Questions of Faith
Roxanne has posed some interesting questions on religion, for those of us who lean leftwards. In keeping with some previous posts, I thought I’d post my answers here.
Her questions are:
- Are you a religioius/ spiritual person?
- Were you born into your faith or did you come to it later?
- Was there a particular event in your life that changed your religious/ spiritual philososphy?
- Do you share your faith with others?
My own answers follow:
Are you a religioius/ spiritual person?
It’s interesting that I initially read that question as “Are you a religious person or a spiritual person?” I guess that’s because I tend to think of them two as being very different things. There are religious people who adhere strictly to the tenets of their faith as they interpret them, who are necessarily spiritual. And there are people who are spiritual in the sense that they are deeply concerned with matters of the soul, but don’t belong to an organized religion or adhere strictly to the principls of a particular faith.
I think I fall somewhere between the two, in that I consider myself a Buddhist, but I don’t belong to any formalized sangha or practice group. I also don’t entirely consider Buddhism as I practice it to be a relgious faith so much as a life philosphy and system of ethics. There are those who practice it as a religion, but I don’t approach it that way myself. I think the reason I approached that practice is because my experience growing up in a religious family—in the sense described above—left me with an abiding wariness of organized religion and religious organizations in general.
Were you born into your faith or did you come to it later?
I came to Buddhism later in life, as I detailed in a previous post. I was born and raised in a very religous, Baptist family. In fact, there are a number of Baptist ministers in my family tree. Growing up, I remember that practicing the Christian faith was pretty much compulsory in our house. As long as you lived under my parents’ roof, you were going to church—preferably theirs, but another church was OK so long as it was Christian. If you wanted to practice another faith, or held other beliefs, you were better off keeping it to yourself.
Was there a particular event in your life that changed your religious/ spiritual philososphy?
It was a series, definitely, but I think the jumping off point for me was my coming out, which happened at a very young age at the time (I was 12, but kids are coming out younger now than they were in the 80s). I could never reconcile to one another my orientation and the faith in which I was raised.
It didn’t take long to figure out that my orientation wasn’t going to change, and that’s what led me down a course of exploring other faiths and belief systems, from other denominations of Christianity, to elements of new-ageism and paganism. I ended up cobbling together my own system of belief that didn’t totally gel until I started studying Buddhism and realized that the basics of it lined up with what I already believed anyway.
Do you share your faith with others?
I write about it here occasionally, it’s in the tagline for this blog, and I’ll talk about it if someone asks, but for the most part I don’t talk about it much specifically. It’s really a much more personal thing for me than it is public, though it’s something that touches or informs much of what I do.