Traditions - A Line in the Sand

Salam Alaykum, my readers! And Happy New Year! (albeit a bit late - but at least the earth is still turning with us still on it!)

My blatherings have trailed off for a time because I had become buried in the humdrum of life. Well, it hasn't been all humdrum... The holidays were fantastic as I celebrated Christmas with my family. I may know where the date of December 25th originates, and I may no longer be a card-holding Christian, but I love our family holiday traditions. This year I found that they were more important to WHO I AM than I ever before realized. 

Its interesting how life shows you your priorities when you lest expect it. My sweet man and I were traveling a few rough roads over the course of fall, but we were trying... trying t hold on to what we had found in each other, yet grappling with learning the fine technique of compromise. In this process, we fell not to blending our boundaries, but drawing them firmly in the sand. My line was Thanksgiving. 

I had told myself over and over again after my divorce that I should never allow myself to be completely lost in another person again. It is important to maintain an independent persona to avoid becoming lost, floating in the realms of depression, not knowing who you are anymore. I decided that there were certain things I was not willing to give up to keep my romantic partner happy. One of those things was the dream of having my family with me for those wonderful traditions we celebrate each year. I think that this need to have my partner at my side for such events became ever more strong due to the fact that every other year I must face them without my children, as I must now share them with their father, separately. This loss is simply too much for me to bare alone - when there IS someone in my life who (in my mind) SHOULD be there with me, understanding my pain in those moments. This past Thanksgiving was the first time I was going to not have my kids with me. And Christmas was to follow much the same. 

For reasons I still don't completely understand, my sweet man decided he did not want to attend ANY Thanksgiving with me nor with his family. I pleaded, but it was a resolute, "NO." I felt devastated. I almost didn't even go to my parents' house. I just wanted to sleep in my dark living room, on my comfy couch, with the shades drawn. Finally, I decided that the tradition was more important to me. I called him up and told him I was done. I didn't want to live this way, being alone when I thought I had a family. I picked myself up by my bootstraps and went to my parents'.

A week passed and we didn't speak. I missed my neanderthal man, but I wanted certain tings in my life, and my man by my side for the things I find important is one of them. I missed having a family, and I have a belief in the way family is "supposed" to be; at least the way I wanted it to be. 

I honestly can't recall what happened to bring us back together, but it seemed neither of us really wanted to be apart. We missed each other, no matter how much we drive each other crazy at times.  I worried as Christmas came, because I was afraid he would back out again and again I would be alone. He stayed true to his word, however, and he not only stayed with me on Christmas day (I was very willing to go to his family's Christmas, but he wanted to just stay home), but also joined my family and I when the children returned on New Years Eve. I felt whole. I had a family again.

Since our return to each other, we have learned how to compromise, even in regard to the holidays.  I can tell our love grows more and more each day, and I find that although he is not romantic in a traditional sense, he does sweet things to take care of me... he even sought out Stouffer's Mac & Cheese and a Coke for me one evening when my uterus felt like it wanted to explode. Who needs flowers when you have a sweet man to hold you and make you feel safe and loved?

Compromise is extremely important in relationships, but so is individuality. If you must draw a line in the sand, make sure that you are doing it for the right reasons. It must not be about control, but about being true to yourself. Don't forget that you fell in love with your partner because of who s/he was when you met them - do you really want to lose all of his/her individuality to the relationship? 

Blundering Into an Interfaith Opportunity

How does that old saying go? "Life is what happens when we are making other plans"? Well, God has a sense of humor, for sure - I'm the proof.

Seriously though, all day I had been looking forward to hearing my best friend and her new band play their first gig tonight. I had to  make my typical four hour (round trip) Friday journey to my ex-marital home to drop of my kids with their father, but I was still sure that I could make the show before it was over. I double-checked the time on my Facebook event invite, and sure enough, I should be able to catch an hour and half of the show, if I hurried. Cue God laughing...

I made it to the location of the gig, a quaint little gift shop not far from where I live at 9 pm. The invite said the show ran until 10:30... I was in luck. I saw my bestie outside the front door and assumed she was taking a breather, so I didn't holler, figuring I would rather tackle-surprise her with a big hug instead. I finished rolling up my windows, and headed into the store, as I didn't see my friend outside anymore. I saw a young red-headed girl sitting at a table and thought it was my friend's daughter (I think I should start wearing my glasses more), but my friend wasn't anywhere to be seen, nor was her band.

The people who were in the backroom, where the microphones and seating was, welcomed me graciously. I explained who I was and found out that they had just left. I felt so bad. Not for me, but for my friend because I had promised I would be there to support her, but I had missed it. I called her and apologized for missing it and told her I hoped I could make it to the next gig.

Everyone who was still in the backroom invited me to stay and listen to who was going to play/sing next and mentioned that there was a couple who knew my friend from their church still there. They asked me some things about myself and I happily volunteered details (I talk too much). One question led into another and I began telling them about my majors in Religious Studies and Arabic at MSU. I explained that I intend to have a career in the interfaith movement, and that I was focusing on Christian and Muslim relations. I was steadily getting nervous, because I could just feel the question coming... "but you're Christian, right?"

Silence.

Expectation.

Realization.

Half of me wanted to run out the door as fast as I could. My bestie loves her Christian faith and has been active in her church communities for years, even as a very successful youth pastor for a time. I had no doubt that I was amongst other very devout Christians. I was tired. I had driven for four hours already and since I had missed the gig, I wanted to go home. I didn't feel up to the challenge of standing up for my beliefs at that moment.

The other half was yelling at me, "OPPORTUNITY!" I had just told them I was focusing on Christian and Muslim relations. It wasn't time for me to be a coward. Yup, God was laughing at me. And pushing me. And reminding me why I am passionate about this in the first place. And showing me I can do it. Yes, this is still my path.

My silence only lasted about a second, in reality, although it felt longer than that. I am sure I blushed some as I said, "I used to be."

No one ridiculed me. No one belittled me. No one yelled at me. No one threw me out. There were some Christian affirmations. There were questions. I answered to the best of my ability. Every one was very nice and very polite. I had one gentleman approach me  and tell me that he understands a little bit about what it must be like to try to explain that although our beliefs may be somewhat different, or the terminology is somewhat different, that we love the same God and how beliefs can change as we learn new things. For me, it was reading the Qur'an; for him, it was learning about and embracing his Native American roots.

I am reminded by this experience that we interfaith activists never know when we might be presented with what I am going to call an "interfaith opportunity" much as I would also call it a "teachable moment". We should never shy away from it because we have other plans, or are just too tired for polite debate. We should instead remember our passion for this work, reach in, pull it out, and embrace the moment same as we embrace our new friends.

Have you ever blundered? I would love to hear your stories or reactions.Please take a moment to comment below.

Salam, which means PEACE!

Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives and the Retrospective Self

In response to Paula Fredriksen’s Paul and Augustine:  Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions and the Retrospective Self

Conversion stories bring with them an establishment problem, that of retrospection. Conversions come in an instant; it’s that eureka moment where the light bulb goes off. One is not usually writing about the experience as it happens, instead he/she writes about it after it happens, in retrospect. Retrospection is always 20/20 because we read into our past the information we need to explain our present: to ourselves, to others, to the ones angered by our change of opinion. Paul and Augustine are no different. Augustine takes this a step further though, as he attempts to redefine Paul’s conversion to match his own. He looks for credibility by incorporating Paul into his own conversion and circularly, recreating Paul’s own conversion to match.

Augustine

            Paul has to explain himself to those that disagree or do not understand his new philosophy. His conversion story becomes rhetoric. We cannot know the moment of his conversion, nor do we have a vast autobiographical retrospective account like Augustine, but we can pull what Paul feels convicted about via his rhetorical writings to the churches. But even there, the past gets in the way. We cannot see clearly the present and present theology or philosophy without reviewing the past, where our minds automatically make assumptions to make the past match the present and vice versa. But it’s a past and present that we want to see. We cannot review the past without introducing our own bias, which is the problem of conversion narratives, Paul’s included. 

Paul

Written for my Birth of Christianity class on 2/14/12

Self-Expose

I have been on an over-long hiatus since starting this blog due to my enrollment into Michigan State University. I decided to return to school and restart my life, following my passion and the path that I believe has been set before me.

The transition has been interesting, stressful, but well worth it. My absence has been due to my academic workload as a double major in Religious Studies and Arabic, as well as now being a single full-time mom. Hopefully, now that I have learned the new routine, I will have more time to give to this blog.

As a re-introduction, I have decided to post a paper I wrote for an awesome Religion class that I took over the summer. It is basically an expose of myself and how myth affects my life. I hope you enjoy it and I welcome and comments and questions. Thank you for reading.

Being Born for Myth
By
Elizabeth Robins
6/16/2011

I believe that I first discovered myth when I began reading, at an early age of three. My mom and dad read to me a lot and I always had fairy tale books around as a child. Of course, at that time I didn’t know what a myth was, but I knew the stories of princesses and noble knights and princes, witches, bad parents, and children enduring hardship to be rewarded with good things in the end. I think that is something I always liked about those stories, the happy ending. It was the possibilities in mythology that made my imagination soar and made me think anything was possible. I never realized how much mythology was going to influence my life, how important it would become.

As I grew up, I realized that these stories were just that, stories. I knew they had morals to learn and taught lessons in sneaky ways, but to me, they became just stories. I still enjoyed them, but I couldn’t relate them to my own life, except for daydream about my own happy endings. I had wandered away from myths and fantasy in my reading as an elementary student, but my Aunt had given me a book written by Piers Anthony called, Man from Mundania, one of the Xanth series. For a long time, I wouldn’t read the book because fantasy just didn’t perk my interest. I had somewhat given up on the idea of happy endings. But, I was out of books one summer day, and being an avid reader, I needed something to read. I picked it up to take to my Grandma’s house with me. I didn’t put it down until I finished. My Nana even had to bring my lunch because I wouldn’t stop reading to eat. The story intrigued me. Here a normal man was drawn into this parallel world of fantastical things. I got a kick out of the puns too.

I was in about to enter the seventh grade and had just gone through one of the worst years in my life at that time. I had even gone through my first suicidal attempts. I was often depressed, from having to deal with more than I could handle as a child. I found an escape in this book. The idea that a normal man could have wonderful adventures woke up my imagination again; it probably even sparked some sense of hope in me. This was probably the first time myth became alive for me. From that time on, fantasy, myths, and legends became my genre of choice. I ached for those happy endings.

Although I think that there is a chance that my desire for escapism causes me to occasionally drown in other people’s dreams, I believe I found something more important in these “dreams”. I noticed that a lot of the various stories I was reading, stories from around the world and written at different eras, seemed to have many of the same running themes, like they were linked somehow. I became curious about that, and at the same time was becoming curious about religion. I began asking myself, “how is it that these stories and religion all seem to be trying to teach the same basic concepts?” They no longer were just other people’s stories or escapism for me; they were now somehow a mystery in which Truth was contained. I wanted to start to unravel that mystery and find Truth.

When I refer to the term, “truth”, I place it in a dichotomy. I think there are two different kinds of truth. One is truth with a little “t”, it is the truths we as individuals know, and those truths, in my eye, are our perceptions of “what is”. Truth with a big “T” is something different. It is something that we as individuals cannot KNOW, but we can sense or believe in. It is where faith comes from, I think. Truth is “what is”. It is absolute, no perception. We as people, as individuals, experience everything differently, and our experiences shape our perceptions.

Because of our differing perceptions, and my own unique way of looking at the world, I began to question religion and see how different religions held different paths to the same thing for people. I recognized that I could not KNOW the Truth of which religion had it right. I could only have faith in what I believed, which at this time was becoming blurred. I believed in God and in goodness and in Truth, but structured religion started to not make a lot of sense to me. As a Christian, there were certain things about my faith and the stories I was told from the Bible that just didn’t make sense to me, but at the same time, some of the stories I was reading on my own, the ones from ancient mythology and other religions were making sense. The problem I saw was that they all tried to teach the same things, basically, but they all also seemed to get things wrong too.

Christianity for me was always more of a way of life than adherence to a particular doctrine. My parents didn’t attend church regularly because they had gotten involved in a Christian cult as a young couple and that ruined organized religion for them. They still accepted Christ as their savior, and taught us about Jesus, but it kind of ended there. Most of my church experience was the Christian holidays and from when I went with my Grandparents. My Grandmother’s church was rather conservative and they didn’t like to have children at mass, so I didn’t get much from going there, except the feeling that I wasn’t wanted. My Nana’s church was the opposite, and I enjoyed going with her.

My Nana’s church was Episcopalian and she had helped to start the church, as she was from England and missed her home church. I liked going because I liked to hear the sermon and the stories from the bible. I could always find some way that they were speaking to me. I often thought of Jesus, as I stared up at the crucifixion statue in front of us on the wall. I often thought of what it must have been like to be him; how he was so strong and courageous. I suppose that he was a hero to me. Someone to look up to, to want to be like, but I couldn’t worship him like the others did. I honored him, but I usually saved my worship for God. That was where I started to get off track with the rest of my family and with other Christians. I questioned the idea of Christ as God incarnate and as the only son of God. I felt we were all God’s children in a way, that without God, we couldn’t exist. I also had a hard time thinking of God as a man. For me, God was this big unexplainable mystery, but I knew God loved me and I did and often do think of God as a bit of a parental figure. When I do something stupid and I meet the consequence, I joke of it being God reaching down to smack me on the back of the head, as if to say, “you idiot, you knew better and you did it anyway, so here you go!”

My priest and I would have wonderful discussions and he seemed very understanding and patient with my questions and challenges; but, I wasn’t allowed in bible study. I tried that a few times in different groups… I usually ended up stirring the pot more than the leader liked. This refusal to question what we were being taught really caused me to question things even more. I started to think of Christianity as more of an idea that people like to follow, and if followed properly, can be very good. The problem I was seeing was that there was a lot of hypocrisy and all these “good” Christians were often very judgmental and had a lot of hatred for others, exactly as we were taught not to be. For me, this is where the myth started to break down.

Religion as a doctrine wasn’t focused on in my childhood per say, but my parents always talked of having faith. Usually it was to tell me some story about how they needed something and just when it seemed like they were lost, God would deliver. That their faith is what kept them going. I was often told that I needed to have more faith. I can say they were right, but it took me a long time to understand what faith was.

I think the lack of focus on religion as a structure in my household allowed me be more open to other ideas. I think it made me a more spiritual person than a religious person, and of course by that I am referring to religion as a system of rule and practices, rather than some of the other definitions available.

I no longer define myself as a Christian, as there are particular parts of the doctrine that are central to being a “Christian” that I was never comfortable with and I no longer accept as a possibility. I do however, accept Christianity as another possible path, but for me, it lost some of its truth. Not being a “Christian” doesn’t mean that I don’t value a Christian life. I still love and honor Jesus and his teachings, but for me, another path feels more like Truth to me. Not only feels, but logically, it makes more sense to me. That is not to say I reject all other faiths, in fact I find a lot of what I see as Truth in many faiths, but in those other faiths, I often find something that just doesn’t make sense.

I found my new path via a conversation online. I met someone in a chat room and immediately jumped into my favorite topic: spirituality. We discussed how we believed in our own spirituality and discussed God. I found myself agreeing with everything he was saying, which I found intriguing because I was never a traditional Christian and would often come across some things to disagree on. In the course of our conversation I asked him, finally, what his faith was. I was surprised when he said he was Muslim. This statement took me aback because Islam was foreign to me.

I have read about many religions and mythologies around the globe, but Islam was something I knew very little about, with the exception of what was given to us via the news media (which I never quite believed). It was interesting to me that I met this individual, because I was indeed already interested in learning more about Islam. I was frustrated that I didn’t know much about this religion that was the second most popular in the world. In fact, the previous Christmas I had even asked for an English translation of the Quran for Christmas. My parents laughed at my request though, saying that it was “probably sacrilegious” to purchase it for me. Needless to say, I didn’t receive it.

After my meeting with this individual online, I decided it was time for me to purchase the Quran and read it for myself. It was time for me to see what was written in this book and not just listen to what others had to tell me about it or the faith. I went to the nearby bookstore and purchased it and began reading the same day. I began reading the Quran as I did any book about religion, as an academic, pen and highlighter in hand. Within the first few pages though, something changed. I was no longer just reading a book. The book was speaking to me, to my heart. I would definitely say I was having a religious or spiritual experience. It definitely felt spiritual.

I found by reading the Quran that Islam is much like Christianity. The differences are few, but major. The same things I questioned as a child and young woman were explained in the Quran in a way that made sense to me. I was finding myself reading what I already believed. For the most part, Islam was very easy for me to accept. In fact, I believe I accepted it by the time I finished reading the Quran the first time. It took me a while before I “officially” accepted Islam by saying shahada. My hesitation was not so much about the faith but about social acceptance. After a time though, I decided that I believed what I believed and social acceptance or lack thereof wasn’t going to change that.

Even with Islam though, I question things. I don’t question much of what I read in the Quran, but I do question the hadith and many of the beliefs and practices that the more conservative Muslims follow (and are sometimes cultural and not religious as they think). For me, if it doesn’t make sense, or if I don’t understand it, then I need to find out why. One thing I like about Islam is the fact that I am told to use the brain God gave me. I am sure that my experience growing up being told not to question things led me to appreciating this aspect a lot.

Although I have accepted a new path, I don’t see my view of myth changing dramatically. I already am open to the lessons that can be learned from them and I no longer look to them for escapism only. I still see hope in them and I hope that I will always find the parcels of Truth within them. I think myth is important for reasons of faith, growing and learning, and also for plain old imagination. I love reading the stories to my kids and I hope they find something great within them as well. My acceptance of Islam is not going to prevent me from wanting to continue to read and learn about other religions and ancient mythology. Perhaps, it even encourages it in me in some ways. Here I was a Christian my whole life until I read the Quran and found a truth that resounded in me more than what I found in the Christian church and at the same time, shared so much with Christianity. It enforces my belief that all these traditions share a thread of Truth and I am interested in learning more and more. I have always believed that myths and legends came from some Truth, whether they are based on actual people and events (and have since been exaggerated or been tampered with) or are stories of worldly truths. I hope I will always retain some of that childhood wonder and inquisitiveness. I know I am more skeptical than I was when I was a young child, but a healthy dose of skepticism is good, I think, to help decipher fact from fiction or possibility from impossibility.

My openness in the face of mythology is one reason I feel that I am suited for the next stage in my life, the stage I now prepare myself for. I wish to work with people of different faiths, different beliefs, different cultures, to see each other not as different, but as how frequently we are the same. I want to work in the interfaith / intercultural dialogue and peace process and being open-minded about other peoples’ faiths and beliefs is an important requirement to be successful in such a field. I begin with myself, my friends, and my family, even my children. Everyone in my family is Christian, including my son (as he says he is Christian and I support him). Many of my friends are of other faiths, but namely they are Christian. I don’t wish to convert anyone to anything but tolerance. I already sift through the challenges of interfaith and intercultural relations and find myself comfortable with those challenges. I believe it is my open-mindedness and knowledge of many religions and mythology that aids this process. I find that I sit at the cusp of the rest of my life, and it is being shaped by mythology.

NOTE: I am particularly interested in studying the mythology of pre-Islamic Arabia and the potential influences on the ahadith.