There are Puritans among us

My journey along the way has been long. As a child I was open and vulnerable. Ready to believe whatever was told me, taking it at face value no matter what, finding security in the grown-ups around me. Exposed to religion in bits and pieces, I put together a strange and sweet story based on love, fear and an agrarian society.

My teen years found me romantically searching for truth among the stories of saints and those extreme religious, like cloistered nuns in hospitals. I wanted ritual and order, safety and absolute security.

After my marriage I was drawn back into the religion of my husband and my father's family. Episcopalians are transitional people. Not quite Catholic and definitely not Baptist. But looking back I think it was mostly belonging. The priest drew us in, gave us places in the church, work to do and he tapped into our neediest desires. That belonging lasted through my child raising years.

And then, just as my boys were starting to question and rebel, the people in our new, tiny, upstart Episcopal church began to bend towards the fanatical. Not the priest, he was and still is a person I love, respect, and admire, but many other upstanding members began to stand above and upon the others. There was a dark, grim, satisfaction in suffering that emanated from them, time honored descendants of a Puritanical society.

I did not belong.

In the end this opened the way for me to explore other religious and spiritual paths and, ultimately, a doctrine of my own based on science and being and meditation. This morning, walking across the acorn strewn grass, stepping over and around huge, long tree roots, feeling the breeze gently blowing through my hair, seeing people in the distance fishing, I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging, of being, of a love that transcends time and space and finds the puritans among us to be mere shadows in the light.

The compression of atoms that define this body in time seems of supreme importance to me, but this is barely a spark in the continuum of time. I am. I was. I will always be.

Whether I am aware, or how I am aware, is irrelevant to 99% of what is, but it is important to me now and I want to make the best of it.