Aha Moment

Dear readers - Today's post is heavy and really just stuff that I needed to get out of my head and onto another space.  It was good processing for me.  If you are looking for a story, please wait for another post.  Otherwise, read on...  

I started this blog, titled Finding My Way, with the premise that I was lost trying to find my way in the world.  That was a mere six weeks ago.  I've discovered that I am not lost, rather attempting to cull together all I know and believe into a framework that makes sense for me.  What I've discovered, at 37 years of age, is that my own lens matters and that my perspective on life is changing.

I'm reading a book in which the author spends an entire chapter reminiscing about her childhood education in the subject of history.  She was taught history as a factual subject in which the student could simply memorize and spit back dates, rulers, class structures, wars and conflicts and walk away fully informed about the history of our world.  I don't know about you, but it sounds much like my own history education.

What she discovered, at a far earlier age than I, is that history is a mere recollection of events sometimes pieced together without evidence or actual knowledge of the event.  Moreover, history is often told through the eyes of the beholder.  So, our history books are sometimes as much fiction as the novel I am reading.

This notion of history as "reconstruction almost always flawed" got me to thinking.  Thinking about the thing that has been at the center of my disharmony - my faith.  At first I wanted to blame my internal dissonance on our move to a rural, conservative area.  Then I wanted to blame my close daily work with the fundamentalist Christians in my office.  Then I began to question the history of the church, liturgy, even the impetus behind writers of the Bible.  Then I started to connect with Eastern ways of life.   I'm beginning to question and wonder about the things I've always known to be true.  My old paradigm doesn't fit in today's world of religious controversy and competition.

But, my "aha moment" came this morning.

So, my old paradigm doesn't fit.  So, I have questions.  So, there are pieces of many religious practices that resonate with me.  So, I like to read about the threads that run through many world religions.  So, I believe we are all bound to our context of origin and no culture is more right or more god-like than another.  So, I believe we are all going to Heaven despite what my Christian affiliation may argue.  So, like the author above, I've learned that religion, like history, doesn't happen in facts, laws, or liturgy. 

Faith can be constructed and held through the eyes of the faithful.  My faith can be constructed through my eyes.

It is nice to be in a place where I can grapple with this cacaphony of noise in my head and know that I will make sense of it.  It is nice to believe that I can cull together my knowledge, thoughts, and experiences with different world religions, theologies, and ways of life to make my own perspective.  It is nice to finally believe that my lens matters, if only to me.

So, I've changed the title of my blog to Through My Eyes...