a few months ago i was at my sisters house and noticed one of my dad’s letters lying around. my dad died when i was 13 so these letters are very valuable to me and the family. he wrote a lot. he wrote a lot of people. some of these people thoughtfully sent the letters back to my mom after he died. these contain the most revealing insights about our family and my childhood.
Joe is 12 now and he’s doing great. Christian merit award two semesters in a row, honor roll all year. He is very introspective. We are thinking priesthood. He already has that “far off look”. HA! One of his teachers even approached him about it!
now that seems ridiculous at first, but i think artists do essentially the same thing as “men of the cloth”–they attempt to communicate unseen truths. it is difficult to say anything about the dead without being trite. saying something like “he’s in a better place” the other death clichés have always seemed especially empty to me. it is like taking the emptiness of a cliché and magnifying it an infinite number of times. as profound and spiritual as death is, that is as empty as death clichés are or were to me when i was younger. unfortunately there are some subject that language cannot adequately address.
i went through a long period of atheism in high school and immediately after. i wrote an album about it called “SWIM”. older people who i respected kept telling me something would “knock me off my horse” and i would eventually come back to the light of god. nothing ever did. at least, not in the same way that i first experienced loss of faith–that blow from dad’s death. but over the years religion has come seeping back into my life, albeit very slowly. for a while when i felt that longing for eternity creep up in me i really didn’t do much except write about it and try and have beautiful experiences, sort of as a spirituality substitute. then a few years ago i took a comparative religion class at a local college just for fun and my perspective started changing a little. enter buddhism. learning about eastern religions was a total mind-fuck for me. in the same way that learning about philosophy only reinforced my rational atheism, reading about eastern religions really opened my mind to the possibility of spirituality again. christianity has a lot of problems for the thinker, for the artist. it’s really hard to be a christian as you get older and learn more about the universe around you. built into the religion are a lot of mechanisms for tranquilizing your intellect and silencing your questions without providing real answers. but in buddhism i found something that appealed both to my sense of wonder and my rational mind. this is a spiritual tradition that wants you to doubt it (a lot of buddhists prefer “spiritual tradition” to “religion”). the idea that a spiritual tradition could be practical and pragmatic–built on direct personal experience rather than clinging to beliefs and judgments–was a completely new idea for me. not that i am going to shave my head and live on a mountain. well maybe someday. but for now learning about these things is just the best way to keep my mind open. i do believe in the infinite, i just can’t exactly articulate why and how yet.
