Everyone’s cramming, while I’m blogging.
Okay so, I don’t feel that people should force themselves to be religious, or even to have a spiritual practice. Things like prayer and contemplation can open up all these doors and windows inside oneself that some people just can’t deal with. And I believe that some people choose to practice their spirituality through less explicit means, perhaps even without their own awareness.
I used to think that my friend, who was brought up an atheist, had no spiritual life whatsoever, because she never prayed, and didn’t seem to ever stop and ask herself important questions, and the like. (This was an unfair assumption to begin with. After all, I have no way of ever knowing what really goes through her head. Who am I to arrogantly say she doesn’t search for meaning and truth? Who doesn’t?)
But then, she is also one of the most patient and loving people I have ever met and I realized one day that her spiritual practice lies in how dhe maintains her relationships with the people she loves the most. The is her own form of religious devotion, the regular care and nurturing she gives to those closest to her. She just cannot relate to a church, or a priest, or a book that’s been misquoted by religious zealots over the centuries. She cannot put her faith in an institution that, she feels, has failed her. So she puts her faith in what seems more real to her, the people she has committed to loving.
But as Victor Hugo wrote, “to love another person is to see the face of God”. She does believe in a god. She just doesn’t know it.
We all search for love, and meaning, and truth, and we all need some sort of outlet to express the experience of this search. To some people, their religion perfectly encapsulates this experience. But religion is not for everyone.
But I think that what some people don’t understand is that the kind of god they believe in says so much more about themselves than anything else. All the same, I sometimes think that blind rejection often echoes the amount of self-rejection in a person.
Anyway, it’s 8 am and it’s time to take a test.
