Views
A Renewed Faith
"Religion, Sexual Orientation and the Law"
A Renewed Faith
by Jason Whipple
 |
Since September 11, I have been in an intense state of self-analysis to help me understand the enormity and atrocity of that now infamous day. I had a terrible weight throughout my body while trying to articulate how I have been changed. It is only the beginning though, because it has tested a faith I never knew I had.
As a child, I had always heard the word secular, but I was never able to fully comprehend its complexities because my thought process was not yet able to grasp such abstract words. All of this uncertainty about belief was uncomfortable and difficult. In personally dark times, I would stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, asking and wondering if there was someone else inside me.
I was never forced to answer to a higher being. I asked my mother once what religion I was. She told me that I was never baptized because she and my father wanted me to find my own beliefs. Because my personal possibilities have never been permanent, my imagination was ‘the other,’ free from the linear thought that numbs one’s intuitions.
I have been given the ability to question and continually revise myself. Everything is inside of me. So, with no God but myself to turn to, how do I make sense of September 11?
In those seconds while watching those two towers collapse on the television in front of me, that fantasy life I lived as a child ended suddenly. How could this happen here, in the United States? I never felt the fear that was intended by the attack. Instead, I felt the anger of those individuals who felt the need to express themselves in this tragic way. The sadness within me was not my own, but the sadness of the families who had abruptly lost loved ones.
I cannot change what happened, but I can continue to revise how this event will affect me throughout my life. In every second, my past, present, and future is constantly changing. We will be different individuals in our future’s past.
I have not traveled since last month, choosing to stay here in Vermont. My only real connection to the outside world has been through the sensational media, through the constant stream of e-mails informing me about the latest news, and the row of national and local newspaper headlines at the local bookstore.
War has begun. Violence has begat violence. We continue to punish each other because we are afraid of the otherness inside each one of us. Let us look deeper within ourselves to make small changes. Let us put that otherness in our own quivering middles. All the actions we choose to make today will create a ripple effect into the previous and coming centuries.
I believe that the impossible is possible. Uncertainty is my only certainty.
I have faith in change.