You've got to have faith...or do you?

After our meeting with Dr. DeMartino today, my mom, dad and I talked about faith. Faith comes in a lot of different colors, shapes and sizes. The degree to which one has faith and in what are interesting considerations. Ten years ago, as we began the journey of the original “Boys of Summer”, I asked my dad what faith was. He said, “Faith means that I believe I have what it takes to get the job done”. That definition speaks toward faith in himself. His body has failed him to various degrees over the last ten years. Some of it is just getting older as he looks at 70 on the fast-approaching horizon; much more of it, I believe, is due to Parkinson’s Disease. Being robbed of something that you hold faith in has to shake you.

 

My dad doesn’t hold much interest in religion. He was raised Catholic and, along with my mom, raised my sister and me as Catholics. When my mom left the church, somewhere in the 1990’s, my dad left it, too. My mom says she continued to question and develop a new faith toward God and Jesus Christ as she needs to understand that. She goes to church again, today, with great passion and faith, though it’s not Catholic. My dad still doesn’t go and doesn’t seem to have any interest in it. I left the church when I went away to college. I still remember taking a mythology class and having my mind blown by the stories from other cultures, some similar, some not to the Catholic faith, many of them predating the teachings in the Bible by thousands of years. This revelation, alone, isn’t to say one is more correct than the other because of that information, but because the faith was presented to me as a closed system, with other belief systems being unquestionably wrong, this was earth-shattering to me at the time. Just recently I began to go to church again, largely for my children and my family. I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit.

  

Back to my dad and his faith: the other night we went to the Zen Center in Las Vegas. I’ve suggested my dad should incorporate meditation into his life for a number of healthful and quality of life reasons. There are an increasing number of scientific studies that point to the validity of meditation as an exercise that increases brain activity. As my dad is dealing squarely with a neurologically-based disease, so far as we understand, meditation seems like a good fit.

At the Zen Center, my dad asked the Zen Master, “If I commit seriously to meditation, what can I expect to get out of it?” Whether or not my dad knew it, he’d stepped right into a zen trap. It is in the wanting of anything that one gets lost. The Zen Master brought up the metaphor of the mind being a glass of dirty water. Through the process of meditation, one can help the sand and dirt settle to the bottom of the glass, adding clarity to the water. One cannot remove the sand itself. How can one do this? How does one know meditation “works”? It is in the doing. As my dad is a logically-minded person, this didn’t sit well with him. I offered to send him some of the science-based articles on meditation to see if they would offer him encouragement or peace of mind to continue on this unknown path, in the absence of faith. He said yes. In case you’re interested, those articles can be found here.