Last night my mother asked me, "what do you mean by 'religion'?"
The word sounded sour and pinched in her mouth, constricted from too many years of religion being a cudgel in the world she occupied, the same world I grew up in, although I learned a different story.
I had to explain to her that she raised a deeply religious child, and then explain what that meant, even though she taught Sunday School while my father served on the building committee, she drove me to church so someone else could drive me to New Jersey for leadership conferences, and to the airport for the national convention, four years in a row. She also drove me to church camp and to youth group and to Sunday services long after she gave up on the chaos of people.
We are also the chaos of people.
My father is the one who swears he is an atheist but also made sure that when my Ganesh idol broke I took it to the ocean to return it to the waters.
We hold--we held--many truths. We still do, of course.
But what did I mean by religion, the religion my mother raised me in, the religion her father converted to in 1937 in a dusty church in Sacramento just a few scant years before she was born?
I explained how recycling is a religious act, how being kind when I'm feeling impatient is a religious act, how the curriculum in question, our lifespan sexuality education curriculum*, carries religious beliefs through the whole thing, about how queer folks belong, about how sexuality is beautiful and sacred, about how important consent is, and bodily autonomy, and communication, and how teaching that is teaching religion, and she was mollified.
She didn't know what I meant by religion, even though I am a minister in the faith in which she raised me, and I was shocked.
I don't say it explicitly much, but almost every decision I make is a faith-based decision. I think .and. pray, and they are usually different, over every major choice I make and most minor ones. Living religiously: kindly, generously, truthfully--the theme of my ordination was *speak the truth in love* --is the only way I can imagine living. If I am losing compassion or my deep connection to all the world, I am in need of religious re-inspiration, I need to reconnect so I can continue to be faithful with every fiber of my being.
Notice I didn't say theist. I am theist now but I lived and believed this way when I was atheist and agnostic. No God required, just an inner compass that draws me again and again to the true north of living into both sovereignty and interdependence in balance. The one and the many. Living as part of a beautiful and sacred whole.
The other day I started journaling again, for the first time in a long time, and I wrote that I was feeling oddly detached and that while it was freeing in some ways, I didn't like it.
Compassion fatigue and burnout are real things, but they separate us from one another, which makes the fatigue worse. They are like a a virus that alters our brains to do more to spread itself, and less to protect ourselves and heal the damage.
I got up from the page and made sure I tended my altar, spent some time connecting with the world, took an extra hour to breathe.
Sometimes my contemplative time is absorbing from people, and sometimes it is reflecting within myself, and sometimes it's prayer and sometimes it's hands in the dirt. Often it is tree time or ocean time .as. prayer.
What did the wind say today? What did the stars?
What do people seem to need, especially if I talked with a lot of them?
What did the bird friends tell me? (When the sparrow died and the finches left, the scrub jays seem to have moved in. I want to make friends but I dare not, because we harbor a cat with quick reflexes and bird flu is on the hunt. So I listen from afar.)
I have not been with my trees lately. They are ill and it grieves me that I cannot seem to more than help them limp along. I need a better sprayer and a schedule, and soon the leaves will fall. They probably need more than a 20" container, too. They grew in good faith and now they need more. It is time for me to do my part of our agreement about growing and trying and effort.
You may be able to hear that I am struggling with the sickness and death part of relationship at the moment.
My faith gives me fewer tools than I'd wish for the complicated things. We got a little too logical for a minute there in the 19th century and again in the 1950s and we each time have to take stock and recover as a movement, by which I mean the thing that our hearts do together every day regardless, until they don't, one day, and still the world goes on.
Cows would fart methane without us, after all, but there would probably be far fewer of them, or different, but then there would be fewer of us, and would that be such a bad thing, but each of us individually is still sacred and precious, me and the cows that feed me and you and that guy I really don't like and the stranger who scared the cat, all of them. All of us.
What *doesn't* love the world, after all? This is faith to me, this is religion, this is love.
All the rest is commentary.
*The curriculum is called Our Whole Lives and it can be life changing. Unitarian Universalist and UCC congregations both can offer it.