Calvinism (bulleted list)
Mar 5, 2008 Friends, Judaism, Race, Spirituality, The Story of My Life
- Last night at writers group, my friend Sarah told me that she was thinking on this post (the one where I out myself as a former slut) and she was wondering why the thinking felt familiar to her then she realized, I’m a Calvinist! Except for the being Jewish part. Now I don’t know much about Calvinism or any other brand of Christianity (my friend Sarah is a savvy Christian and is patient about explaining denominational differences to me) but the way she explained it is that Calvinists preach that no one is better than anyone else and so there’s no “holier than thou” teaching there. Now don’t start arguing with me about Calvinism because I don’t know a darn thing anyway but we all thought it was funny, me being a Calvinistic Jew.
- Then after writers group we strolled out of the restaurant and stood on the sidewalk chatting last minute when several police cars whizzed down the road. We were in downtown Worthington (we met at Le Chatelaine). If you don’t live here I’ll explain that downtown Worthington is like Main Street, America. Kitschy little shops, a few adorable-type restaurants and a village green that has Sunday night concerts. But the main drag cuts through all of Columbus, which is what keeps Worthington from being quite a sleepy little suburb. Anyway, the police cars go by with lights and sirens and then the street was totally silent. Suddenly another car comes shooting down and slams into a streetlight, shedding it’s bumper and several other important-looking parts; bounces off the streetlight; fishtails down the block (knocking into at least one other car, maybe two); skids into the Graeter’s parking lot; whips around and roars down New England Avenue. We stood there stunned and then a million point one police cars suddenly careen into view from both directions, arriving at the intersection where the car left and then scatter leaving two of them to literally pick up the pieces. I have no idea where the guy was coming from, why he was running and whether or not they caught him. It was crazy and I was shaking hard for quite awhile after the street was clear again.
- Madison is going to the doctor today because yesterday she still seemed to be carrying herself differently from her non-fall on the couch. Today she seems fine (it’s always that way — like the day you’re supposed to get your hair cut it looks good for the first time in days). We’re going anyway. Noah is going rollerskating so he can wrench his neck.
- I can’t believe the primaries are dragging on. My heart can’t take it and it’s not even anywhere near November yet. You know, I always felt like Hillary was paving the way for a woman president by her stint in the White House as first lady; I never thought that first president would be her. I’m wondering if she took Ohio because Republicans could also vote in the Democratic primary. (You can vote in whichever you want — you just tell the folks at the table which primary you want to have a say in.) I think Obama is a better match for McCain and maybe they do, too. But I tell you — I love Michelle Obama.
- Speaking of Obama, the other day Madison pointed to some talking head on television and asked if that was Obama. I said, no, Obama had brown skin and then showed her a picture. She said, “Oh like ME!” And yeah, that made me want to vote for him a little bit more. I don’t want to get into a pissing contest about race versus gender but if I was only voting on the “who should go first?” ticket (and I’m not), it’d be race. I’m having a hard time articulating why this is but it’s not where I would have been pre-Madison. That’s something I need to meditate on for awhile.
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Oh I wanted to write a long post
Feb 20, 2008 Adoption, Spirituality
One about the myth of the redemptive power of suffering but I just got back from a morning meeting and have to leave in twenty minutes for another meeting.
Julia and I talk some about the work she does for the PKD Foundation, particularly with other parents facing a new diagnosis. She’s found a way to make meaning of her family’s challenges but you know, I get the feeling she’d give up all that meaning in a millisecond if it could make her kids healthy. But then maybe she ought to quit being so committed to serving the PKD community because that’s so much focus! So much attention to something negative! Why dwell on the bad things? Move on, Julia!
Why do we ignore the fact that the most activist good comes from people obsessed? (That MLK! That Ghandi! So single-minded! Sheesh!)We less obsessed people who show up for the rallies, write our letters to the editor — we’re riding on their coattails. (Do you think I would have testified if Marley hadn’t been keeping track of the legislation?)
I don’t know. It’s running through my head from some of yesterday’s comments and then hearing Terri Gross interview Bart Ehrman yesterday about his book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer. It’s worth listening to if you have the time.
But instead of wandering around on this topic for hours, I have to go eat lunch and head back out into the snow.
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Tags: Julia, resiliency, resilient, suffering, tragedy
Smack head
Oct 27, 2007 Adoption, Spirituality
I’m such a loud-mouth. I got in a debate with Jessica’s lovely boyfriend about (gulp) religion. Well, not religion so much as religious beliefs. And the thing is, I think we mostly agree only the language we’re using is different.
Sorta.
Other than that (and he’s so gracious that all the heated voice-raising was on my side) we had a nice visit tonight. Jessica carved the kids’ pumpkins (they look great, by the way) and Madison leaned in and said, sighing, “I love it when you visit!”
Man. I can’t believe we got in an argument about religion. When am I going to learn to keep my mouth shut???
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Answering comments = easy posting
Nov 24, 2006 Judaism, Spirituality
awrungsponge asked:
I wonder if you know a God beyond religion? Or do you see religion as only a human phenomenon? I am guessing that you do believe in a Universal Great Spirit God (terminology?) but see that as somewhat separate from religion. Do you think it is up to an individual (our children) to find that Spirit in their own journey, or do you think that Spirit will seek to know us/them?
I found a way to include a higher power in my life when I was about eighteen because I was dating an alcoholic and started to go to AA. My alcoholic boyfriend was (probably still is) an atheist and his higher power was a bottle cap. This bottle cap represented the love other people had for him and that he believed would help him not to reach for that drink if he would “let go and let god.”
This experience was the first time in my (raised cynically agnostic) life that I began to think about god and about spirituality in a way that might successfully apply to me. If he could find God (as he understood him/her/it) in a bottle cap, then maybe my ideas about God (white man, long beard, angry expression) could stretch a little.
When I met Brett he was drinking and so it was back to 12-stepping for both of us. He tentatively shared with me how important his Christianity was to him (he is intensely private about his beliefs so I can’t elaborate) and I started wondering if I could be a Christian. Answer: No. I find the idea that we need to be saved offensive (to me personally — it’s central to my husband’s faith); it was too big an obstacle for me to ever get around. But I still felt the presence of God in my life and I wanted to find a structure to explore him/her/it.
What I’ve told Noah is that religion is humanity’s way to try to understand God and so no person’s religion is “right.” We all experience God differently — if we seek to experience him/her/it. We chose to raise him (and Madison) as Jewish for all the reasons I’ve explained before and also importantly because both Brett and I like the emphasis on questioning. Religion is supposed to serve us in our relationship with and understanding of God. Me, it seems like I came with a built-in bias for Judaism (my rabbi tells me that all the souls of all the Jews — including the converts — were there for the giving of the Torah and so if you buy that, I was Jewish before I knew it). I believe Judaism is more right and true than any other religion — that’s why I’m a Jew. But I think God is bigger than religion and just because I think Judaism is more right and true doesn’t mean that anyone else is less right or true.
I do think it’s up to my kids to figure God out for themselves. My brother is an atheist and I have no truck with that; that’s how he experiences God (as an absence? as a non-issue? whatever — it’s his truth). Likewise, my kids may end up atheists. I don’t know if God seeks us or if we seek him/her/it. I have told Noah that Judaism is a good place to start but that he will need to open up his heart to discover his own truth; I have no idea what God might be whispering to him or if he will hear it or if God is whispering at all.
Brett gets hung up on the big questions. It bothers him that he doesn’t how salvation can be true but not one-size-fits-all (he doesn’t believe I am going to hell, for example). Me, I just don’t worry about it all that much. I’m ok with not knowing because I think God is beyond our comprehension. I don’t worry about or think about the details except as they apply to how I’m supposed to operate in the world.
You know, I was thinking about this last night. Judaism is a good fit for me for a lot of reasons but one is that it’s the most mindf*cking religion I’ve found. Look at this page from the Talmud. The Talmud is rabbinical commentary on the scriptures. Ok, did you click to that page? Go click it and then come back. All of those different colors there midway down the page are different commentaries. The rabbis discuss and debate across centuries — we’re still doing it today.
You know what you get when you put two rabbis in a room? Three opinions.
More Talmudic fun here!
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More on faith on culture
Nov 23, 2006 Adoption, Judaism, Race, Spirituality
I think I must have done a really really horrible job of explaining so I’m going to re-explain.
Both my kids are being raised in the Jewish faith, as in their formal religious education is happening at our synagogue. They are also being raised less formally with some understanding of Christianity because their father is a Christian. (He’s non-denominational but in short he believes that he needed to be saved, he finds comfort in his bible and he is humbled by Christ’s teachings.) Because it’s easier for me to talk about my beliefs than it is for their dad to talk about his, when Noah asks big questions I answer from a Jewish perspective as I understand it.
We’re not so great at the trappings of either of our religions. Judaism — even Reform — has a lot of trappings and this is one of several reasons that our kids are at temple instead of at church. (The other major reason being that churches are not comfortable places for me and Brett enjoys services at synagogue.) It’s pretty easy to embrace Christianity — you just become Christian. But Judaism has a lot of formal rites that can be confusing and off-putting and to learn them now will make it easier for them to live Jewish later, if they choose to.
That’s our immediate family: non-denominational, liberal Christian and very Reform Jew. Our extended families are everything from Christian Scientist to Athiest to Catholic to Pagan. They have some exposure to all of that but their faith teachings spring from my Judaism and Brett’s Christianity.
Now to further explain why I feel it’s important that Madison have exposure to Christianity:
1. Her birth family, as I said, is French-Catholic. Her grandparents met in Catholic high school (Jessica’s last name is french). Her history on both her maternal and her paternal grandparent’s side is Creole way, way back. She should have a cultural understanding of that because it’s a rich part of her birth heritage. (Noah, as an aside, is jealous that Madison has a busier family tree than he does because we’ve talked about this.)
2. Also her birth family, even when they don’t practice Catholicism do practice Christianity. It’s a big, huge part of their lives and the emails and things we get from them reflect this. She needs to understand this so she has a shared language or at the very least understands their point of view. (Also as an aside, her adoption into a Jewish-identifying family was a concern for some of her first family and we’ve made a point of letting them know that they don’t need to censor their faith with us.)
3. Likewise, Christianity is a very important part of the African American community at large. Open up a copy of Essence if you don’t believe me. Christianity is assumed in a way that Islam is not. “Church clothes,” gospel music, biblical teachings — they are important cultural touchstones. Madison is going to miss out on a lot of cultural touchstones by virtue of growing up in our white family and I can’t try to replicate them for her. What I can do is offer her an understanding of them by actively seeking out members of the community who are willing to educate her about them. (Our babysitter is one person who is helping us with that.)
I don’t think that Madison has a “true” religion that I can ferret out by looking at the color of her skin or her family tree. I certainly don’t have the hubris to enter into the debate happening in the black community about the relevance of Christianity — what do I know? I’m a white Jew! I’m not talking about faith, I’m talking about the cultural experience of religion. So teaching Islam does not seem as important to me as teaching Christianity in a casual cultural context. We’re all for formal and informal multicultural religious education and the informal part is, to me, about addressing the immediacy of a shared cultural experience. This is also why I haven’t gone out of my way to expose my children to Buddhists — we don’t know any. (We know some people who are casually interested in Buddhism but no one who is a practicing Buddhist.) Likewise, in my need-to-happen-more forays into local African American community, I’m seeing a default to Christianity. I have also been explicitly told by several black people that I need to expose Madison to Christianity. So far the only two people who have brought up Islam are two bloggers here. (one on this blog, one on LJ)
A woman wrote me (commented here) awhile back about being a Jewish woman with a child from Guatamala and she said that her son’s birth religion is Catholic but she can’t teach him Catholicsm because she’s Jewish. I understand the dilemma — but I’m NOT talking about raising our children in their birth faith. I’m talking about giving our children an understanding of their birth culture.
Here’s something of an example — one reason I think people assume I’m Christian is that I understand some Christian language. I understand what “the world” means. I understand what it means when someone says, “I was convicted on that.” One of the guys who assumed I was Christian used some of that language and I didn’t ask him what he meant and now I realize that by knowing his language, he was able to more comfortably (and surely unconsciously) make an assumption about me. I was welcome in a discussion we went on to have that I might not have been otherwise. (Sometimes I’m troubled by this because I worry that I’m lying by omission but he never asked so there didn’t seem to be a proper way to back up and explain. Anyway.) I want Madison to grok the language.
It goes back to some old posts (too lazy to dig them up) I had about American-Family and math camp. To be Chinese, her husband quite clearly says, means to go to math camp. So should all white parents of adopted Chinese children sign up for math camp? Well, maybe. If math camp has the opportunity to be a shared touchstone that will make it easier for said child to enter into his/her birth community, then math camp has way more importance than just, you know, math camp. It’s a cultural experience that can give a child options.
There are black kids at our synagogue (not many but they’re there). The difference between them and Madison is that they all have at least one black parent. Those children may have to struggle to define what their blackness means to them (or what other people’s assumptions about their blackness means to them) but it will be a different struggle than Madison’s and I think I need to be more proactive than those other parents need to be.
I don’t want to dictate Madison’s experience by telling her that there is one more legitimate way to be black than another (that it is more legitimate to be Christian or Muslim or to embrace the example of Ethiopian Jews). Her experience as a child of African American heritage is legitimate because she is legitimate. BUT I do want her to know what the world at large is talking about. Even if she never has a chummy time in someone’s kitchen getting her hair done, she needs to know that lots of other black women do and that sometimes people will look at her skin and think she shares an experience that she doesn’t. I don’t want her to be broadsided by this — I want her to be prepared, at the very least to be prepared to know that she doesn’t know things but also where to find out. I want her to feel comfortable finding out. Having some shared language will, I know, make her search easier.
The reason I know how painful it is to be ignorant of things that feel like they should have been a birth right is that I’m a second generation interfaith Jew who converted at 30-something. It’s hard sometimes to participate in temple activities and I can’t help but wish my parents had given me an idea of what was going on even if they didn’t want to teach me the faith of Judaism. (It’s a relief to be able to talk about grandmother’s hamantaschen even though I didn’t even know that’s what they were until I went to my first Purim celebration as an adult.) Sometimes I don’t mind being ignorant but lots of times I want to (irony alert) pass as a regular old Jew. Sometimes Madison will want to be able to blend in, too, and I will do my best to open doors so she can craft her own identity instead of being stuck with the one we’re foisting on her.
What Madison’s faith will be is entirely up to her — she may end up feeling strong ties to her French-Catholic ancestry, or her dad’s mom’s Christian Science history, or she may say to heck with all that and become Mormon. Being a second-generation interfaith family, I feel that religion has way more to do with following your heart than with following familial dictates. But I also know that sometimes we look for — and find — truth by following our roots. Madison has a lot of roots. She has those that came to her by adoption, she has those that come from her first family and she has those that are part of the shared history of African Americans. It’s easy for me to share my faith and to share my family’s faith (including her dad’s family) but it will take special effort on my part to share the religious culture that she lost by being adopted. My post was about making that special effort because I want her to have access, should she choose to exercise it.
I’m not sure what that will look like but I imagine I will follow the lead of our local (i.e, Columbus) African American community and seeing where it leads us. Also it comes from studying black history, reading books with black protaganists, and yes, from reading Essence. (I don’t subscribe anymore but I did and I learned a lot — about hair and about religion to start.)
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Tags: Erica, high school, Madison, Music, Noah
