I’ve changed my faith or religion or spiritual practice a lot over the years. I was born to parents of Jewish ancestry, but they were Unitarians, or Jewnitarians, as their friends joked. I was born to hybrids.
When I was twelve, we moved to Israel, largely because my Dad felt guilty for not teaching us kids about our Jewish history. It seemed to me to be too much too late. It was an alien country and faith to me. I felt terrible about the holocaust, and I understood Nazis would kill me whether or not I felt Jewish, but I still didn’t feel like kissing the ground when we landed in Israel.
At thirteen, I went to Quaker boarding school in the mountains of North Carolina. As students, we didn’t go to Meeting much, but we spent our days and nights outside in nature. You might say it was in the mountains I found God. I came home to myself and fell in love with the streams, rhododendron, sandy mica paths, and black mountaintops. I loved sliding down rocks in the South Toe river, sliding down mountain sides in the snow, skating and swimming in natural ponds, resting in wild grasses and staring at the stars on windy nights. My house parents had to drag me inside to go to bed at night.
As a young adult, I flirted with Christianity, walking in and out of churches and cathedrals in New York City.
I later followed my partner to an ashram in New York City and meditated for several years.
When I became a mom, I felt the need to find a religious faith with “normal” holidays to celebrate, and since my partner and I both came from Jewish ancestry, we joined a synagogue, went faithfully to Shabbat services, and practiced the Jewish faith for fourteen years–Challah, matzo ball soup, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover and all. We still do. It’s good for the family.
As my daughter grew older, I searched again and I began meditating with a local Buddhist group.
Each of these religions offers me different ways to understand and deal with the challenges of the human condition–but, above all, what I have come to embrace most deeply in my search for faith, is not an official religion, with a title or building or set of written laws, practices, and rules, but my experience of and with nature.
It turns out that my greatest devotion, commitment, love and joy, outside of parenting, or perhaps integrally linked to it, is connecting with and protecting the earth–soil, rock, water, mountains, oceans, rivers, trees, animals, birds, reptiles, and all living creatures.
My belief in nature makes me understand that if I love this blessed nature so much, then I have a sacred duty to protect her.
Yes, I want to guard and protect our beautiful earth. I want to be sure that clean water, air and soil are here to stay for all future beings, human and nonhuman.
That is my rock solid faith.
What’s yours?
This video, made by my friends Doug and Patti Wood, founders of Grassroots Environmental Education, inspired these thoughts. “We were called to be guardians of the earth.”
I understand that this beautifully made video is about our environment and specifically Hydro Fracking. What I want to know is why that water can’t be recycled and possibly be put thru some sort of cleansing process for another use. Does Fracking cause the water to disappear ??
If not we need the oil to get out from under the dependence of other countries. We need to get back to taking care of our own right here in the US.
, Mollie,
it seems that much can be done, technically, to recycle water and other resources turned into harmful waste.
problem is, the oil companies won’t invest the money for that, and their scramble for oil has become an illogical and destructive obsession of those who have manipulated laws to immorally hoard money. the big companies knowingly and routinely cut safety corners (as BP did on the rigs in the Gulf that blew up and destroyed its entire fishing trade and natural ecosystem). they shamelessly commit fraud and rob the taxpayers, just for the purpose of profit. workers’ safety has long ago become unimportant to the super-rich owners who also increasingly exploit their workers as well as our earth’s living balance.
they also neglect the need for switching to alternative, safe, earth-friendly power sources…….they won’t ‘waste’ their money; they’ve lost all perspective, as have politicians, who have become willing to similarly abuse their vast powers for the lure of money=power.
I grew up in Colorado in a sea of domestic violence and child abuse, and under the spell of my FBI-agent father, amidst a backdrop of immense beauty – snow-covered mountain peaks, icy tumbling streams, and a grassy range as far as the eye could – the closest place to God I knew, that hid gullies and gulches, diamond-backed rattlers and black angus cattle. During times when nothing could stop the war that was raging in my home I found comfort and protection in a towering cluster of blue spruce and Douglas fir pines that lived in our side-yard abutting U.S. highway 24 that lead all the way to Kansas. Some days I crossed the highway and played “pioneer” in an abandoned hay wagon I found in the field hidden among tall yellow grasses believing that I would “go someplace when I grew up.”
At 19, after working a year to save money, I rode the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad’s Burlington Zephyr all the way to Detroit to Marygrove college where I earned a bachelors degree in Chemistry and Biology, but more than the degree, I learned to think and question the shape and structure of society. This was in the tumultuous civil rights era in a city with an indomitable spirit and carrying the crushing weight of slavery and all its pursuant injustices such as poverty, unfair wage and labor practices, roundups and deportation, even of citizens who had served the farm and labor industries that built Detroit into a burgeoning metropolis in the 1960’s.
After college, I married, raised six children and struggled with the fallout of a childhood filled with violence all the while involving myself in Detroit’s inner city to try and stem the tide of escalating racial violence following the Detroit riots in 1967. After waging an uphill and unsuccessful effort to stop the city of Detroit from evicting “Ma Bell” and the women and kids she had taken off the streets in probably one of the first homeless shelters for mothers and children in the country, I learned the truth of the statement “You can’t fight city hall.” I threw myself on my bed and wept with rage. It was an important lesson, one that I have carried to this day. One must learn powerlessness before one can be of service to the world.
One must reckon with her own wounds if she wants help transform the world. This takes time and the support of a healing community. Our own wounds are the wells from which our capacity to heal spring and, I believe, this healing always evolves in relationship with Spirit, our ancestors and the natural world. I survived childhood because the mountains, streams, the range and Colorado sky, the firs and pines held me and even transported me to another dimension where fire and snow, passion and compassion, water and wind were my companions, even if I didn’t realize it back then. I do now!
I have studied violence theoretically at the masters and doctoral levels at Harvard University; have been an agent of violence and a victim of it, and lost my oldest daughter to it. But, what I remember everyday is the constant presence of the love, beauty, and joy I have known, even in the darkest of times in the pines, in a stream up in North Cheyenne canyon in Colorado, in rocks I have loved and that have held me, in the rivers of my childhood: Colorado, Platte, Rio Grande, Gunnisson, Arkansas.