This I Believe

The only things that I really know for certain are the things that I have experienced directly through my own senses.

And even these things I don’t fully understand.

Everything else I have to believe.

Everyone else,

I have to believe.

We are told different things,

depending on where we grow up.

I grew up in northern Alabama,

mostly.

My family went to church several times a week.

I was taught a very simple message from a very complicated book.

Little pieces of that book were taken out and repeated

Over and over and over again.

It was called the gospel story,

If you believed and did what it said then you were saved and it stuck forever,

It was really, really simple.

Black and white.

You were saved or you were lost.

God and Devil.

Good and bad.

My way or the wrong way.

But weird things happened that I didn’t understand.

The preacher of the church would say things that weren’t really in the Bible,

but that people seemed real interested to hear.

The preacher said that the Devil was working right here in our town telling the communists what to do.

And the Preacher showed us a movie,

a black and white movie of horrible images of dead dismembered people that the Devil and the communists had killed.

And the communists and the Devil were telling the Negroes in our town what to do.

And if we didn’t protect ourselves from the communists and Negroes

they would come across the rail road tracks

to our side of the town,

and take over everything,

and communists and Negroes would control the government

and we had to stop them right now.

And everybody nodded and said “Amen”.

But after that the church was almost normal,

except in the parking lot,

where the people talked about the communists and Negroes.

But they didn’t really just say “communist”.

And they didn’t just say “Negro”.

And they didn’t say many things at all that I thought Jesus would want to hear.

But that’s when things really changed for me.

We moved to Tennessee,

and my new sixth grade class was a lot different.

We were all just sixth graders.

Mixed up all together, blacks and whites.

Integrated,

and just fine about it

and that’s when I started thinking that maybe

I shouldn’t believe everything the preacher said about Negroes

and communists

and the Devil.

Which made me think of all the other things the preacher had said.

Maybe all of the thousands of years that went into the Bible couldn’t be contained in a simple gospel story.

It is hard to believe sometimes.

But hopefully we all know people that we believe,

that we can trust,

that it is safe and comfortable to be with.

That we can share anything with at all.

That we love.

That love us.

God is this love.

I believe this God-love is in all of us,

waiting to surface.

And I believe that when a person trusts another enough to share a pure communication of the experience of their soul,

with the wall of self protection set aside and plain and simple truth is shared with no disguise,

no hidden agenda,

no motive but to share,

that the God inside of each of us is sharing with itself and that if this one pure moment could go on with us forever and that everything we say is from the purity of all that we have experienced and we express the truth and just the truth every moment every day that it will be the closest thing to heaven we can have upon this earth

and then

the purest human spirit

holy spirit here on earth

would reign supreme.

I am not sure about all of this,

But I believe it for now.