I'm currently sitting at work, waiting for calls to come in on a day that for many is a holiday or rather a holy day, one of the big ones the majority of Christians celebrate. To be fair, probably the holy day that differentiates Christians from any other religion.
It has been years since I had gone to an Easter mass, decades I would say. John celebrated Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread, not Easter. And it, like Halloween, was not a hill I really wanted to battle. Besides, the DofUB were a pain enough to deal with with the requirements of having to deleaven the house first and then go an entire week without any leavening at all. I just didn't bother unless the girls wanted to do something with it and then maybe I would put something together but Christmas was always the big one for me. And once I came to identify more as an atheist, I simply didn't see the point.
And so seeing everyone getting together for another holiday, there are a mixture of feelings. On one hand, I still very much struggle with the concept of the existence of a deity at all, much less one so fleshed out as the one in the Bible. There are still too many questions in my head, too many things that do not make any sense to me at all.
And yet, I do feel there is something beyond me. It's hard for me to really explain though. I don't know what it is, just something more. Maybe it's the sense of the vastness of space, of the universe. I don't know. There are things I feel the be true within me, things that are important to me, my values and morals so to speak. What exactly it is connected to, that I'm not so sure about.
It's something I never really got to explore being married to John. With him, I either believed what he believed or nothing. And that certainly didn't make things easy. It was just easier not to believe in anything at all, easier not to figure out what I did believe. Not that it mattered, whether I believed or didn't believe, it was a way for him to be morally superior over me because I didn't believe what he believed and his beliefs were the only true ones.
And now, after being divorced for almost 3 1/2 years and living on my own for close to four, I'm slowly starting to try and figure out just what I believe. It isn't easy. I'm realizing that there is a lot of baggage I carry from my marriage that has some effect. There are a lot of voices out there too. There is no one set of beliefs, one school of thought. There are thousands, perhaps even millions. Figuring out what I believe in the midst of that is a huge challenge.
But I feel it is something I need to figure out for myself in order to be true to myself and be the most authentic me I can be.
