A Little Sister, a Dog and God.

Paper II

Our family dog, Mo, has a wild spirit for adventure - goes missing for days on end until we either receive a phone call from a hesitant neighbor who was grown to love the little charmer, or until he simply reappears back in our house, by means unnoticed by any of us. Though the behavior is now expected, understood and secretly admired, there was a time when his behavior was unexpected, misunderstood and immensely worrisome to a family who had never before owned a dog.

It was the first night of his disappearing act and my little sister, Eliza, was growing fearful. She has a compassionate heart, eyes like a hawk, and the memory of an elephant. Her connection to the dog was easily the strongest and most fragile as she was also the youngest in the family, five years younger than me. She told me later of her experience that night when Mo returned home. She had gone out alone to the front porch and began to pray. She closed her tearful eyes and prayed to the god of her understanding for Mo’s return. She said she was out there for about ten minutes when she heard a distant jingle. She opened her eyes and sure as shit Mo was running up the lawn towards her, tongue flopping out, all high spirits and smiles. I am not claiming that she has any sort of magical powers, rather restating the story as she told it to me.

A few years before that, I was playing guitar in our front lawn, soaking up the summer sun, when Eliza swung open the squeaky door and took a seat next to me. She pointed to the billowy clouds over the mountains and said, “See that? That’s where God is, just above those clouds.” I looked at her, a bit confused at her young and honest interpretation of “God.”

Perhaps these instances would exhibit normal behavior in the child of a family that frequented church or Sunday school, even if only a few times a year. However, Eliza has never been to any religious institution, never read the Bible. My father, being the linear, rational, scientific emergency room doctor that he is, did not approve of his children’s attendance at church, though I suppose my mother would have otherwise followed her parents’ example and taken us to church. We never talked much about it and I hardly gave it a second thought. I only learned recently that I was baptized in a church in Arkansas, though I do not know under what branch of Christianity my soul was “saved.” I feel extremely lucky in that I am able to look at the mighty beast of religion without personal bias.

What I find so interesting is my little sister’s concept of god and of prayer. Where does this belief come from? As humans, does our complex understanding and need to categorize the universe warrant such beliefs? Or was it through the shadowy subtleties of societal influence that Eliza picked up these beliefs? She used to ask me questions like, “How do you talk to God?” or “Are faeries like angels?” I tried to answer honestly, but as I was growing up I was also developing my own understanding of the world. People used to ask me about my religious beliefs and the only way I could explain my sentiments toward such a foreign subject was to say that I was faithful, though unsure of what I was faithful towards. I used to tell people that I believed in the World. I believed in the ultimate working-out of the universe. This did not give me an excuse to act irresponsibly, but it did provide a certain degree of comfort in an otherwise uncomfortable world. I justified my belief by a hindsight understanding of how my current gratitudes came to be and through the idea of optimism. Perhaps this would be best explained through example:

From the age ten to about sixteen, my mother was fairly absent from my life. Physically, she was around, but her heavy drinking distorted her mental presence - she offered little comfort or advice during a very strange part of my life. Blank stares and stumbles, spontaneous fits of rage and tears, suicide threats, DUI’s... the works. When our dirty family secret somehow seeped through our fool-proof act to the extended family, my mom’s sister flew out to Colorado and literally dragged my mom, who clawed the floors and walls in desperate denial and confusion, to a rehabilitation center in Newberg, Oregon. Her long process of recovery played out with phantoms and rock bottoms, lonely nights and angry words, and my father’s temper was becoming shorter and shorter. His drinking became a bit toxic and scary and his verbal abuse and tyrant-like hunger for control left life-long imprints on my sisters and me. And although those times were some of the hardest and loneliest of my life so far, the results were and are a blessing.

My mom decided to stay in Oregon where she had built herself a little nest of support made up of hard-ass recovering women and their equally hard-ass histories. As a result I visited Portland quite frequently and discovered my love for this city and its hidden treasures. I could argue that my interest in Philosophy was a result of such hard times. If my mother had not been an alcoholic I may not be here, and I would definitely not be the person I am today. Considering how happy I am with my physical and mental location in life, I have no choice but to be grateful for my mother’s alcoholism, as twisted as it may sound. My father’s temper resulted in the unbreakable bond between my little sister and I, as she was my confidant and I hers, and together we endured the wrath of my father. It seems the bond of suffering always grows deepest.

When I see life as such, it would seem a certain degree of faith emerges. Maybe it is only a crutch, or a comfort that I use to survive the hard times, but because the opportunities rippled out of such painful and trying experiences, I can say, with some amount of evidence, that everything will work out as they should. Life happens and time passes and maybe the way things are is the only way they could be and we should squeeze all the juice out of it no matter how we look at it. Maybe more than faith I accept and have a humble understanding of the push and pull of the world and as a result I see even the worst times as opportunities for growth. Maybe it is only my human brain trying to make the world as manageable an idea as possible. Or maybe I like the idea of a bit of harmony to the universe and my life in it.