Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2002 22:59:33 -0500
From: Dianne Cowan <diannecowan at mindspring.com>
To: "Johnny at Charm.Net" <johnny at charm.net>
Subject: My faith

I often refer to myself as an agnostic, or more accurately, as "of no
particular faith," because these terms are simple ways to get the point
across.  But thinking back over the past few months, with different folks
describing in what, for them, faith consists, it seems important to me to
unpack that label, "of no particular faith."

When I was about 20, I went to Paris for three days.  My travelling
companion and I went to Notre Dame in the morning, and the Centre Georges
Pompidou in the afternoon.

Until this point, I was what might be called a lapsed Catholic.  I had been
very devout through my teens, but early in my sophomore year I just stopped
going to church.  People who knew me at the time thought it had something to
do with the death of my friend, Andrew Pausley, but in fact, I had stopped
going to church a couple of weeks before the accident that killed him.  It
had nothing to do, either, with the scrutiny we give to the Bible in
sophomore year.  I stopped going before we began reading the Bible.  I just
stopped, and I felt no guilt.  That's the strange thing.  The Catholic
Church teaches, and I believed, that going to Sunday Mass is an obligation,
and if I ever missed Mass before that, I felt I'd sinned.  And yet, I felt
no guilt, any more than a little girl who outgrows her clothes feels any
guilt.

So, a few months later.  Laura and I were in Paris.  It was February, and it
was hailing.  We had gone to the Louvre the day before, and I had commented
on how the Mona Lisa didn't seem like anything special, locked as it is in a
glass case, so tiny and insignificant amongst the throngs of people craning
their necks for a glimpse.  We joked that the hail was the gods' vengeance
for my disrespect of this great work of art, had a nice French breakfast of
baked goods and cafe au lait, wrapped ourselves up in most of the clothes we
had with us, and set out for Notre Dame.

I was walking the perimeter of the very dark cathedral, listening to the
hail rattling the stained glass, looking at the Stations of the Cross, and
remembering how I'd been taught to pray before them, when I realized that
Laura was on the other side of the church, sitting in a pew.  I went over to
her and saw she was crying.  "What's wrong?" I said, but she just continued
to sob.  Now, I am a crier, but Laura is not.  I didn't know what to do, so
I put my arms around her and rocked her until she calmed.  We spoke no words
then, and we seldom speak of it now, though occasionally we'll refer to the
day Laura cried in Notre Dame, and once she told me she was just overcome by
the weight of it, of the cathedral and the Church in which she, too, had
been raised.

When we went to the Pompidou, we saw Matisse's workups for the Chapel of the
Holy Rosary in Vence -- simple painted paper cutouts of the vestments and
especially the windows.  Laura was a gallery behind me, or a gallery ahead
of me, and the gallery with the Matisse was curiously empty.  Or perhaps I
was curiously unaware of the strangers around me.  In any case, I felt
something in me open that had remained closed for a long time, perhaps my
whole life, and though I didn't cry out or fall to my knees, I knew I was in
the presence of love.  It was to all outward appearances the most ordinary
of experiences, walking through the galleries of a museum, and yet
everything changed in that moment.

Later, I said to Laura, "Notre Dame was meant to put the fear of God into
you; but Matisse's chapel was meant to put the love of God into you."

I am not a Christian, and I do not know enough about other faiths to claim
any of them for my own.  I feel silly referring to God as though he were
looking over my shoulder, and the thought that knowledge is the original sin
repels me.  I think Eve made the right decision, and faced with her choice,
I like to believe I would have made the same one.  A God who would condemn
me to death for it is jealous and unjust and not my God.  Any faith that
takes its start from Genesis is not my faith.

But since that moment when, 20 years old, I looked at some yellow oak leaves
pasted on blue paper, I've known, known in my heart and my gut, that this
world is more than the sum of its parts, that if there is a God it is in the
spaces between the words, as the Talmud (I think) says.  Or perhaps, as
trite as it sounds, God is love, and love, which clothes itself in varied
garments, is always the same.  The feeling I have when I'm with a man I love
is the same as the feeling I get when I'm with a woman I love, the trees in
the park, Bach, Matisse.

Perhaps I belong to the priesthood of Matisse?

Dianne Cowan A92