Showing posts with label god. Show all posts
Showing posts with label god. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
hare krishna
It had been a long time since we listened to devotional ecstatic religious music--chanting and mantras and bouncing. We listen to Hare Krishna music, because there is a joy there. Children respond well to joy. The words are easy to say and they all mean God. So, we laugh and dance and bounce, and fall into a pile of us. I told Beezus last time we chanted that we should go to the Hare Krishna temple for devotion.
Chanting in a group feels electric, I tell her. Then we could eat vegetarian food and smile at people. There is a light in this scene I am painting. It was summer then. Our shoulders were bare. Our feet leathered and hot. It was humid. We soaked through our clothes. We burned incense. We put our hands in namaste position and bowed to each other laughing. Beezus loves namaste hands, she repeats the word like a mantra too. I don't tell her it means peace, because I like the way she says it quickly, in a very unpeaceful way.
namastenamastenamaste.
Beezus asked me what a Hare Krishna is. And I tell her that Krishnas are people who believe they can be closer to God and achieve enlightenment by chanting and dancing together, and eating food for God. They devote their lives to this kind of joy. Her eyes perk up, and she says, "That is what I want to be when I grow up."
The wind has been terrible this week. We are wearing layers in our house. I light the fire. The wind blows it out. It rattles the upper floor windows, sending an icy draft over us. It pushes against the car when we are flying down the highway.
Box yourself into your metal machine. Crank up your Sigur Ros. Turn on the heat, but I will still blow you away, the wind howls.
I feel swept up in the winter now. My voice, nothing but a weak breathy deepness, lost in the sounds of our house. The only thing I have been chanting is ahem. My heart pumps faster to do less. My nose drains, runs into rivulets and floods the arroyos, like snow caps melting. I don't have time to get sick. I don't have the wherewithal to battle the gales. I want to chant about God, but I feel an icy emptiness in me--a tundra that stretches from apathy to abandonment. I sit still. I sit with the children and walk through a meditation. It is a winter meditation about quiet and reverence. It feels so Nordic these practices. There is no Hare. No Krishna. The dark and cold seeps into our belief, settles into our God bone.
This morning, we rebel. After our coughing spells, following the warming of our tootsies in front of the fire, we strip down to barefeet and bounce.
Hare. Hare. Hare. Hare Krishna. We are happy. We are happy. Hare Krishna. We are family. Hare. Hare.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
on God and angels.
When I was at the hospital, giving birth to my daughter, there was a lot of angel talk amongst the nurses.
“Your daughter is an angel now.”
“Little beautiful angel Lucia.”
"Now, she is an angel with her grandfather."
I tolerated it because I was reeling and numb. I have always called my daughter Beatrice an “angel” in this context, “Can you please pick up all the Bunny Grahams you just dumped onto the carpet, my angel?” My mother uses Angel interchangeably with Angie, and when I was at university and would come in with my laundry, my step father would often not look up from the television, but scream to my mother, “I smell an angel in the house.”
Still, there is something about referring to my Lucy as an angel that enrages me. I go literally from zero to Red Zone. Why? I guess it is because I want people to see her as a real baby that really died. I often think about this quote from Dr. Zhivago, “For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here in earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and call each thing by its right name” So, let’s do that, shall we? Let's call things by their proper name. She is not an angel. Let’s not imagine her flying around heaven playing a harp. Let’s not paint some beautiful picture of this situation. My daughter is dead. She was my baby, and now she is dead. She was six pounds, 18.5 inches. She gestated for 38 weeks. She kicked me. She flipped around. She played Mama and Lucy Poke Each Other. She had black hair, and blue eyes, and perfect lips. She didn’t die for any specific reason, but she is still dead. She wasn’t an angel. She is a baby. Sure, now she is a dead baby, but she was still a baby. My baby.
What I have gone through shakes the foundation of everything any of us want to believe in, and that we do believe in. When we are atheists, we think, "I wish I believed in God, maybe then I could make sense of this situation." When we are theists, we think "I wish I didn't believe in God because I cannot make sense of this situation." It shakes what we imagine our future to be, and how we see our past. I thought my time pregnant with Lucy was the happiest time of my life, and now, it seems like the most fucking ignorant.
When someone told me after losing Lucia that God had a plan for my baby, I just thought, "What kind of plan could God possibly have for my baby? Is he creating some kind of baby army? Is her looking for beautiful baby girls to pose for Hallmark cards?" And more than once, I thought, "If for some reason, this is God’s plan, then God is an asshole." These days, my internal dialogues are not too deep. I have my degree in Religion. It used to be my raison d'etre to discuss what people think God's plans are, and yet, I just cannot get behind that line of thought. Even if I believed in a God like that, I just simply cannot believe that He would take babies for some higher purpose. I do appreciate it must be comforting to someone. It just is not comforting to me.
I think it is more comforting for me to think the world is a random, chaotic place that is frequently cruel, though after Lucia died, I found that incredibly frightening. When I came home from the hospital, I had a conversation with Sam in which I said, “This is the worst thing that will ever happen to us.” And he looked at me pityingly and said, “Just because our daughter has died doesn’t mean we are immune from ever suffering again.” It made me shudder. I wanted to wrap everyone I loved in bubble wrap, and keep them on a low shelf.
“Your daughter is an angel now.”
“Little beautiful angel Lucia.”
"Now, she is an angel with her grandfather."
I tolerated it because I was reeling and numb. I have always called my daughter Beatrice an “angel” in this context, “Can you please pick up all the Bunny Grahams you just dumped onto the carpet, my angel?” My mother uses Angel interchangeably with Angie, and when I was at university and would come in with my laundry, my step father would often not look up from the television, but scream to my mother, “I smell an angel in the house.”
Still, there is something about referring to my Lucy as an angel that enrages me. I go literally from zero to Red Zone. Why? I guess it is because I want people to see her as a real baby that really died. I often think about this quote from Dr. Zhivago, “For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here in earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and call each thing by its right name” So, let’s do that, shall we? Let's call things by their proper name. She is not an angel. Let’s not imagine her flying around heaven playing a harp. Let’s not paint some beautiful picture of this situation. My daughter is dead. She was my baby, and now she is dead. She was six pounds, 18.5 inches. She gestated for 38 weeks. She kicked me. She flipped around. She played Mama and Lucy Poke Each Other. She had black hair, and blue eyes, and perfect lips. She didn’t die for any specific reason, but she is still dead. She wasn’t an angel. She is a baby. Sure, now she is a dead baby, but she was still a baby. My baby.
What I have gone through shakes the foundation of everything any of us want to believe in, and that we do believe in. When we are atheists, we think, "I wish I believed in God, maybe then I could make sense of this situation." When we are theists, we think "I wish I didn't believe in God because I cannot make sense of this situation." It shakes what we imagine our future to be, and how we see our past. I thought my time pregnant with Lucy was the happiest time of my life, and now, it seems like the most fucking ignorant.
When someone told me after losing Lucia that God had a plan for my baby, I just thought, "What kind of plan could God possibly have for my baby? Is he creating some kind of baby army? Is her looking for beautiful baby girls to pose for Hallmark cards?" And more than once, I thought, "If for some reason, this is God’s plan, then God is an asshole." These days, my internal dialogues are not too deep. I have my degree in Religion. It used to be my raison d'etre to discuss what people think God's plans are, and yet, I just cannot get behind that line of thought. Even if I believed in a God like that, I just simply cannot believe that He would take babies for some higher purpose. I do appreciate it must be comforting to someone. It just is not comforting to me.
I think it is more comforting for me to think the world is a random, chaotic place that is frequently cruel, though after Lucia died, I found that incredibly frightening. When I came home from the hospital, I had a conversation with Sam in which I said, “This is the worst thing that will ever happen to us.” And he looked at me pityingly and said, “Just because our daughter has died doesn’t mean we are immune from ever suffering again.” It made me shudder. I wanted to wrap everyone I loved in bubble wrap, and keep them on a low shelf.
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