On the diversity of the divine
The thesis is still a river. / At the top of the mountain / is a murderous light, so strong / it’s like staring into an original / joy, foundational, / that brief kinship of hold / and hand, the space between / teeth right before they break / into an expansion, a heat.
– excerpt from poem Where the Circles Overlap (The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón).
Tears were still drying on my cheeks when I recounted to Ethan the moment I was brought towards a Christian faith.
I was sitting on the balcony of my family’s home in Singapore – only years ago, though it felt like a lifetime ago. I had heard, it seemed to me, a glorious symphony of brass and string coming from the clouds, over the apartment buildings. My first thought was I am hallucinating. I had been operating on only a few hours of sleep in the last three days. But my ears echoed with that sound only I could hear, and I wondered what it meant. The chorus said there was something divine just there, and perhaps it had always been there but could only reveal itself at this time, when I was truly in need of saving. I would not admit it yet for another year, but that was the moment I wondered if God was real. Thus began my search for the divine.
A few years later, with four different churches and the entire Bible-reading evangelistic Christian experience, I was sure that the divinity I was seeking could not be defined by the Judeo-Christian God. I cannot deny that I had learned a lot from being a Christian, and my heart did indeed expand, but it wasn’t right for me anymore. It hadn’t been right for a deep swell of time.
I was telling Ethan how I missed it, how I missed that wonder, that search for something divine. I so badly needed a symphony to sound out again and whisper to me that I’m special, that I’m loved. It is a good thing that the divine is so diverse.
I am still searching and finding the divine in the most unexpected places. In Zambales on the Northern coastline of the Philippines, there’s a woman who named a patch of forest Cathedral. There’s a family who fed me and told me that the body and spirit can heal best when inhaling the salty ocean air. There is a more fundamental sound than brass and string; when I climb mountains, I hear a symphony of rustling leaves mimicking rushing water. The sound may not tell me that I’m special, but it plugs my entire being into the watershed. My consciousness rides down the rivers and travels through the soil, deposited at the mouth. I want to sing.
Whenever I commune with nature, I am reminded that I am still connected to the divine, just in a different form.
If you were to ask me what I believed in right now, I would say the mountain, and by extension, all life. It isn’t conveniently summarized in one word like Christianity, and it makes for interesting interactions when I’m pressed for an answer. For instance, it’s part of hospital procedure in the Philippines to ask for your religion when making your patient profile. When I was at the ER two weeks ago, I put a dash in the Religion box, but the nurse still asked me, “Are you Roman Catholic?” “No,” I replied. “So, what is your religion?” “Do I need one?” Ethan and I later laughed at the attitude with which I said this, but it’s true. I don’t need one.
I realized while writing this that the beauty of a religion comes from the act of searching rather than the belief itself. That moment on the balcony in Singapore spurred my search, and even though my beliefs have a new name now, I will always hold that memory close. When climbing mountains there are many resting points where one can look out at the valley or marvel at the various plants which grow along the path. The curiosity and eagerness with which we seek the divine is what makes our humanity so sweet. In whatever form we expect it to come in, the divine will always surprise us.
As I think about climate justice and revolution, I wonder about the divine’s role in creating better futures. Paul Kingsnorth argues for a new sort of Christianity, a ‘Wild Christianity.’ Sophie Strand’s books The Flowering Wand and The Madonna Secret indeed point towards the reimagining of old and familiar beliefs to remind us of our radical interconnectedness with all life. Others believe that an entirely new belief-system is needed. I myself tend to answer all of the above to the question of what we need for the revolution, and in this, my intuition is the same. It’s not a cop-out, but the recognition that the collective is made up of many complex groups, with different histories, knowledges, and ways of being.
We will need a diversity of divines for us to work towards that bright and just future. It doesn’t matter the label. We will need as many curious and eager people as we can. Those who are currently lost and searching for the divine, I urge you to keep going. Once you find that glimmer, wherever and in whomever you may find it, we will need you to share with us what you found.