Literary Discussions

I was raised with absolutely no religion, never brought to church even once. When I was 13 I went alone into a nearby forest and came to a beautiful little pond and I knelt and prayed "If there is actually a God then I want to become aware."  Well, nothing happened immediately. But I did wind up going to St. John's Annapolis.  In the Sophomore years, listening to hour upon hour of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion which I loved, I decided to build a simple floor to ceiling wooden crucifix (it was around Halloween) and I purchased a cardboard skeleton and mounted it on the cross.  People rather freaked out when the saw it, especially the more religious Protestants. Then my girl friend took me to my very first Church service (Roman Catholic). I carefully watched her every move and tried to follow along, standing, sitting, crossing. I noticed that at one point she make a fist and lightly pressed it to her solar plexus. Afterwards I asked her what that was and she said it was for the martyrs who beat their chests. At a certain point, I heard the tinkling of little bells and I actually thought I was having an otherworldy experience. She laughed at me and said the altar boy was ringing the bells. As I left the Church I thought "well, if any of this has any meaning then THIS mass is what we should be doing as more essential than reading Aquinas's Summa.  Forty years later I mentioned the chest beating thing to my ex girl friend and , swear to God, she has NO MEMORY of ever doing that.  Anyway, after college, I taught myself to get by speaking Modern Greek, and then I became Greek Orthodox and learned to get by in Church Slavonic, and I stayed with that for 20 years but became disillusioned with myself mostly that I could not really be what I was expected to be. So I spent some time as nothing, and then I spent several years with Korean Zen, and a year with Hare Krishna, and several years in a Guyanese Hindu Mandir. Then, suddenly I felt no need for organized religion. My mind seemed like my own church and each day I would write things that are like sermons. I came to see thought itself as non different from prayer. I totally accept evolution and big bang and quantum and relativity and genome and all such things.  I do not hate or mind the militant atheists. I think I understand how they feel. When I am with Muslims I put on my Muslim hat. When I am with Sikhs I put on my Sikh hat. When I am with Jews I put on my yarmulke. I actually went into a Lubavitcher Mitzvah Tank (truck) once. The Jew asked me if I were Jewish. I lied and said "I am not certain; I only know that my mother was Jewish and her mother was Jewish" His eyes lit up and he said "You are a Yid" so he brought me in and had me wrap the Tefellin and say the Shema (which is what I wanted to do and why I lied.)