventures and misadventures. Our geographical territory encompassed Chicago, Madison, Syracuse, and Phoenix, with a legendary detour on a Greyhound bus to Portland, Oregon. Somehow we have both ended up in California, though in different parts of the state, and we seldom see each other.

But we talked for an hour and a half, and as ever, it was reassuring and familiar, the steadying continuity of an enduring friendship. In the boring manner of people our age, we reviewed our aches and pains and osteopenia, but we also remembered striding along on North Michigan Avenue in our long wool coats, and cooking dinner for hoped-for boyfriends in an old Victorian house in Madison, and the deaths and disappointments that punctured and punctuated our dreams. Cyd has found community, faith, and comfort as part of the congregation of a local church. “It’s what keeps me going,” she tells me. She quotes something along the lines of “cast your cares to the Lord and he will sustain you”…“That’s what I’ve done,” she concludes. “I’ve finally just let it go.”

“And you have your secular religion, Cyn,” she adds with affection. “It’s a faith that works for you.”

Is secular religion an oxymoron? It’s true I don’t belong to a church, unless you count the Church of the Outdoors, but if secularism precludes spiritualism, I don’t think the word applies. Anyway, I had plenty of church and Sunday school in my childhood; I’m sure some of those teachings are still intact. Now I listen to trees and mountains, talk to the sky, and travel through time. I find epiphanies along the trail, when each step can become a kind of prayer or meditation. I recognize the light cast by kindness, and the transcendent powers of poetry and music. I contribute to causes and try to make things better, though I don’t always know what that means, and my reach is very small, but I hold to the concept of a ripple effect. I contain and continue the stories of my ancestors, I converse with long-gone loved ones, I seek learning and strive for forgiveness and I am certain there is more than what I see and understand. And I never give up hope.

I wrote a story long ago about belief and salvation, and when I read this excerpt now, it still seems to apply:

I occasionally glimpsed angels and trusted secretly in something hopeful that had taken root in me early on, but I mostly believed in books and bicycles, in the way the sky looked in the mornings, in the triumphs of music and the mysteries of the human heart. I was callow and untrue and I sometimes hurt others, but I tried and I loved and I grew. Again and again I saw that many things were simply senseless or unknowable, but I submitted to the compelling wonder of now. I began to understand that larger forces shaped me and I was part of an endless cycle that moved me along as powerfully as the tides. I learned to live with ambiguity just as I would learn to live with sorrow and loss, and these things made me human.

It’s all a kind of faith…isn’t it? It seems to me there’s a lot of room in there for non-material, spiritual things. My secular religion is quite capacious!

And in the decades since I wrote those words, I can only add that the shining force of love, which some might say is God, has become an ever more powerful theme, and that my heart has become more open to various stitcheries of story and sincere belief, as long as they are not force-fed or used to hurt and control others.

The weather is still volatile. More storms are predicted, and we’re all claiming to be cold, and I’m having leftover pizza for breakfast while Monte cleans the oven, and I suddenly realize that I have written my way out of a slump here. Yes, it’s another rambling post, but it has brought me straight back into gratitude.

Maybe that’s my religion.