In The Beginning...

So just to re-cap; there's now a new-and-improved pink project 2.0. I decided since Ivy and I were besties already, and since the spirituality section of my “wheel of my life,” had gotten the lowest score, (3/10), it obviously needed the most attention. And so it was time to go on a journey to discover (re-discover?) my spirituality.

I say “re-discover,” because I wasn’t always this creature devoid of all beliefs who stands before you now. (Well, to be honest, I kinda was.) Cuz I definitely took on the role of whistleblower as a precocious elementary school kid, sitting in the corner of my Sunday School (CCD) class, watching my teacher with narrowed, suspicious eyes. Whenever my hand started to slowly raise from the corner, you could practically hear the teacher’s eyes start to roll backwards.

“What is it THIS TIME, Colleen?”

“I’ve got some issues with the concept of hell. You said God is omnipotent, so He knows everything that’s going to happen in advance, right? So He already knows if I’m going to end up in heaven or hell. Well, if He loves his children SO MUCH, then why would He even create those of us who He knows are going to end up burning in hell? Why even create Lucifer, if He already knew how the story would end?”

This is the point when the teacher mumbles something about free will and sends me out into the hallway to think about my behavior for the rest of class.

And don't even get me started on the questions about "why a He, and not a She?" So clearly, I had my gripes with Catholicism from the beginning. It just didn’t add up for me. It also seemed chockablock full of fair weather fans. You show up for an hour on Sun, (some people just showed up on Easter and Christmas.) Maybe you pray before meals if you remembered to, and conveniently, you get ALL of your sins wiped clean just for confessing one. Plus, the ritual aspect was super creepy- all of that kneeling, standing, sitting, and chanting memorized prayers in unison- (and this doesn't even include the actual eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ!) Minus the cannibalism, it’s the basic bitch of religions. My experience of it was very traditional, hands-off, bland, and blah- not for me. And so I didn’t get confirmed. 

As a tragic aside; I probably only got away with this because my father died two days before my sixteenth birthday. He was the Catholic patriarch of our family. My mother had come from a non-religious background, and converted when she married him, so without him there, everyone was just too busy grieving to notice that I had slipped through the cracks. There was the occasional guilt-ridden comment delivered to me about it- (as only a Catholic mother, properly schooled in the art of guilt, can so painfully deliver.)

“Sometimes I think about what your father would say if he knew you never got confirmed, and I feel like such a failure. But you didn’t really want to get confirmed, did you?” (No Mom, I was the one who failed at Catholicism, not you.)

My high school boyfriend and I used to say, “religion is for the weak!” But even back then, I didn’t consider myself a full-blown atheist- yet. I would call myself agnostic; spiritual, but not religious. I was a young performing artist from Alaska, after all. And if that’s not a recipe for some far-out hippie shit, I don’t know what is. Being Alaskan inherently comes with a little witch-i-ness, an automatic worship of nature, trees, and the like. (Also, I had a deck of tarot cards, and I wasn’t afraid to use it.)

As an artist, I was a big believer in “energy” (whatever that means.) If I could describe my beliefs back then- they were probably that we were all just cosmic blobs of energy that got recycled back into the universe when we died. We were all One. I believed in the Universe. (Not too far from what I’m coming back around to believing now, actually, hence the “re-discover.”)

I had a good Pagan/Wiccan friend in college who plied me with books like “Conversations with God” and “The Four Agreements.” She attended drum circles and Burning Man. I lived with her family the summer after my freshman year. So while I continued to run in those "granola" circles from my youth, I ALSO had experienced a life-changing professor during my very first semester (Psych 101- Dr. Chambers- I’m looking at you!) that I credit with completely changing the way that I think, to this day. But that’s why you go to university, right? To learn critical thinking skills? And perhaps, THIS is the essential piece I would've missed out on if I had moved straight to NY at age 18 and completely skipped the "college experience." I guess we never get to know the answer to that- to our "roads not taken."

But back to the psych classroom; it was an interesting place to have a tower moment; in a stadium lecture hall, completely impersonal in every way. I meant nothing to this professor, and he meant nothing to me. (Well, except that I'm forever changed because of him.) I’m sure he’s given talks on these topics hundreds of times. He may even have been phoning it in that day, for all I know. But I was RIVETED. Partially because psychology is a super interesting topic to me, but it was also the WAY he taught, and how he explained concepts. (And there’s no way I’ll do it justice here.)

We spent a lot of time learning about unconscious biases, and the tricks our brains play on us; (like correlation doesn’t equal causation.) For example, a common superstition people might carry is that during a full moon, more accidents happen. They believe that hospital waiting rooms are more full at this time (which is untrue,) but this belief came about because they noticed two things occurring at the same time- a) the waiting room is full, and they want to blame it on something, so- b) the moon is also full. They create a correlation that isn’t true. “More accidents happen during a full moon.” (This is statistically unproven.)

We discussed the amount of people that have reported alien abductions, that also share a commonality. They have a particular sleep disorder (that my professor also had- in which you continue to experience the body sleep paralysis that occurs during the REM cycle, but were partially conscious in Level 1 sleep while it was happening.) He described it as a terrifying experience where he could see his wife looming over the bed like a shadowy figure, all while he was unable to move- not even his mouth. Luckily, being a psych professor, he knew what was going on, could reason out that it was his wife, and not an alien, and they had discussed a plan in advance, where he would start gurgling or making guttural sounds in his throat to encourage her to wake him all the way up.

This man had me believing completely in SCIENCE. He had a reason for everything. The unit we did on probability- he explained how people believed in miracles, but it’s just "the odds." The odds were; that someone, somewhere, was going to flip a coin, and it would land heads up 300 times in a row. (And that, my friends, is the psychology behind gambling and the lottery.) 

ANYWAY- this was the beginning of the end of believing for me. Critical thought, science, and my husband had taken over that place in my mind.