My people!

I just read this article on Friendly Atheist, and boy, did it get me excited! Mary Johnson is one of my people. Her whole journey really resonates with me, and I love that although she is now an atheist, she still can see the value and appeal of religion.

Check out this quote:

I believe that humans need ritual and art and encouragement. I’m in the process of becoming a Humanist celebrant so that I can help people celebrate weddings and births and funerals in a secular context. I’m encouraged that people like Alain de Botton and Greg Epstein and Miriam Muroff Jerris are taking on the challenge of creating meaningful Humanist rituals without supernatural references.

I could have said that! Plus, it takes me back to my original idea for my presentation. Probably, I can focus on deBotton, Epstein and Jerris and that will be enough for one presentation. I wonder if Jerris would answer some interview questions for me. After all, she did reply to my e-mails.

But what REALLY got me going was the discussion in the comment. It seems that Friendly Atheist's readers are up in arms because Johnson used the word "soul" in her last sentence. Personally, I think she was using the word partly as a metaphor and partly because she was asked to address "anyone who is sitting in a church pew right now," so the use of religious terminology was appropriate in that context. But I often say that religion gets a lot of things right, and I think the idea of a soul is one of them.

Let me be clear: I think it's incredibly unlikely that there is any kind of life after death. I don't believe that there is some kind of permanent part of us that is endowed by a deity. 

However, there is the essence of a person. That thing that is not my brain and not my body: the me that metacognates. I know it's not a real thing--it's generated by the chemicals in my brain. But I also know that it is real in my experience of myself and my experience of those I love. It's the thing that makes each of us who we are, different from everyone else. It's the part of my husband that I love all the time, even when his body and his brain are pissing me off. Although I know it's only a concept, it's a concept worth talking about, from time to time, and when we talk about it, we need a word for it. "Soul" is a long-established term for just that thing, and it comes in handy. Because the rest of this paragraph makes very little sense.

And there's another thing. My mother, whose relationship to religion is very confusing so I won't try to explain it here, told me a story that made me wonder about all of this. When my grandmother died, my mother was with her. My mother reports that Nana's last breath was peaceful, and exactly like my first breath, but (obviously) backwards. My mother felt in that moment that death was completely natural. She also says that there is no question in her mind that her mother left the room at that moment, and that she want up.

Do I think Nana went to Heaven? Of course not. But neither do I think my mother is lying, or deluded. She is not a Christian and does not believe in Hell, so there was no interest in her believing her mother went up instead of down, or to the side. What I think is that she experienced something we can't explain. She had a sensation of some kind, and other people have experienced this same thing, and that's where the whole idea of a soul going to Heaven came from. What was it? I have no idea. But I know it brought my mother some comfort. She still had a really tough time with the idea of her mom rotting under the ground. She couldn't watch the body being lowered into the grave, and a few months after my grandmother's death I started singing that lovely childhood diddy about "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout" and I thought my mom was going to have a panic attack.  (To be clear, I was an adult when all of this happened--there was no child abuse involved.) But she likes the idea that her mom left the room with that last breath, and I can't prove that it didn't happen.

So, to sum up: I don't believe in eternal souls that go to Heaven if we're good, but I do notice that each of us has an essence of some kind and I think "soul" is a useful term for it. Lay off the poor woman.

Maybe I've already found it...

There has been a tragic death in my community. A husband and father in his 40's died suddenly this week. His wife is a teacher at The Little Jewess's school, one of his daughters is a student and the other is an alumna.

I barely know this teacher, and I don't know her daughters. But I am proud to be a member of this community. And maybe this is how Humanist communities work.

Tomorrow there will be a visitation and service at a funeral home, followed by a reception at the school. Today, people were asked to volunteer to bring food to the reception. In less than three hours, the sign-up sheet was full.

I was so happy when they asked for food, because before that I didn't know what to do. My child wasn't traumatized (because she, like me, only barely knows the teacher in question, and the daughters are much older than TLJ (The Little Jewess.) So I didn't need to avail myself of the grief counselor the school made available. I thought about going to the visitation or the reception, but the family probably wouldn't recognize me and I wouldn't want them to feel awkward. I thought about sending a card, but again, what would I say? And what meaning would it have to the bereaved? I can't remember ever meeting this man.

But I can bake brownies. I like to bake brownies. And I know how necessary good dessert is when one is in mourning, as well as what a relief it is to have enough food to offer to those who visit.

In some ways, this is the ultimate in Humanist response to death. A community comes together in a completely non-religious way to support the bereaved with food, comfort, therapy and friendship. God doesn't need to enter into it. And for me, bringing food feels appropriate because it is the traditional Jewish thing to do when someone is bereaved. But of course the school community, as wonderful as it is, can not fulfill all the needs that a religious community does.

For one thing, it's transient. While I have made some friendships that I hope last for a lifetime (and so has TLJ) the community will not. I have already lost touch with people I liked whose children are much older than TLJ and who have moved on. And some day we will move on. Although I'll always feel connected to the school, it won't be a part of our regular routine forever.

And then I come back to the need for ritual. I am enormously comforted by the outpouring of support for this family, because should something this tragic happen to me, I know the community will be there for my family, too. I feel somehow a little bit safer dropping TLJ off at a place where the families respond this way to tragedy. But I don't know what to expect tomorrow. This teacher still has to find an appropriate way to honor her husband's death, and someone outside the school will have to help her with that, whether it's a religious leader or someone else. Because a school just can't be a foundational community. It has to be a school.

It's a damned good one, though.

Anyone going to the Reason Rally tomorrow?

On Davy Jones and why Humanists need rituals

As you have probably heard, Davy Jones of the Monkees died suddenly on Wednesday. This may not have been a major news item for you, but I spent my early adolescence madly in love with a young Davy Jones (although Davy was no longer young--we don't need to analyze my psyche here) and so I spent the end of the week receiving condolences for the death of a man I never met.

And then I read this, from fellow Monkee Mike Nesmith:

While it is jarring, and sometimes seems unjust, or strange, this transition we call dying and death is a constant in the mortal experience that we know almost nothing about. I am of the mind that it is a transition and I carry with me a certainty of the continuity of existence. While I don’t exactly know what happens in these times, there is an ongoing sense of life that reaches in my mind out far beyond the near horizons of mortality and into the reaches of infinity.


In other words, "Don't be sad: Davy is still out there somewhere."


Now, obviously Mike Nesmith lost a friend and a former bandmate. The kind of friendship that must have formed among the four Monkees during their rocket to fame and subsequent touring, followed by the difficult on-again, off-again relationship they had professionally over the past 45 years is deeply significant. In contrast, I had a schoolgirl crush on a young man who had long since grown up, gotten married (twice, at that point) and fathered four children (all daughters, more's the pity.) I see the difference, and I realize that Mike was trying, in his way, to offer comfort to Davy's fans and to share something of himself. 


But I get to be sad, dammit. Because someone who brought me joy, and who touched my life with his art, and who made me happy with brilliance like this, is gone. And even if you believe he's in Heaven, he's not HERE. He's gone from this world, and that is a loss, and I grieve that loss. 


But this is one of those moments where not believing is a problem. Not because I want to believe that Davy is in Heaven, or with God, or will be reanimated when the Messiah comes. Precisely because I don't believe any of that. I believe that he's gone. And I recognize that those who loved him (really loved him, not fan-loved him) need the comfort that comes from words and rituals. But that doesn't mean they need God.


One of the reasons I want to get more involved with the Humanist movement is that we all need rituals, especially for important life cycle events. Birth, coming of age, marriage, death--they are all transitional periods, and they all involve a whole lot of stress. The rituals that have been developed (by people, through religion) help people through these transitions, because we need the help. But those rituals were developed by people, for people. We can have rituals that don't involve God, but do bring the comfort and assistance that people need. 


Around death, the most important thing is to honor the pain that the survivors feel. We need to support people in grief and help them through the pain so that they can return to life fully when they are ready. And that's why I was disturbed by Mike Nesmith's statement. Because through his statement of belief, he was telling me--all of us--not to grieve. And not just about Davy, but always. He's saying that death is not really loss and so we shouldn't be sad. That's not fair. 


So this is a call to action, fellow Humanists. We need to work to form communities, and to form rituals, and to make Humanism a force that will provide for people's needs without forcing God on them. For humans.