My mom is a United Methodist minister, and I'm very lucky that she is extremely loving, open-minded, radical, and a passionate activist both in and outside the church. I've yet to actually talk with her about my own hangups with gender identity (well, while sober that is
), but that's not really what I'm getting at here.
When I was growing up, my family and I went to church fairly regularly...but even when I was quite young I began to realize that I wasn't feeling the same kind of fulfillment everyone else seemed to get during church services and activities. I've always appreciated the great beauty and complexity in the universe, but I never saw the need to attribute certain things to angels or miracles; I've never been able to believe in Jesus, or even the traditional God for that matter. For a long time I kept this knowledge to myself because I didn't want to hurt my mom - after all, the study of Christianity has been her life's work.
Finally, I mustered up the courage to talk with her about it. It was something that needed to be done since, for a while then, I had been coming up with lame excuses to skip out on church every single Sunday. I decided to put my beliefs into a metaphor in order to show her that I still did "believe" in something grander and more mysterious than one is truly capable of verbalizing...and that I appreciate all religions on a similar level. I'd like to share the metaphor with y'all here ^^
Metaphorically speaking, imagine that the ultimate Truth beyond the concepts of god(s) or heaven or whatever elementary/paramount reality there can be seen simply by gazing up at the night sky. You're standing alone in a wide open plain where you can see the whole dome of the sky above you, with the horizon encircling you. Before you in the field is a vast (perhaps infinite) row of different telescopes, each one a different shape or size, with different buttons and knobs. Some telescopes may even have a computer hooked up to them somehow to give you numerical read-outs about the image you are viewing. Each telescope is pointed in a different direction in the sky, giving you a crisp view of one small section. You may see a star or two in great detail, or perhaps a planet and its moons. Maybe you just found a pair of binoculars on the ground and are using those to take a closer look.
When I described this to my mom, I went on to explain that (still in the metaphor) each telescope/ocular device represents a different religion. The "religions" are tools one can use to take a closer and much more detailed look at the larger picture. They are highly effective, if used correctly, at showing you a very exact image of one small section of the whole thing...but if you keep your eye glued to one single one, you'll never be able to realize the vastness of the whole Truth, or the fact that all the other telescopes - while they may show a different planet in their viewfinder - are looking at the exact same thing.
To me, religions are the tools humanity has created to help us observe the mystery of it all. Spirituality, if we go back to that metaphor, would be the ability to appreciate the usefulness of each of those telescopes. Perhaps wisdom comes when a person can move between different ones and understand what they are seeing, but also be content to simply sit back and stare up at the beauty of the entire thing.
Thoughts? Feelings?
