I’m sitting here in the kitchen, it is a very sunny, bright and clear winter afternoon. I’m struggling with religion again, it seems to be a common thing. Wondering what path is right for me, wondering if any path will ever be right for me. I try to remind myself that religions are all just made up, they are a collective idea of various humans from various places of their idea of what God is. And the best I can hope is to find a commonality with those ideas. I wish I was one of those people who just didn’t care about finding God. I wish that I could be content to just look at nature, listen to nature, and appreciate that as God. But for some reason for so many years now, I always have this kind of longing and it brings me circling around to different paths.
I grew up as Jewish, but in a very secular way. When I was 16, I became baptized as Roman Catholic to appease the family of my soon to be husband. I grew disillusioned with Catholicism and branched out into New Age type beliefs, such as Wicca and neo paganism. Later on, I learned about esoteric Christianity and Gnosticism and Kabala and the occult and all these other different things and I dove right into all of that and found it so interesting and so engaging.
It was actually through learning about those things that I found my way back to Christianity, not in the form of Catholicism anymore, but as Anglican. But then after working at an Anglican church for some time and reading the pamphlets that I was printing out with the liturgies and the different prayers, and all of that kind of thing, I became very aware of the antisemitism found within Christianity and as has happened with me so many times the more I studied about Christianity the more I dissected it. And then I eventually came to the understanding that in order to really walk the path of Jesus, I should just return to Judaism because that’s what Jesus was. He was a Jew.
So I went back to Judaism and I left Christianity. There is a lack though, of the personification of God that I seem to really crave. All through this I still have supplemented it with nature based paths, such as Druidry, which is what I’m still exploring now. Back in approximately 2010 I even made up my own religious path, a blend of Christianity, Panentheism and Paganism that I called Divinaturism. The focus was the idea that God expresses itself through the natural world. Divine + Natura – combined it is the perfect union, the one Whole. There is divinity within the natural world around us, and that the world around us is the instrument through which God speaks to us. ( Since really looking at modern Druidry, I realize that the ideas of Divinaturism are sort of already covered within that, so I have backed off on that for the time being, but still hold those stirrings close to my heart as personal expression.)
And then I find myself reading Thomas Merton, reading his poetry, and it makes me cry because I realize that I can identify so strongly with these words and with the imagery that he uses. And that my rational mind does me no service when it comes to trying to build my relationship with God, because my rational mind just picks it all apart. It’s such a strange and conflicting place to be in.
It’s been a few decades since I was diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder, it felt like a very accurate diagnosis based on the way I had a hard time managing my moods, and a lot of the other things that they would say that are characteristics of BPD. Behaviors that I did indeed exhibit. Through working on it with cognitive behavior, therapy and dialectical behaviour therapy I feel that I have gotten most of that under control. But the one thing that still really stands out and really affects me is my lack of identity. My identity seems to fluctuate and change for no real reason. And I don’t know if this is why I have such a hard time, establishing a relationship with God through one direct path. Since I fluctuate between different aspects of self.
For example, I might love the idea of being in the country, and I love the countryside, simplicity and nature and little stone paths and all of these things and I feel like that’s where I want to be, that’s where I want to live. But then I’m in the city and the rush, and the noise, and the excitement and the stores and the people and I think this is where I need to be. I need to be here. Likewise my understanding of God or maybe it is my needs from God change. So I gravitate toward one path or another based I guess, where I am at that time.
The divine being or essence that we call God has expressed itself to me through nature for so long, and I most often find meaning in words written by people like Thomas Merton or Cynthia Borgeault or O’Donahue. These are Christian writers that so well verbalize what I feel when I look at the wind blowing in the trees or the sunset or the rain. Maybe I don’t find that same relevance through neopaganism simply because there’s not as much of it written yet or the writing itself does not appeal to me I don’t know. But here I am a few years into heavily dedicating myself back to Judaism, but missing the ideas presented through Christianity, especially through mystical Christianity. The ideas of holy wisdom, Sophia, the great mother of all. The ideas of an inner Christ that is within all of us that we need to nurture and bring out.
I’m just home sick, but I don’t know where Home is.
In the Wind 