So Much Has Changed...

...and yet so little!

For my conversion, I have to write an essay on my journey, basically just about why I want to become Jewish. Whether I write about this or not, I felt the need to tap into how I felt waaay back when, because memory is flawed and it has been such a gradual process that it's hard to remember exactly how I got to be where I am.

My first post on this blog is from January 2012, the month we first attended services at our current temple, so I had to go back to my old locked journal on LiveJournal to try to see where it started. I had a "spiritual journey" tag and it brought me to a January 2005 post with a meme about what I believed in. This is when I had been in New York for exactly four months and still had no real exposure to Judaism. But I did know that I didn't identify as Christian anymore. I still placed a lot of importance on Jesus and his teachings, but didn't believe he was God or the son of God.

Looking at this meme from that place in my life, eight years ago, at age 21, I am impressed with how much of what I believed then reflects what I still believe now, and without Judaism anywhere on my radar at the time! The fact that those beliefs fit so neatly into my current chosen religion is pretty amazing to me. The only thing I don't still believe in is reincarnation.  That's an idea I flirted around with for maybe a year or so, and sure it's possible, but it's not something I believe in. I'm also less sure about ghosts - but very unsure when it comes to that, and feel that it's not really relevant to me anyway so I don't sweat it.

So here it is:

do you believe in:

-heaven: yes. more of a different spiritual plane than a land of milk and honey though. because milk comes from bodies which I'm pretty sure won't be up there, and honey from bees and again.... And golden roads? As if. Gold is man's materialistic desire. Souls have no need for it.
-hell: no, I think it's a man-made idea to scare us into being good
-angels: not sure. I'd like to.
-devil: no. to me the concept of a devil is just what is bad and against what God wants, and people have to make that into something more concrete and give it a name so they can blame things on it
-God: absolutely
-Buddha: uh yeah I'm pretty sure he really existed
-aliens: I believe in the possibility of life on other planets. being the mere speck on a speck on a speck that we are in the universe, it'd be pretty self-centered to think we can be the only living things out there. But I don't think there is life in our solar system, and I don't think the life that is out there comes with almond shaped green eyes and the ability to transform itself into our kind and invade our planet without our knowledge. In other words, I believe in the possibility of other life but not in sci-fi's creations of it.
-ghosts: yes
-spirit (soul): yes
-soulmates: yes but I think there are many kinds so we can have more than one
-reincarnation: yes, there is too much for us to learn before we can be worthy of being in the presence of God and I don't see that we can get all that in one lifetime. so instead of hell I believe in more of a working up the ladder through reincarnation.
-love at first sight: no. You can't love someone you don't know. You can feel a connection, but that doesn't mean it's real. It's a nice storybook idea though.
-karma: I want to but I don't think I do.
-luck: yes
-yourself: yes

Another post is in response to the "Writer's Block" question of the day that LiveJournal would host, and this one was about beliefs in general. This was in September 2010, shortly before deciding I wanted to convert and way before I really knew what that would entail or what Jews are "supposed" to believe. You can see my skepticism and distrust of organized religion juxtaposed with my desire for connectedness and belonging. Here is some of what I posted:

I believe that we are here to make the world a better place than we found it, to show love and compassion, and to help every opportunity we get. I believe that attitude is everything, and that there is a lot to be said for finding meaning in suffering. I believe that hope leads to more positive outcomes than cynicism. I believe that home should be your sanctuary, and if it's not, you need to do some soul-searching about what should change...and it may turn out to be you.

As far as religious beliefs, I make a conscious choice to believe in God. I recognize that my spiritual beliefs may be only in my head and have no basis in reality, and I'm okay with that. Believing in God feels good. It gives me a sense of peace and safety. I use the word God because that's what I was given in my particular religious and cultural background, but God to me isn't a single masculine body. God is an energy and a beauty that can be found everywhere. God is a connectedness between all life forms. God is the universe.

I'm not really comfortable with the word "faith" because I hear it too often used as proof of how devout someone is, as an antidote to fear of the unknown. I'm okay with doubting, with feeling a little anxious sometimes that there may be nothing more to life than earth and living cells. I revel in the earth and in my physicality here, and that is unaffected by this unknown; but I do feel afraid of it all ending, of having no spiritual continuance, of losing someone and truly losing them in every sense except memory, with no spiritual connection to them. So I choose to believe in an afterlife, and in a general connectedness of people's energies even while alive. For me faith is making an active choice to believe in something even while you have a fear that it may not be so. It's not supposed to be easy.

I don't believe that any one organized religion has it right and that others have it wrong. This was part of my spiritual struggle in my early 20s that led me away from Christianity. I think that different cultures and societies interpret and reach God in a way that makes sense to them, within their context and even their time period, which is why I believe in the evolution of religions as the context and time period shifts, if a particular culture/society feels that evolution is needed. (See: Liberal Catholicism, Reform Judaism, etc.)

For me it's important to raise my kids with a basic foundation, however unstructured it may be, so that they can grasp the concept of God. As they grow up, they are free to evolve into whatever spirituality suits them, or free themselves of it entirely. But as Nicole can attest to (she was raised by a Catholic father and a Jewish mother and is agnostic because they passed nothing on to her), it's much easier to decide later in life not to believe in something than it is to try to start believing in something you were never told about.