Great song by REM... interesting concept. Cause you can't lose your religion. I'm a non practicing catholic with Buddhist tendencies and I know my religion is still with me & yours is with you. If you ever had one... It's there under your collar between the creases of your shirt but somehow there even when you stop believing. Why? Because you once believed in it. Like love. It's there once it's there. But... You can lose your faith. That's the confusion. People lose their faith in the way things should be instead of accepting them as they are. Now, I think I've lost my faith in a lot of things but humanity, God & the universe aren't any of them. People change, circumstances evolve into good or bad and it's our faith in what happens next that determines how far we will go. Mistakes are made & things change but no one deserves a hardship more than any other person. No matter their misstep against you. I think the universe directs people exactly down the path they need to go, nearer and farther from us at times. Even resistance from the flow of things will pull us in the direction we need to go... Including the wrong one.
Sometimes I think we have to keep faith, trust ourselves and the universe.
Here's an 400 about losing faith.
Enjoy!
Kisses, m.
Faith. Kneeling in the chapel. Pinned behind the steering wheel of my BMW. My little sister’s wedding. Standing over my fiancé’s grave. Visiting a holy shrine in Israel. Still birth of my first child. When did it happen? There are a thousand places it could have happened, but there is only one place it did. December 22, the south bank of the river is illuminated by the evening sun. Bare cheeks exposed to the cold chill in the air. God wasn’t watching. Couldn’t have been. Abandoned someone that day, even if it wasn’t me. The river was fuller and faster than the previous winter. Little chunks of snow passed through the rapids like tiny white vessels falling over the edge of the world. Spellbound by the spinning and drifting white, I was never prepared for what came into focus. Small shriveled up pink beneath the surface, visible through the clear water. Almost floating along, a ball connected to a thin pink chord. An unnaturally miniscule and odd misshapen ball with ten little fingers attached to thin tentacles. The current spinning and pulling the bundle along with minimal struggle. Pink dancing in a circle three feet away at the bottom of the icy river bed. Tiny dancer. Baby boy. Submerged into the chilled water of the winter river. Baptism. Soul purified and released into the world. Downstream. Away from life. Away from an unwanted home. Away from the unwed teenage mother. A cruel punishment for something innocent. Where was God when his mother put him into the water? His mother, the unknown dysfunctional Mary that misunderstood his premature birth, shoves the tiny carcass into the frozen waters of the river in chilly December before resuming life. Delicately the mysterious offspring came to rest in a pool of shallow water along the bank. Calmly I walked towards the lifeless child. Without thinking I removed my scarf and bent down to pick up the small body. As I wrapped the oddly shaped body inside my scarf, I realize that there was never hope for this unwanted creature. Senseless. Faith can’t explain one life over another. There is no master plan. God abandoned him long before. Left him, along with his mother among the flock of unprotected. My unwavering faith now hanging by a thread of hope. A hope that has been dashed away by the absence of life that rest in my hands.
