Parinama

Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures….as in the natural order of things, so too faith is folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss Unfortunately, faith became a matter of believing impossible or strange things (which was supposed to please God, somehow), instead of an entranceway into a very different way of knowing altogether. Richard Rohr, Naked Now I am wondering, “What is it that I have faith in?”  The root of the word faith is “to trust or promise” or later in its evolution “the assent of the mind to the truth of a statement for which there is incomplete evidence.”   While “belief” and “faith” are often used interchangeably, to me they point to very different philosophies of things.  The root of belief, “confidence reposed in a pe...

Yesterday, I visited the camp I went to as a child.  It is a holy place for me. A place where I encountered God’s presence as a child.  Not that I would have called it God back then or even have known what presence was.  All I knew was the presence of the long deep lake, the cry of the loons at dusk, children’s singing and playing. I knew presence from the tall pines, the sweet ferns, the soft sanded paths that wound through camp. I found presence in horse trots, ice-cream, naked night swims, and laughter when we should have been sleeping.  And the presences in the solitude during the quiet resting part of the day when I heard the water lapping on the stone shore, birdsong, creaks of old cabin floorboards. This was all made available to us through the nurturing and constant rhythm of each day, care of counselors who taught us how to care for each other, the radical belonging of everyone.  The safe container to be your silly, disheveled, made-up, fancy, not all t...

Amelia is my missing grandmother. She was already gone when I was born, dying when my father was only 12 years old from a wasting disease.  They didn’t know to call in Anorexia then but at some point, Amelia just stopped eating enough.  I recall only one picture of her in my house growing up.  Sepia toned and fraying at the edges, it is a small portrait taken when she got engaged to Louie.  She wears a beret, slightly off kilter, her short brown hair cropped short around her ears.  She couldn’t have been more than 20 and was already pregnant with Mikey when this picture was taken. Maybe it was because of her pregnancy that she was getting married to Louie.  What other choice would she have had?  Not something my father or Louie ever spoke of.  But the story seeped down to me a through the waters of extended family gossip.   My father spoke very little about his mother.  What he did say was about how sad and hard her life had been. H...