Exploring Faith

About a week ago I was sitting at my desk, bored, looking for something to do. I looked to my left, where my book case stands right next to me. I caught sight of a book and pulled it out. The book was Night by Elie Wiesel. I examined it, remembering that the only reason I had this book was it was required reading for one of my early university courses. I remembered starting it, but I couldn’t remember if I had ever finished. Remembering that he had recently passed away I shrugged to myself and opened the book. I skimmed the preface on the new translation written by Wiesel himself, and then began to read. The first few chapters were familiar. I had read them before. As I got deeper into the novel, I was taken on a journey. I knew it was there, but did not expect to be so riveting, shocking, and heartbreaking as it was. I started reading at around 5pm and I did not put the book down until I turned the last page at 11:30pm. I am not a fast reader, and I have only ever been able to finish three books in one day. This was now a new one. I managed to avoid sobbing as I read as my partner was in the room with me and probably would have made me put the book down if I started bawling my eyes out.

The story in and of itself is a commanding one. It is a stark description of the holocaust from a young survivor and it is real. I don’t just mean that it is true, because it is, I mean you can feel the cold, you can smell the shit and blood and lye. You can see the faces, the bodies, and smoke. But it was not only this that kept me reading.  It was the talk of faith. Wiesel was, in the beginning, a devout Jew. He was interested in mysticism, and prayed regularly. Through the course of the book, he utterly and completely loses his faith.  The horrors he saw done to his family, his countrymen, and himself caused a devout teenager to become an intensely atheistic man.

I don’t know what it was that made me pick up Night. Maybe it was the fact that Wiesel had passed away, and I was curious. What ever the reason was, by the end, it got me thinking. It got me thinking about my own faith. I was raised Christian, as many white people in Canada are. My parents were part of a local United Church, and my grandmother was a devout Lutheran. When I was young I can remember hating getting up early on Sundays to go to church. I remember the nice clothes, and fidgeting in the pews of the church. I remember sometimes going to my grandma’s church and wondering why they were different.  But going to church never really got me thinking about faith. My grandma would read me stories from a children’s bible she had, but that was all they were, stories. I could name all of the sons of Jacob, because I knew the songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show. To me, there was no statement of faith or anything else.

I had always been interested in religions, all religions. I’m pretty sure that came from my dad. He had an interest too. He owned an English translation of both the Quaran and the Bagvad Gitah and some writings of a Buddhist monk…or the Dahli Lama…I never really did figure that out. We would talk about religion and belief for hours sometimes. At some point I decided I wanted to know more. So I started paying attention. It wasn’t until I joined the youth choir at the church my parents went to that I started to learn a bit more about faith. I sang the songs, and tried to listen to the words, but there was something that never seemed quite right. So I started to formulate my own opinions of God. It wasn’t as if it was always in my thoughts. But at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would pray, or just think about how I imagined God.

As I went through high school, I had some hard times, and once again, in the dark of night I would pray to God to help me through. During the hard times, I didn’t really change my thoughts about God, but in some ways, praying became my life line. For some reason I had a deep drive to believe in something. I found myself desperate for some way to manifest what I believed in. Some symbol to wear to show my faith is something outside myself. The only problem was, I felt weird wearing a cross. It never felt right. So for the time, I put my desire to wear my faith aside. Once I was out of high school and into university I came to this great realization, I could now legitimately learn about different religions and get credit for it! So I did. I studied old civilizations, I studied mythology, I took an intro to religious studies, and a course on great religious texts. One day in my second year, a young lady stopped me in the hall and asked if I had a moment to talk to her about my beliefs. It was a bit of a kismet, because just days before I had started thinking about my idea of god again. I had been taking a History of Christianity course (one of the worst courses ever but that is beside the point) and had been reading a lot of the bible, so God was on my mind. I said yes and we sat down and had a chat. It was interesting. I listen to her prepared talk about how Christ died for our sins etc. and then I told her my thoughts. Christ was not divine. A real man, yes, a prophet, maybe, but not divine. God takes on many forms, and there is no one way to believe. She smiled at me, tried briefly to convince me otherwise, and then I had to go to class. The conversation gave me an insight to myself that I had never really expected. I was not Christian. In spite of the fact that I had been raised as part of a church, and went to church fairly regularly because of the choir I sang in, at some point I had subconsciously decided not to put my faith in Christ. So now, I had a new question to ask; What did I really believe in?

I started looking for a new religion, because I still had that drive to believe in something I could show the world. Something I could wear a symbol of proudly. I now knew why it could never be a cross. I thought about Jeudaism, but put that aside (too many rules and no bacon!). I had a belief in God but the Jewish God didn’t quite fit me either.  Looked to Budhism, and while I felt a connection to some aspects, that wasn’t right. Then in my third year of university, I did an exchange to Denmark to learn about Old Norse Religion and Mythology at the University of Aarhus. I was going back to my deep Scandinavian roots, and I fell in love.  I fell in love with the country, with its history, and with its ancient religion. This was my connection. The old gods; Odin, Thor, Frigg, Tyr, Freyja, they were all calling to me. I started slowly, learning histories and myths before practices. I learned as much as I could and five years later, I got my symbol to display to the world, in the form of a tattoo of the rune Ansuz, the rune of the gods, and the poet’s rune, on my ankle and a pendant with both Ansuz and Eiwaz, the rune of the world tree Yggdrasil carved on them. I had found my faith, and a way to show it. Even though some of the beliefs of this religion still don’t mesh perfectly with my world view, the practices are self-directed enough that I can get around any inconsistencies fairly easily.

For some reason unknown to me, faith has always been an important part of my life. Of my group of friends, I am the only ‘theist’ among them. The only one who believes in a ‘god’ figure. It’s just who I am. They don’t judge, and I do my thing. Faith got me through some hard times in my life, even though I didn’t really know what it was I had faith in, I am now satisfied.

To anyone who actually made it through this whole post, I applaud you. Faith is not an easy thing to talk about, and I would be more than willing to answer questions, and respond to comments on the topic.

As always:

Cheers
Sláinte
Skol