Sister, when you laugh

My heart fills full up.

Earlier today, I found a video of myself and two other boys when we were in the 2nd grade. We were pretending to do the news. All the artifacts of my pre-college years have slowly been adding up to reveal to me how very very Southern was my upbringing. And only in one respect is this regrettable: the accent. Absolutely horrifying. This accent literally drains all the adorability out of my childhood self. Only in silence was my childhood self cute. Thank God for a geographically diverse college population to iron it out of me. I have adopted a new Southern accent in Atlanta, for some reason, but it has more character to it and less the ring of ignorance. Also, I can put it on and take it off at will.

My brother is part Buddhist. He is the one pillar of theism left in the Whitson family, after death and academia and Richard Dawkins have had their way with us. I used to think his faith was strange and half-breed and maybe heretical, but now, he is the one trying to draw me into the fold. At moments, he is all that makes me want to believe. For J., God is not the endpoint or the substitutionary atonement, the heaven or hell or the one we're all trying to impress. No. For J., God is everything. God is a breath and a summer breeze. the earth. the moment between, he says. That is God. If this is different from the way I see, I cannot articulate how.

It is a theology of immanence, as Beth and I were discussing yesterday. God with us, in the Christian tradition. God in us, for others. a God in all things, instead of a God over all things. I love theologies of immanence, Beth says. I believe I do too. To see everything, every moment, certainly every person, as sacred. To cherish all things as they are, each moment as an awakening, as a creation. "Each day, I awake in god." God isn't a belief, anymore, not a doctrine. God is just a vocabulary, a way of talking about things as they actually are, or as you see them. And it's a vocabulary that's got some hang-ups, but that has some real potential also.

J.'s faith reminds me how limited my questions and critiques are. They are all responses to Christianity, and that is fine, but Christianity is not the only way of seeing God, and before I walk away completely and before I start making categorical statements about religion and secularism, I should at least recognize what all is out there. And I still think my final word on religion comes back to this: it's not a matter of what the belief is, but of how one inhabits that belief. Any idea worth having has the capacity to redeem or to destroy. You are not going to rid the world of destruction by regulating belief. So what it comes down to, for me, is: would the world agree that your belief makes you a better person? more loving and accepting, more engaged in the world around you, more caring of the earth, more responsible in your dealings with others, more honest, more free? Does it steer you away from demonizing and dehumanizing your fellow human beings? Does it give you more of a capacity to view and create beauty? Does it expand rather than constrict your world? If not, you simply must be mistaken. But if so, I won't argue with you.



Sister, when you cry,
I feel your tears running down my face.