I have been lying in bed for four hours, trying to fall asleep. I was exhausted when I went to bed, and I'm still exhausted, yet sleep is nowhere in sight. Insomnia isn't uncommon in people my age, and usually I read until I'm sleepy, but tonight I really just wanted to fall asleep because I was so tired.
As usual when waiting for sleep to arrive, my mind is a beehive of activity, and tonight is no different. I'm worrying about my apartment, which really needs a good vacuuming; I'm worried that I have not completed my Christmas baking, owing to a peculiar lethargy and a really bad migraine attack that kept me in bed for two entire days this week. After I have these episodes, it seems to take several days for my brain to function again. So, for instance, I went to Whole Foods and bought food for Christmas dinner but forgot to buy lavender soap for the sink. I was supposed to have a guest for Christmas, but she's not coming until the 26th, which means I'll be alone on Christmas. This, too, has happened before, but I never take it well.
Maybe it's because Christmas is a holiday that has always promised so much pleasure and delivered so little. It has seemed to me, since I was a child, that there should be one day a year when no one had a fight with anyone, when everything was beautiful, and when there was real joy everywhere (in spite of the commercialism of the holiday). But in my life, the promise has seldom been fulfilled, and certainly not when I lived with my family of origin or when I was married, for various and tedious reasons.
Anyway, I thought I could handle everything okay this year, so I put Messiah on the stereo, pretty loud since I don't think any of my neighbors are home except the drunks, who always have their own music on. It is one of my favorites, and when I could sing and did sing, I was in several performances of excerpts from it. My recording is particularly fine and I was enjoying it. I even sang along with some of the songs until my voice gave out. But I dropped my kitchen work to listen to the "Hallelujah" chorus. I sang along pretty well, quitting only on the high Fs, Gs, and the single A, until we got to the final "Hallelujah," when I inexplicably began to cry.
It's been quite a few years since I decided I just didn't believe some of the basic tenets of Christianity, namely the virgin birth, which is scientifically impossible since Mary would have had a clone of herself, not a boy; the Affirmation of Faith, which I could no longer attest to since I did not believe in its central tenets; and finally, the act of Communion itself, which seems totally barbaric to me, as well as cannabalistic. Eat the body of Christ? Drink his blood? It seemed like a throwback to a time in Judaism where they practiced human sacrifice, only in Christianity it had been sublimated into a symbolic act, without any real flesh or blood involved. Yet there it is, one of the central Mysteries of the religion, and the thought of it made me nauseated.
We all go to church and participate in these rituals without thinking about them, or at least I realized that I had always done so when I was a member of the Methodist church. But one year, I had decided not to eat sugar, so I didn't bake my usual thousands of cookies, and I had this little satori: my relationship to Christianity was basically one of habit and sentiment. After that I started to look at the rituals with clearer sight.
This is, after all, what the Buddha says we must do. We must see things clearly. All things. Everything. In order to become enlightened we must accept what we see. So I saw these things and realized I couldn't be a Christian. It wasn't that I wouldn't or didn't want to be; I could not be one anymore.
One would think that would be the end of it, but alas, it is not. Nowadays when I walk into a particularly beautiful church, I cry. I cannot sing hymns from my childhood without crying. When I try to sing certain Christmas carols I dissolve into tears, just as I did today. For many years I asked myself why I had turned into such a crybaby about things having to do with the church of my childhood. Finally, this past year, I decided that what was happening to me was grief. It's one thing to say you no longer believe something, and for very rational and sensible reasons, but quite another to persuade your heart, which isn't rational or logical or even sensible. And after being a Christian for nearly forty years, off and on, giving up on it is more difficult than I could have imagined.
For me, as a singer, God was in the music. My primary form of "worship" was singing, literally raising my voice in song. When I sang, I would feel that I was touching the divine. Feeling that I couldn't go into a Christian church anymore and couldn't sing made me simply stop singing entirely. That's why the Fs, Gs, and As were hard to sustain. It's been over five years since I sang a note, even around the house or in the shower. I'm telling my readers this so they will know that nothing comes without a price, at least in my experience. I never realized I'd stop singing if I couldn't sing music from The Sacred Harp or by Handel. When I stopped believing, I didn't realize what it would mean—really, really mean. And it isn't just church music; it's all music.
What does a person do? I don't know. I suppose the Buddha would instruct me to meditate in order to find peace in the decision, but right now, my heart is torn, shredded. Who will I sing the "Boar's Head Carol" to? It's supposedly the oldest carol in English. Who knows it? I do. But who would I sing it to and why? I've always felt that music was separate from words, and that for church singing, the words weren't that important; it was the music itself. But it's the words and the music together that seem to cause the manifestation of grief, not the one or the other.
I made the decision, though, and somehow I must work it out. The monotheistic religions are what Jung would call extraverted. God is somewhere "out there," while a spiritual belief such as Buddhism is introverted. The individual him/herself must find the divine "in here," in him/herself. The monotheistic religions allow only one god, which causes many wars; but Buddhism says only that if you look inside yourself and live by certain precepts, such as loving-kindness and not killing things, you will eventually be able to see everything as it is, and one hopes, end one's suffering. Monotheistic religions rely on continual suffering—guilt, revenge, the desire for a superficial perfection, and persecution of infidels—while Buddhism relies on the attainment of clarity of perception to bring about a more peaceful reality.
Frankly, I don't see anything wrong-thinking in this comparison, every though it's simplistic and I know it. It's also basic and fundamental to the differences between the four great world religions, three of which are the reason for so much war and death in the present day. The god of Abraham is a jealous god, and the world gets to be the stage upon which this jealous contest is fought. Seems like a pretty pitiful historical record to me.
Well, in any event, and out of my tears of grief and loss, I wish anyone reading this a happy holiday season. I'm sure I'll solve my dilemma eventually if I keep working on it. And believe me, this is probably the first and last serious entry I'll make in this blog.
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