Note: I am posting this as art, because art is my spirituality.
I read the Huffington Post, even the "Religion" posts. Raised in a religious home as a Methodist, I come from a line of Baptist ministers dating as far back as the 1700s when they immigrated from Wales to establish Welsh-Baptist communities in the U.S.
The Methodist Church provided an opportunity for me to visit a Jewish Synagog. I enjoyed that so much that I started taking bus rides to attend services. Later in life, while doing genealogy research, I discovered my Jewish heritage. (A Jewish friend remarked, "Everyone had a Jewish grandmother somewhere.") Well, maybe.
The love in my life came along in high school, and she was Catholic. We had a hiatus in our relationship, but I converted to Catholicism. I once thought that if I couldn't recover the lost relationship, I just might become a priest. I admired devotion to doing good things for people.
Fortunately, my life came back when my wife and I joined in a lasting marriage. We raised our daughter in the Catholic church to be good parents. While we all benefited from the social experience, I cannot say that religion had a lot to do with it.
In fact, my spiritual life condensed to believing that we humans need to embrace the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We need to respect those who have religious faith as we also respect those who don't.
As for praying, I can't stop. I don't want to. When I walk along alone, I pray to all of the souls who gave life to me. I pray for the things that I don't understand. I believe in the Holy Spirit. As for what presides over that, I simply don't know. For all of the stories that I have learned from religious life, I appreciate the lessons.
Amen.
Very nice piece, Jim. (Before I read it, I thought maybe it was going to be about praying that the American electorate would act in a responsible way)
ReplyDeleteRuth: That is a nice extrapolation of the idea.
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