Every once in a while a good Barbra Streisand title sets you on a path of reflection and as fate would have it, the Jewish New Year rolled through just as my boyfriend and I talked at length about faith. He has held a constant belief system that has kept him and seen him through most of his life. It's a strong and beautiful facet of him. When the question arose to explain my own, I found myself both stupefied and tongue-tied. I'd rarely discussed it openly, especially to someone I was dating. Furthermore, I hadn't gotten to the point where I could fully articulate it to someone outside myself. It's wondrous that the topic presented itself at that very moment, because I had spent the better part of the past year and a half really understanding and deciding what I believed. Here was my chance to boldly state it. Suffice it to say I babbled my way through it like an idiot.
When I moved to New York three years ago, a change began to take place. An awakening, as it were. Faith had always been a strong component of my life, but it was always tempered by a deep questioning, perhaps even skepticism. As I had grown up in a household that embraced both Christianity and Buddhism, I merely accepted what I found to be parallel faith paths. Yes I gravitated towards Christianity, but Buddhist principles constantly found active applications in my life. Moreover, I noticed that the basic tenets of mutual and individual respect, a search for inner tranquility, and an active love of others were common throughout. However, I often found it hard to negotiate what I felt was a narrow view of God within the congregations I actively attended. I couldn't understand the constraints put upon the nature of God. Nonetheless, I stayed along my path and kept my focus, absorbing aspects of both faiths that spoke to me, inspired me.
Then my teens came in, and along with it confusion, anger, and general doubt in who I was. The divorce and the fact that I liked boys didn't help much, either. As it were, much of that belief system crumbled. I went to church and played the part, continued meditating, but found myself increasingly unmoved. Apathy is worse than aversion in faith. You no longer care one way or another for what you previously believed. You merely exist, just slogging day by day ignorantly unaware.
Then, as my teens gave way to my twenties, my apathy gave way to my struggle and determination to feel, indeed believe, in something. And to my enormous surprise, I found that my faith in something greater than myself hadn't died. Merely gone into hibernation, waiting for me to wake up from my paralyzed sense of identity. What a great joy, but a great sorrow, for having not seen it or realized it was there for so long. But this time, it was different. It came with an understanding of pain in confluence with bliss, sadness with happiness. Both exist within and inform each other. And there was a new duality of faith, an appreciation of my beliefs as a Buddhist and a Christian, which now tied completely with the duality of being both bilingual and bicultural, and having to straddle two existing ideologies and sets of customs. At least for me, all of them enrich each other, trauma providing insight into the vastness of joy, language offering more complex and precise forms of expression, and each culture increasing an understanding of the human condition.
So now I'm at a new point in my odyssey with faith. Having the question asked of me has put me on the path to succinctly define it for myself, to open myself up to what I really believe. One thing is certain: throughout this journey, I am thankful for rediscovering a faith that is uniquely and wholly my own.
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