This I Believe

Mabel Pool

27 November 2005

When I agreed to give this talk on What I Believe, I thought I would have little to say. How could I stretch it into 20minutes? I ended up, cutting pages! I learned, just last week, that there is a five minute program on OPB, the radio station I listen to most of the time, called, This I Believe. I listened to it for the first time last Monday and again on Thanksgiving morning. I learned that the program, This I Believe is applied to many subjects, not religion alone.

 There is a short article titled, This I Believe in the latest issue of our own UU World magazine. I recommend you read it. Anyway, to begin, I was given four questions to answer and talk from. Thank goodness!

Here was the first question I was given: If there is a God, what do you need to know about that? Golly!  That’s a good one! Probably more interesting than the other questions.  To begin with, It would be good to know the whole nature of God, wouldn’t it?

Although it is not really necessary, I am curious about the physical aspects of God. Does God have a gender? Is God a he or a she or an it or even some plant or animal form or a combination of animal and human as believed in some societies. Does God have a helper?

Does God have human needs? I mean, does God sleep, eat, take walks? Is there really a home area for God? Sounds silly to us  UUs, but early peoples and some current societies, believe God  or gods and godesses have these physical needs and attributes.

I never heard about God that I can remember, until I was about eight years old and we had moved like others in the Grapes of Wrath, from  a failing farm  in Minnesota to Washington State. After a year in the Puyallup valley, we found our niche on the hill north of town in Mt. View, a country community. Here there was a church within walking distance from the farm homes my folks rented. The final home, they bought. From the very first, we became a part of the Norwegian Lutheran church community.

When I was in Sunday School there, our Sunday School papers pictured God as a man with a strong face, steely eye and long white beard. I didn’t question this likeness. I guess it was the Michaelangelo version I remember, because God seemed to be reaching out from his robe, floating among the heavenly atmosphere. I didn’t dwell on the theology. When I was older, I listened to Rev. Tollefson’s sermons from the choir box. I’m afraid a good share of his messages sort of washed over me. I spent more time counting the windowpanes or thinking about the lemon pie Mom made for Sunday dinner. I assumed others sitting in the pews were thinking about other things also. My folks never discussed the sermon so I figured most people attended out of a Sunday habit…something one just did in those days.

Years later, When I was in college and began to co-mingle with people of varying faiths, especially my science minded best friend and roommate, I was exposed to different views regarding God, Jesus and theology.  I visited the Methodist students Sunday gatherings once and found more open and free discussion there than in our Lutheran meetings. Also, they held dances, but we had to keep secret the dancing we did.

I met one or two young people in those college years who actually said they were atheists! I didn’t think they had given enough thought about God. I hadn’t even heard the word, agnostic.

I remember when Rev. Tollefson lead us, the children’s choir, from house to house to sing Christmas carols to the elderly infirm and bed-ridden. We trembled at the knowledge that the next house on our route would be the Larsens, the home of an atheist. Mrs. Larsen was a Christian and the reason for our visit. I was under the impression that Mr. Larson would be mean and growl at us or chase us off the porch. He probably wouldn’t have a bowl of candy ready for us either.

However, when he opened the door, I saw a smiling man with blue eyes and a long white beard. It was very rare to see a bearded man in those Depression years. He was the only bearded man in our country community. I did not believe he was God, but I learned from his gentle manner that he was not a cohort of Satan either.

You see, we didn’t know about religious diversity in those long ago days. Our little church’s diversity consisted of three Swedish families among the host of Norwegians. Compared to the present, with travel, TV and computers, my early years and education were confined to a small region. Before WWII, people stuck pretty close to home.

In order to share with you what I believe now about a God, I had to start many years back when I was without God material. It was a rather long, but not a painful journey to get to where my belief is now,

Here is my question:  If there is a god, where did he/she/ it come from?  I need to know that too. Who created God? Who created the creator of God? Who created that creator and so on. My mind cannot fathom eternity or a beginning of the solar system or anything out there beyond the universe.

Did God begin when there was only one dust particle in the atmosphere?

<>If there is a God, I need to know what power he/she /it has. Does God have charge of the weather, the spinning of the earth? The turning of my red maple leaves I love so much?  Does he trigger Mt. St, Helens to erupt? Did God slide the continents around? Does God tell my daffodils when to open their buds? Does God send Katrina?  How specific is God’s power and knowledge?

Years ago, one of my relatives, still a good Lutheran, said that it was “God’s will” when a little neighbor girl was run down and killed by a drunken driver. I was aghast! “Why would a God of love do such a thing?” My relative answered, “God has reasons for what he does. And do you know, Mabel, the family of the little girl forgave the drunken driver and didn’t hold it against him!”

Her god sounds very capricious to me. I don’t want a selective god who plays favorites…who picks and chooses.

In my early years, I was under the impression that God took care of only planet Earth, especially where Jesus had lived…Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Gallilee. I figured he was aware of our little Mt. View Lutheran Church and the surrounding countryside and knew us pretty well. I imagined he could hear us repeat the Apostles Creed every Sunday: I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary, and so on…    to the Forgiveness of sins; the Resurrection of the body; and the Life everlasting. Amen

It has been close to 60 years since I stood and repeated those words, and I still revere the feeling of belongingness I had there growing up, participating in the Lutheran ritual. I used to wonder how God felt when my mother skipped the words, and Resurrection of the body. She said she couldn’t believe there was room for all our bodies to be up in heaven. However, now, years later, I think it is Jesus’s body that is meant in the Apostles Creed. I I probably thought Mom was right. Mom was a skeptic, having spent time in Congregational churches in New England as a young woman. However she did share her thoughts  with me on scripture that was read in her Ladies Aid.

My father, a church go-er and a good person, although having been confirmed when a boy in a Lutheran church in Minnesota, never said anything about his beliefs nor did I ever hear him utter the name, God in any context. I think he assumed we believed what the minister said about God, the Holy Ghost and Jesus and since we went to church, participated in all the church activities that this was all that was necessary.

I used to wonder how detailed God’s knowledge about us was.

A lovely song, sung at my brother’s memorial service 5 years ago was, “His Eye is on the Sparrow and I know he’s watching me or cares for me”

I loved a song we sang in our Mt. View Lutheran Girls Chorus years ago  that goes, “Be still and know that I am God, whatever may befall. I hold earth’s waters in my hand…enote the sparrows fall.” I liked the comfort of God’s compassion for a small bird. I enjoy the chickadees the juncos, the finches and the flicker that visit my bird feeder together every day.  Birds and animals show a sense of community and caring just as we humans do. I want to read you a bit from a bird booklet about this. Because of my love of nature, my favorite UU principle is the last one, the 7^th. We covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are apart.

I enjoy imagery in songs, poetry and prose. There are many beautiful images in the Bible, especially the Psalms. I can see the green pastures by a running brook in the Twenty Third Psalm. I have a favorite brook. It is on the return trail from Ramona Falls on Mt. Hood. Also in the psalm I could see the table set before me and the cup that runneth over. I prefer this soft side of  God.

As a young newly married couple, my husband and I visited the Unitarian Church in the University District of Seattle. This was my baptism into a fresh new idea of God. I was thrilled to hear from Rev. Trueblood about God’s more gentle personality. After attending that church a year, we moved to Vancouver to start teaching, my belief about God shifted. By, the way, my husband was already a skeptic, well on his way to Humanism and Atheism.

It was a few years later when we became part of the fledging Michael Servetus Unitarian Fellowship across the river that I learned that a few men in 325AD, at the Council of Nicea came up with the idea of the Trinity…

Learning that fact changed my belief about the Trinity mighty fast!

I was easily persuaded to believe that Jesus was human and a very special one. As a youth, I had seen Jesus every Sunday from where I sat in the choir box in our little church on Mt. View. The large picture above the alter is one of Jesus sitting alone in the garden of Gesthemane. It was still there a few years ago when I attended the Mt. View Lutheran Church 100^th Anniversay.

I preferred the picture of Jesus as a shepherd holding a lamb that I had seen on a Sunday School paper. I liked the stories too, of Jesus’s miracles..(the miracle of the loaves and fishes.) joke.

I think there are numbers of Jesuses…such as The Lone Ranger, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Sister Tereasa and the Dali Lama. They are of diverse faiths. Only the Lone Ranger is a legend who represented other good men.

Although I changed my theology from that of Mt. View Lutheran Church. I am glad for having been a part of that beloved community and  grateful to be counted in its history.

 Now I should mention the Holy Ghost; I used to be confused, early on, by the Trinity. I understood about God, the big power, and Jesus, his sort of emissary, but I didn’t understand what the Holy Ghost was. It seemed to be the name used in place of the word, God. When I learned that Ghost could mean Spirit, then it seemed to be God’s essence that  through  everything and everybody after the creation of the world.

It seemed like the Holy Ghost was a sort of distant relative I had never seen. Not too many years ago, the Holy Ghost was like the oyster fork I found in my mother-in law’s tableware she handed down to me. If I placed it on the table it would have no real function, since I never serve oysters.

But, I do believe in a special spirit, like in Spirit of Life that we sing of, after we light the chalice. This is the God I choose to believe in.

I believe like many UUs, that a sacred thread of kindness and caring, and love connects us all around the world. With our new discoveries in animal behavior and in some plant behaviors, I tend to believe and want to believe that humans, animals, plants…organic matter have a little or a lot of connection. This hinges on Native American ideas. Dolphins, orcas, birds, primates, and our own pets are giving signs I translate into a sacred connection.

.To address the Spirit of Life in a prayer seems comfortable to me. I visualize the Spirit as a soft, rosy-colored thread running out across the world when we sing those words. I find prayer good therapy. When I am in need of courage or extra energy or patience or worried about someone’s safety, even my own, I reach out to that rosy-colored thread for strength.

Even though we have put the old God on the shelf, I imagine, many of us pray, now and then,  to the old God who controls everything and everybody. When we are truly desperate, we call on all the Gods there are to save that loved one. Yes sir, just in case…we cover all bases, hoping our plea will be heard by at least one of the gods. Some people even make promises to God if their wish is granted.

I like giving prayers of appreciation and thankfulness like we gave last Thursday on Thanksgiving Day. I cried, “Thank you, thank you!” when I opened the curtain the other morning to a heavenly sunrise of pink-orange and firey red with turquoise furling like chiffon across the sky’s canvas. Don’t you express that same joy when you see a rainbow?

Now, to Another question I was given:  What is the purpose of our lives? If there is a God who gave us purpose, I don’t know what that purpose is.  Is it to maintain earth’s properties? To entertain or keep God company? When I was fourteen along with six others, I attended Confirmation class. Every Thursday after school we got off the school bus at the church for our weekly indoctrination. We were to memorize answers to religious questions from our confirmation textbook. I was a good memorizer, but to this day, I remember only part of one question and answer. The question went like this: Why did God put you on earth? The answer was, “so that we will something, something, “and to glorify God” Mom didn’t like that answer too much. She would go. “humph” and mutter something about “bowing and scraping all your life.”

What do I think my purpose is here? I think we create our purpose. I believe as long as we are here, we should try to keep our planet healthy for those who come after us. I believe by nourishing each other, caring for each other, helping each other to enjoy and live meaningful lives is a purpose I can believe in.

Another of the four questions is: What happens after we die and what does that mean for our life?  I believe that after I die, I am returned in a new form to nourish the earth. I believe the only heaven I will know is here and what I make it. But, I do believe that I will live on in the minds and memories of others, just as I hold dear the memories of my friends and loved ones who have died. I hope that my contributions will be of help and not of hindrance to anyone. I hope that my appreciation, and love for all nature will be carried on through my children. This is good enough for me.

The final question is:  What is the purpose of church?

I believe church offers the validity to our common belief system. Because we are social beings, we need companionship, support and love from other people. Church provides this. One is welcome to enter any church and sit without need of an invitation or door fee. There are no pre-requisites to participation, although membership in a church denomination gives added privileges. I think our Wy’east church is the same as in Robert Frost’s poem about home, “Its where they call you by your first name and they have to let you in.”  What would it feel like if you had to knock on the church door or carry an invitation to be welcomed?  I must admit, sometimes our entrance door is stuck and one has to rattle it to gain admittance. Aren’t we lucky the door is glass, so we can see if someone is running down the aisle to help!

Churches perpetuate their doctrines. We Uus do not have a doctrine, but we hopee and  our children will look to out Seven UU Principles as a guide to a good and useful life. There is strength in numbers, thus churches are able to promote and carry out social action projects.

Our church, as well as many others, is our refuge, where we are safe to speak our own truths, ask questions, seek answers and share our wonderings.

Because. one of our UU principles encourages individual spiritual growth. we are constantly weighing our beliefs and adding new thoughts and theories to our repertoire from other world religions. I have been reading A Path and a Practice, Bill Martin’s book using Lao-tzu Te Ching as a guide to an awakened Spiritual Life.

 In the spirit of Tao we are all equal. The essence of life is always present. Compassion is its very nature. It is there to find, not to seek. This is how I see our Spirit of Life—again, as a loving, compassionate rosy-colored thread weaving in and out and around  across the world and  here in this room as we sing together and listen togther and in a few minutes join in a circle together. This is the energy that binds us together. This I believe.