No Regrets (So this post won't be called "Why I Never Should Have Gotten Married.")

This morning, after about 17 months on the waiting list, I finally got to speak with a therapist from my local CLSC. I haven't much to report because 1) this was just our first meeting, so we basically just chatted and got to know each other, and 2) therapy is confidential anyway! :p So there!

It did get me thinking about some things, though, while I was driving to the appointment. What do I want to talk about? What do I need to talk about? What outcome am I hoping for? Not surprisingly, it all pretty much led back to my marriage.

I don't believe in talking about people behind their back, so I won't get into all the nasty stuff I have gone through. Instead, I will share a bit of wisdom I learned from my Bahai friend. At the same time, this can kind of make up for the fact that I didn't write my usual Sunday post yesterday. (Too busy with the kids, and that's not an excuse, that's a reason.)

One day over a picnic lunch in Confederation Park, my Bahai Friend and I were talking about marriage. He asked me what marriage was. By the time I met Friend, I had been married for seven years and had a daughter who was over a year and a half. I had already gone through some difficulty in my marriage. In fact, the first time I seriously thought about divorce was when my daughter was born. I was that disappointed in my husband as a father. All this to say, I thought I knew what marriage was and proceeded to give Friend a definition involving such big words as partnership and commitment.

Friend listened to what I had to say, then gave me his version, that is to say, the version of the Bahai Faith. Marriage is a law. I was a bit surprised by this. I had, of course, "heard of the go forth and multiply" bit in the Bible, but I never thought of marriage as an actual law. Being the open-minded person I was and am, I asked Friend to tell me about the Bahai view of marriage. Since friend in these circumstances was also Teacher to me, and a very good one at that, he complied.

One of the things that really struck me in what Friend told me was that for Bahais, if the parents of the bride and groom didn't agree to the marriage union, the marriage could not take place. Now, for most of us, we of course want our parents' blessing, but how many of us will actually refrain from getting married if we don't get it? I would guess most people would decide for themselves if they want to get married, despite parental objections. (I fell into this category myself.)

If you think about it, though, getting parental approval makes sense. Besides the fact that it literally lets you practice Honor thy father and thy mother, making sure that parents agree with their child's choice for a spouse also ensures harmony after the marriage. I think of it like a miracle potion for getting along with your in-laws. If I look back on my own experiences, life could have been so much more pleasant if my parents and my husband had gotten along. Unfortunately, they disliked him, and he disliked them (that's putting it mildly!) with a vengeance. This was not only an issue when we all got together, but was also a problem even when my family wasn't around, since my husband continued to badmouth them. For years and years, I tried to make him understand that when he put them down, he was also putting a part of me down. He never got it. Unfortunately, even though I was aware of it, being conscious of the fact still didn't help me protect my own self-esteem from Husband's continuous verbal put-downs.

I think the Bahai faith has a very intelligent view of marriage. Had I known about their way of thinking, and had I thought seriously about it before, I probably would never have gotten married to the man who became my Husband. Of course, the previous sentence uses the conditional; I also know that given the chance to do it over again, and knowing the outcome, I still would have married him. The reason is that we have three super-dee-duper kids, and I would not give them up for anything. So, no regrets. 

Now, a funny short story:

I have thought to myself in the past that had I met my Friend earlier in life, I never would have gotten married to Husband. I once told my sister this, but without filling her in as to WHY I felt this way. (i.e. I didn't tell her about the Bahai views on marriage and about how the parents had to agree to the marriage.) So, great was her surprise when we met him in the street one day and I introduced her to my Bahai Friend. I think she was expecting to see some twenty-year-old hunk. Instead, she met a man in his late fifties, balding and with a bit of a beer belly. Shorter than me, to boot. Great was her surprise!  She thought I meant that I wouldn't have married Husband because I would have married Friend instead! Obviously, I had some 'splainin' to do! lol So I set things straight and explained that Friend was Friend and Teacher to me, and nothing more. (And I told her to get her mind out of the gutter! :p  )

The End   (See? It was so short, it's practically just an anecdote!)

Two Religions, and Two Kinds of Religion

Seeing as it is Sunday, I am allowing myself to continue with the posts I have been writing that describe my spiritual journey, that winding road that has lead my in and out and all about, so to speak.

I had mentioned that when I started working, I met a colleague who was a Bahai. Because he was very easy to talk to and because religion was such a very big part of his life, I asked him a lot of questions and in essence became his student. I wanted to know about the Bahai faith and everything I learned made me respect it more and more. For example, Bahais believe that all religions are valid. They believe that all the religious figures of the different religions (like Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad), were messengers of God, each arriving on earth when and where they were needed. The Bahais believe that the latest of these messengers was Baha'u'llah, who lived in the early 1800's, making the Bahai faith the youngest of the world's religions. I think it is true that all religions are valid and I really like the fact that there is a religion that actually forwards this idea. The Bahai religion teaches tolerance, not prejudice. It also teaches equality between men and women. Bahais wish to educate, to eliminate extremes between the rich and the poor, and they preach harmony between nations (and between religion and science!) as a way to world peace.

My friend also lent me a very interesting book called Baha'u'llah and The New Era that had some very interesting ideas in it, which I had suspected or intuned before, but had never been able to put into words.

The reason I was able to access this information with an open mind was thanks to the university courses I had taken a couple of years previous, which opened my eyes to the fact that although some people, like my grandmother, interpreted the Bible literally, others read it more pragmatically, to learn its lessons, while not taking everything at face value, or on faith, if you will. Knowing this, I was more at ease with the way of speaking about God that I had imagined to be "blind faith," for lack of a better expression. It helped me understand that if someone said that God wanted us to love each other, I could agree because I recognized that the good in all of us was God, and I recognize the need of humanity to love and to live in peace. Maybe we weren't both talking about exactly the same thing, but our jargon was similar enough that I think we were able to converse on the same wave length.

There was something that happened in university that opened my mind to the fact that there existed two kinds of religious beliefs in the world, so I will leave off talking about the Bahai faith for a moment and tell you what happened to me when my university class visited a Buddhist pagoda in Ottawa.

We were guided through our visit of the pagoda by a man, perhaps in his forties, who told us a bit about his religion, which, he specified, was Buddhism, but not the same Buddhism as his mother practiced. He illustrated this with a comical example:

When he was young, the man's mother would take him to the temple and he had to pray for good grades. The way he did this was that he had to pray while shaking a small cup that had many sticks in it, and each stick had a poem written on it. He had to pray and shake the cup, and when a stick fell out of the cup, the poem that was written on the stick would be meaningful and could be interpreted as a sign that his prayer would be answered, (or not.) The man recounted laughingly that while he was praying, his mother would gossip with the other ladies in the temple, and that, while she wasn't looking, he would shake the cup, quickly read the stick that fell out of it and, if the poem did not presage a good outcome, he would quickly stick it back in the cup and keep praying before his mother could see. In this way, he eventually stopped praying when he got a poem that essentially told him that he would get good results in school. He would then show his mother and she would be satisfied that his prayers would be answered.

The man went on to explain that when he was young, he didn't really believe in any of this, which is why he felt justified in manipulating the poems in the cup. But, as he grew up and read the teachings of Buddha, he saw that there was a lot of wisdom to be learned from Buddha's teachings. Although he didn't consider, as his mother did, that Buddha became a deity when he died, the man DID see that it was good to study Buddha's teaching to see what he could learn from them in order to live a good life. He would say that his is a pragmatic Buddhism, whereas his mother's is a superstitious Buddhism. In the end, though, it all amounts to the same thing because they both learned Buddha's wisdom and live by what they learned.

I recognize that talking about pragmatic and superstitious religion paints religion in a very black and white scheme. But I had to be able to differentiate the two before I could go on to understand that the world is not black and white, and neither is religion. This is how I was able to broach the idea of faith and of the mystery of religion. Still, whereas pragmatic religion made it easy for me to interpret that, for example, when Jesus cured a blind man, he had in essence opened the blind man's eyes to religion and to God, I still had a huge leap to make in order to really accept God's existence and to be able to talk about Jesus' miracles as true miracles instead of just stories whose meaning I was meant to search for. That, for me, would have been true faith, but I was not there yet. But, as I said, it was a step in that direction.

Open-Minded Agnosticism

It occurs to me that while I have decided to write down my journey towards faith in this blog, the blog itself is supposed to be about a single mother and how she faces life's ups and downs. In an effort not to forget about that original intention, although I am continuing with the spiritual posts today, I will try in the future to keep up with the rest of my mission: to write about parenting. For today, I will however keep to the spiritual posts. I hope you will forgive me, seeing as it is Sunday. :o)

In my early twenties, I was an agnostic with an ever-opening mind. My previous doubts about religion had been based on my inability to accept that people could believe in God based on the Bible, which they took literally.

I have always loved reading and had pretty high marks in English literature. I liked to look for clues that foreshadowed a story's dénouement and I liked to look for deeper meanings. I found that once I learned to do this properly in English class, even my enjoyment of movies was increased, as I paid more attention to dialogue, setting and circumstances to see if I could guess the end.

After that famous discussion about the story of the loaves and the fishes, I came to realize that it was not necessary to read and believe in the Bible literally. I came to see the value of looking for the underlying message. While I did not yet claim to be a Christian, I was very curious about religion. At the same time, there were things about religion that turned me off.

Although I did not claim the title of Christian for a long time, I knew since the age of about 15 that my family was religious. My maternal grandmother was a devout Catholic her whole life and my paternal grandmother was also religious, although I must say I never knew it by being around her. When I got married at age 19, my cousin asked why we weren't having a church wedding. My answer at the time was that we weren't religious enough. But when I think back, we weren't religious at all. I considered myself a Christian not by belief, but by heritage, seeing as I came from a Christian family. I think I probably said that we weren't Christian enough because the cousin who asked me the question was very religious and I guess I succumbed to a bit of something like peer pressure. Truth be told, though, I didn't believe in God when I got married. I hadn't taken those life-changing courses in university yet. My husband was even less religious than I, despite his Isten, Haza, Csalàd! (God, Country, Family!) motto. I came to understand that he only said that because he was a big (true) Hungarian and that is a Hungarian motto. But I came to see that he knew very little of the Bible. I mean, when we saw the Disney film The Prince of Egypt, he had no idea that it was based on the Bible. Yet, that is very basic Bible knowledge, it seems to me...

Anyway, like I said, I was open to the idea of religion, but had yet to really come into contact with it. My grandmother did try to teach me a few things, but I saw her so seldom because I lived in North America and she in Europe, that her influence wasn't very permanent. Mostly, I think I played the role of The Good Girl for her, but none of her teachings really stuck, apart from my seeing that religion really did give her peace of mind.

I remember one day when I went swimming in a lake with my great-aunt and she told me a Bible story as we were swimming along. I remember being really annoyed because her whole point was that homosexuality was a sin - something I did not and do not agree with - and I felt like she was trying to stuff her beliefs down my throat. Don't get me wrong. She is a very nice old lady, but very strict when it comes to her beliefs. I do love her very much. 

Another thing that made me hesitant about religion is what I heard when I went to church, (because after my daughter was born I started taking her to church when she was about a year old.) I was curious and mostly I didn't want Daughter to miss out on what I had missed as a child, so I took her to church, if only to better her chances at understanding English Literature when she went to high school. I thought it would be to her advantage to know the basics. I was also hoping to land a teaching job in a religious school, and so going to church couldn't hurt. If you are thinking right now that those have to be the WORST reasons for a person to go to church, I won't argue. :o)  Anyway, although I was open-minded and curious, I didn't really like the sermons. It sounded to me like the priest was preaching that the Bible should be taken literally. I didn't see him trying to get at the message of the Word. I have since been to other masses that I have really enjoyed so I guess this had to do with that one particular priest at that one particular church. In the end, I stopped going to church, but I did buy picture Bibles so Daughter could still get her initial education.

When Daughter started daycare and I started working, I met someone at work with whom I had some very interesting conversations about religion over some very spicy cups of tea. This person was of the Bahai faith and he made me think about a lot of things that I hadn't thought about before. But that will be a story for a different chapter. That's enough for today, I think, except of course for some Supermom Words of Wisdom that I will leave you with:

One conviction I have arrived at somewhere along the way is that all religions are valid, and that includes atheism, or lack of religion. If you look at any religion, you will see the same underlying guiding principle: love. Religions are a kind of code for how to live one's life, and it always comes down to love. Love thy fellow man. Love thyself. Love God, if you believe in him. Love the good you can find in everyone even if you don't believe.

As for parenting, I will leave you with an example:

I have mentioned previously the value of teaching children about the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes to teach them about generosity and sharing, but if you do not believe in God or if you have an aversion to using Bible stories as parenting tools, you can achieve the very same goal by telling your children the  Stone Soup story.


The basic point is this: decide on your values. Find the tools you need in order to transmit your values to your children. I believe everyone is born good. In fact, I believe that everyone is born noble. Nevertheless, children aren't born knowing everything about life. They learn many things from what they see and observe. It is up to us parents to make sure they see and observe our values so that they have a good foundation on which to build the values that they will eventually adopt and live by. They are little. They can't do it alone. That is what parents are for. :o)

The Beginning of the Next Chapter - How I Discovered God (In My Own Agnostic Way...)

Back when I was in university, religion was still being taught in Quebec's elementary schools. Parents had their choice in enrolling their children in either Catholic or Protestant religion classes. Alternately, children could be enrolled in what was called Moral Education. It basically taught the same values as the other classes, but left God out of the equation. As I mentioned yesterday, Religious Education was taken more or less seriously in Quebec's public schools. In my grade four class, Religious Education period was devoted to personal hygiene for a full 3-month term. I guess they were covering the Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness angle...

I took two classes in university about religion. The first one was the really interesting one. It covered the story of the Bible from a historical viewpoint. I learned a lot, and at the time I wished I had learned all this before, not because of religion, but because it would really have come in handy in my high school English classes. There are so many allusions to the Bible in literature and I was always at a loss when these came up. Knowing about the Bible would have made the two years in Mrs. Durst's Hornors English and AP English classes much easier for me.

One day in the class, we were learning about the exodus from Egypt. The professor said something that day that made a bell go off in my head. DING! For the first time, I felt that I actually got it. What did he say? "When the Jews left Egypt, they felt that a force was keeping them together. They called that force God."

Before, I had always wondered how people could believe in God. It didn't make sense to me. I mean, if I compared the story of Creation to the Big Bang Theory, or if I thought about the miracles Jesus performed, I had trouble believing that what was written in the Bible was actual fact. Although it had been easy for me to believe and pray as a little girl, because it had all seemed so magical, as I grew up and learned about the world, the Bible stories just didn't fit into it for me somehow.

When my professor uttered that sentence about the Jewish people and God, a thought jumped into my head that kind of helped the pieces fall into place. For the first time, instead of seeing it from the angle that God created man, I switched the tables around and looked at it from the other side: not that God created man, but that man created God. I realize to most this would seem as blasphemy, but I was so happy to have this thought in my head. Suddenly, I had a certain grasp on something: there is good in everyone, though some may not manifest it. To me, the good that was in everyone was God. Once I recognized that, I could modify my previous thought from "man created God" to "man recognized God."

That is how I first came to concede that God may in fact exist. It was a great leap for someone who, although not an atheist, was at most agnostic. When I had thought about God before, I just couldn't believe, but I knew that other people believed and to me, that meant that to them God existed. But for me, it was impossible to prove. I had been raised by two very pragmatic scientists who dealt with facts (my mother was a pharmacist, my father a doctor, they have both gone into scientific research since then); I needed proof. But then, with this idea that there was no need to prove God's existence, but only to recognize it as the good that is in everyone, that was my first step towards belief.

There was another thing that my professor taught us in university. I don't remember if it was in this same class about the Bible or if it was in the second class, the one about how to teach religion, but at one point we were having a discussion about the miracles Jesus performed. In talking about the miracle of the loaves and fishes, we were discussing what our future students could learn from this story. The professor pointed out that one aspect of studying Bible stories was to try and see what the author of the story wanted to say to the readers. After much discussion, we came around to the subject of sharing to make sure that everyone had enough. 

That discussion made it  easier for me to accept that we could learn something from the Bible. Although I didn't know if the miracle of the loaves and fishes had actually happened, (I guess that is where faith would come in), I was prepared to accept that we should teach these stories to children to teach them about sharing. After all, in that story, Jesus was preoccupied with making sure that everyone had enough to eat.

So, thus far on my journey, I had become an open-minded agnostic. I couldn't prove that God existed, but I was no longer preoccupied with trying to prove or disprove it. If I said that I believed in God, I knew at some level that I did not mean this in the same way that, for example, Christians would mean it when they said that they believed. I personally simply meant that I believed there was good in everyone and, for lack of a better title, I called that good God. It was the beginning of a new chapter in my life, religiously speaking.

Broaching the Topic of Religion - The Good Girl

I want to say first off that I am not trying to start a debate with anyone or to convert anyone or to make fun of anyone's beliefs. It simply occurred to me that I have walked my religious path on my own for so long, it might be interesting to get it out there and let people know what my journey has been like.

I wasn't raised in a religious household. I was fully 15 years old before I even found out that my family even had a religion. Before that, I had always assumed we were atheists. I had been vaguely aware that my maternal grandmother was Catholic, but that was the extent of what I knew.

When I was in grade three, a new girl came to our school. Her name was Trisha and as luck would have it, we were on the same school bus. We became best friends. Trisha's family was religious and she gave me a picture Bible to read. It was something completely new to me and I think I thought of it as a novelty. I remember bringing the Bible home in a plastic bag and when my mother asked me what it was, I was evasive at first. I said something like, "It isn't something that we read." She figured out right away that it was a Bible. She said it was no big deal and that there was no need to hide it. So I believed that she was open-minded, but I still didn't know that she believed in God. I just thought that she was being tolerant. When I think back on that today, it is really weird that I thought that.

So my first experience with religion was thanks to Trisha. I read the Bible and started praying, but I didn't really know what it was all about. To me, it was like being a good girl. If I prayed, then I thought I was being a good girl. I read the Bible and tried to study it so I would know what it was about, but that is as far as it went. Besides feeling that I was a good person, I didn't really experience anything that I would call faith. I had plenty of imagination, but that was as far as I got in believing in God. Soon the novelty wore off and I forgot to pray or to read the Bible. The next year, in grade four, Trisha moved away and we didn't keep in touch.

As far as I can recall, that was my first experience with religion. It was a very short chapter of my life.

Later, when I was in university studying to be a teacher, there were two optional courses that we were strongly encouraged to take so that we could be qualified to teach religious education in elementary school. One course was a sort of history of religion that covered some of the stories in the Bible, and the other was a pedagogical course on how to teach religion. It wasn't an absolute must, but as most teachers were called on to teach religion, it would help us land jobs if we had taken the two courses.

In the second course, the pedagogical one, we learned that when a child is young, it is the mystery and the wonder of religion that reaches out to them. At a young age, children are not yet looking into the message that the writers of the Bible were trying to transmit. They are simply attracted to the wonder of the stories. Creation, David and Goliath and the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes are magical stories to children. At a young age, this is all that were were asked to transmit to the students. The magic.

I think that I caught some of this magic when I was reading the Bible and praying on my own. It is actually ironic that I had to go out and get this magic on my own. I don't remember ever being taught about it in elementary school. I have looked over my old school report cards and was surprised at what I found there. In grade four, under the heading of Religious Education, the teacher had written that we had covered personal hygiene that term. I kid you not. This is what Religious Education period was used for.

Instead of the public school system, I have Trisha and her family to thank for planting the seed. I don't even remember their last name. I wonder where they are today...

Magic

Yesterday when I picked him up, my six-year-old son's first words were, "I saw a real princess today!" That of course made me smile. I get such a kick out of him and his view of the world! Often, when he is watching a DVD, he will turn to me and very seriously say, "That can't happen. They did that with a computer just for the film." This is usually at the scarier parts, so I recognize that he is reassuring himself. But otherwise, he is perfectly willing to believe what he sees. Like yesterday, when they were taken to see a play, he saw a real princess.

I think it is so important for children to believe in magic, the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny and, in my family's case, God. It is a real challenge every year to get the Christmas tree up and the presents under it without the children realizing that it was all my doing. (My daughter has caught on, but she has agreed to keep the magic alive for her two little brothers.) Our tradition holds that it isn't Santa who brings the presents. It is the Baby Jesus who brings them as symbols of his gift of Love. (Saint Nicholas comes a little earlier, on December 6th, to put chocolates and oranges in their boots.)

Nowadays, when children have questions, such as about where babies come from, we tend to pull a book off the shelf and explain human anatomy to them, so that we are honest with them, as modern parents should be. I don't quite agree with this. I think there is great value in believing in miracles. Children are happy to get a toonie for their teeth, or to clean their boots and put them in the window for Saint Nicholas. It is a way for them to keep the wonder about the world that increasingly is too informative and makes them grow up too soon.

Don't get me wrong. I am all about explaining photosynthesis to children when we are hiking in the woods. I explain about not picking the wildflowers in a park because they are protected. I talk to them about not littering, about pollution and conservation. But I know they also get a kick out of pretending that the trees that grow in perfect rows are bewitched soldiers, of that elves live in the hollows of trees. It develops their imagination to play this way, and it also helps them be brave, and to move into situations where they might imagine that it would be scary, but they move forward nonetheless. My daughter was afraid of the Easter Bunny for years. She would come get me before going out into the living room to see if there was an Easter basket there for her. I would accompany her and, over the years, she eventually started walking in front of me instead of behind. Finally, she was able to go look on her own. I can see this self-assurance in her today, and wonder if it isn't thanks to the Easter Bunny. :o)