Gemini Renaissance

I first learned of Oasis in the 10th grade thanks to a sweet and annoying classmate named Sarah. Sarah, who spoke like a Gilmore girl (not a compliment), was mid monologue (I was the audience), when I interjected: “What’s Champagne Supernova”? And that added fuel to a different monologue altogether that made me feel like I wasn’t in on the secret that everyone and their mother seemed to be in on.

Now, personally, I think that specific Oasis song drags on for far too long. She could’ve led with something else.

That day, after listening to (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and learning about the seething Gallagher fallout, I felt closer to Sarah than ever before. This goody-goody who likely orgasmed at the thought of a crown braid and a Bath and Body Works lotion set was onto something.

Sarah was right. It was a crime to not cherish that beautiful angst that torments everyone at least once in their life. It was a crime to not experience it through music, through Oasis and the like. And yes, “only someone who lives under a rock wouldn’t know who Oasis is”.

I don’t live under a rock anymore. But I used to. Plato preferred to call it a cave. Historians prefer the “dark ages”. I call it an evangelical christian upbringing.

I grew up in a home where the rituals of organized religion pervasively dominated every decision that was made by me and for me. The way I spoke, the way I dressed, the guilt I was supposed to drown in from partaking in normal teenage life. The church we attended every Sunday—and later on nearly every other day as my parents were increasingly absorbed by bible clubs, devotionals, fundraisers disguised as special events, the marriage “ministry”, etc.—was a megachurch. The kind where each Sunday service begins with worship, or a performance bigger than the Super Bowl Half Time show where each member of the band is trying to outshine the other. The kind where the majority of youth group sermons center on how sinful sex before marriage is, instead of addressing important topics related to sexuality like healthy relationships, coercion/peer pressure, insecurities, the health consequences of unsafe sex, and exploring one’s identity. The kind where it’s more important to point fingers and judge things as sinful, rather than empathetically consider all the complexities of a situation and a person. The kind that robs you so easily of a true sense of fairness by feeding you a gospel of “us vs. them”, believers vs. the world.

When I turned 18 and left for college, I felt I was shedding a layer of my life I increasingly recognized less, a layer of friendship circles and social skins I once wore, of beliefs I no longer identified as my own. I began a search for God. Not the murderous deity looking to put people in Hell that I had been preached about my whole life, but the one I experienced whenever I would share a meal with a homeless person, the one I felt in my dad’s hugs, the one I felt while standing in the expanse of nature.

I had no clue where to find him, so I shopped the usual suspects. I searched for God in a bible group on campus and couldn’t find him. I searched for God in a church near college and couldn’t find him. I searched for God in people, some of the kindest ones, and they turned out not to believe in God!

I don’t claim to know God. I don’t think anyone can. But I do think we can come to know him in the most quotidian and subtle ways. In principle, I’ve found God in love, in sacrifice, in equanimity, in mindfulness, in gratitude, in the natural world, and in the infinite cosmos. I’ve found God in my beagles, in caring for them, in cuddling with them, in playing with them, in cherishing them. I’ve found God in watering my plants. I’ve found God in my yoga practice and my morning meditations. I’ve found God in my farts, the roaring ones that can get me and my husband laughing after a tense day.

I have questions. I have a litany of them. I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that an ocean wave can be so mesmerizing, and yet a tsunami can kill hundreds of innocent people. If God created nature, how could he possibly create such malevolent catastrophes? Or not intervene to stop them from occurring in the first place? The classic: “Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people?” I don’t know the answers to any of these. But for all the evil that exists in mankind and in this world, I believe there is good. I believe that strangers are more inclined toward kindness than cruelty, more likely to search for love, to admire a tree, to affectionately pet a dog than to actively embody acts of hatred, abuse an animal, or intentionally destroy nature. And that speck of hope, or stubbornness, is my God.

I’ve worked hard to rebuild my belief system and views on love, marriage, sex, boundaries, etc. And I’m sure I’ll continue learning and molding my views until the day I die. I’m not sure one needs religion to be a better person, but I’ve needed it to understand that you can find God anywhere, especially outside the confines of a church.