god in the details

so yesterday was passover, this weekend easter. on my way home from the dog park this morning, ann, the eldest of a brood of four homeschoolers whom i know only through my cordial relations with the owners of a doodle named basil, wished me a happy easter. i returned the wish, though with the realization that i know pretty much nothing about easter. i mean, of course i know the basic story - it's hard to grow up in this country without grasping at least that - but i don't know anything about easter, in much the same way that i don't know anything about christmas either.

j is always amazed by this. over the winter break, i revealed to her that the only time i had ever been to church was to listen to or play music. church doesn't simply doesn't signify to me in the same way as it signifies to her. i often wonder what i missed by growing up without it... would my world look different? my mind? does faith allow or encourage a way of approaching "fact" in some fundamentally other way?

in a somehow related way, i talked to e about passover this morning too. if i know little about jesus and easter, i know even less about passover. so she told me the story, and we talked about the relationship of belief to tradition to... well, belief. and we both noted how, in growing up with a lack of god in our lives, we find the ability to believe (which seems more to me to be about the ability to suspend disbelief) almost unbridgeably foreign. and it's not that i don't want to believe; it's more, truly, that i can't. like there was some critical period in development that related to developing the ability to believe - truly believe - in god. and i missed it. and some days i wonder if in missing that, i missed out on some important way of seeing the world. and then on other days, i think maybe that the god i wasn't raised with just took another form for me - maybe it lives in science, in thought-space, in relation-space, in my own reluctance to dig too deep, and in the idea that anything is possible and we couldn't, or maybe shouldn't, work too hard at understanding. maybe it's just that my non-god doesn't wear human-like clothing. but in the end, i suppose it's just as ineffable as any religious deity, and just as powerful.


ry cooder - i think it's going to work out fine