GO YOUR OWN WAY

This woman ditched standard religious dogma in favor of a unique patchwork-style path that works for her.

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One summer in the early '60s, when I was 11, my cousin Julie was visiting my family at our suburban Washington, D.C., home. After supper one evening, my mother, Julie, and I sat in the living room discussing religion—the word spirituality wasn't in our lexicon back then. Julie and I were sitting on the sofa, Mother opposite us in her favorite rocker. At one point she gestured, making a large generous circle with her arms. “Maybe we're all part of God’s body,” Mother said, as she puffed on her Winston.

God’s body? I was riveted. What an image! I struggled to visualize all the things seen and unseen, known and unknown, wriggling around in God’s limitless body. The idea was so huge, I couldn't really absorb it. Later, as I drifted off to sleep, I was still puzzling over the image.

Sixty years later, Julie reminded me of that evening, one she had never forgotten either. “Mother was describing Gaia,” I marveled. “Without the words or the concept, she was talking about Earth as the spiritual embodiment of God.”

MY PARENTS’ FAITH

That conversation was one of several ways my parents’ approaches to religion flavored my spirituality. Both grew up Protestant in South Carolina but were raised in different denominations. My mother, a Presbyterian, was a loose, liberal believer. One of my regrets is that because she died so young, when I was in my mid-20s, I didn’t have the opportunity to continue discussing spirituality with her as we each evolved.

Raised Baptist, my father had a full-immersion baptism at the age of 12. He later earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in meteorology, so it’s no surprise that he became an intellectual agnostic. At 80, he described his belief systems, writing “I am satisfied that the beginning of life grew out of the laws of nature, not from divine intervention,” and that “early man” probably needed to create a God to assuage his fears.