Friday, June 19, 2009

god and all that other nonsense

A long time ago (approximately seven years now and before), I believed in a god, though my faith had been waning ever since the age of about seventeen. It's safe to say that most of my conscious memories take place during a time when I attended church: I went to a private Christian school beginning in kindergarten. Religion was a given; it wasn't a choice.
When I was nineteen, I took a religious studies class during my second year of college. One of the assignments was to write an essay about our own religious backgrounds and our beliefs. I wrote at length about my Christian ideals (although when I think about it now, the words were most certainly half-hearted, a sort of automatic writing). One of the subjects I wrote about was miracles. I confessed that I had never witnessed anything akin to a biblical miracle: walking on water or turning water to wine or healing leprosy or raising the dead. What I wrote was that I needed no supernatural wonders; the people in my life were miracles to me, a proof of a god's benevolence.
Seven years later, and here I sit writing it again: people are miracles to me.
Of course at present there's no supernatural link in my mind. What I call a miracle now is simply a beautiful accident. A miracle is something that I don't fully understand. While I can say that I think I have pretty decent understanding of humans, our kind continues to baffle me in many ways. But what I've witnessed over the course of the last nine months is the amazing capacity for us to love one another.
I could sit and explain love as a mix of seratonin and oxytocin and vasopressen and dopamine and so on. It may be, but that does not change how wonderful it feels to love and to be loved. I am amazed day to day at how lucky I am: to have loved and to have been loved like I have. Evolutionary adaptation or not, I love love.
To those of you I forget to tell enough: I love you.
I love you now. I will love you always.
Amen.

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