TL;DR

Just words tonight, folks. Probably not even any jokes. But I feel the urge to write, and my topic is religion. I grew up in a very non-religious household. So far as I can remember, the first time I stepped foot into a church was for my grandpa Lauren's funeral, when I was not much older than five. I felt nothing while looking at my father's father's lifeless body. I understood that the crying people around me were going to miss this man dearly, and I felt bad for them, but I grew up four hundred miles away from the man and only got to spend a weekend with him in life. I was too young to understand the enormity of what had happened to bring us all together that day, and I certainly did not understand the building we were all congregated in. I spent more time in churches this way over the next six years, at weddings and funerals of relations I never knew, people who shared blood ties with me, but no experiences and no familiarity.

My first stint with religion began on March 15th, 2002. I had turned thirteen only eleven days previous. On that day, my brothers Matthew and Ryan were taken from this earth in a violent one car accident with a drunk at the wheel. I remember being awoken in the small hours of the morning by a knock at the door, two hours after the crash. I found two policemen there, asking to speak with my mother. Matt and Ryan were no strangers to trouble with the law, so I just assumed that they had been arrested, and went back to awaken Mom to this bad news. I went to my bedroom while she talked with the officers. Suddenly, the thought that maybe something more serious had happened crossed my mind, but before I could pursue this line of thought, I heard a terrible, anguished wail tearing out of my mother's throat. In that instant, I knew what happened, and I will never forget that sound.

Suddenly, I was faced with the harsh realities of death. I saw it in the strained, grief-stricken faces of my parents and sister, felt it in the rare, consoling hand of my brother in law. But I was numb. I could not react, one way or the other. I felt nothing in my heart. Occasionally, a stab of grief would pass through me, like when I heard their obituaries being broadcast on the radio, but then some unknown mechanism would clamp shut again, and oblivion settled back into my chest. It wasn't even bad; bad implies that there is something there to be labeled with an adjective, and there wasn't.

It was after the funeral that I "found" Christianity. I had inherited Matthew's leather-bound bible, and I treasured it. I read from it every night, gloried in its onion-skinned pages, and prayed to a merciful God to keep my siblings' souls before drifting into sleep. This lasted maybe a month or so before I left behind my new found piety.

Over the next seven years, I found new gods to worship, and a flock of fellow believers with whom to pray. These gods were music, art, and a thousand other more fleeting notions that I would follow with all the eagerness of the zealot, but none of the substance of the truly holy man. I began to resent all forms of religion as I learned of the atrocities committed in God's name over the centuries, and I don't think I ever forgave God for taking away my brothers before I even had the chance to know them. I was bitter. I shunned the church and all its promises of salvation and eternal life, branding them lies meant to sway the masses into a lull of complacency. I even declared that there was no God. Instead, I focused my time and energy on playing music. My prayers were now in the form of drum beats and guitar riffs, my altar was my guitar amplifier, my saints were men with names like Jello Biafra and Thomas Kalnoky.

I laughed in the face of the ignorant believers, especially the old. I took a sadistic glee in the notion that these people knew their time was almost up, and in desperation they were turning to some mystical force that would forgive their sins and welcome them upon death. I denounced them as fools and sheep, with no inner strength and no sense of accountability for their actions. Just duck into the confessional once a week, and everything was just fine. I continued this ignorance for seven years.

It was death that once again brought me back to religion. On August 15th, 2009, my dear friend of nearly six years, Joshua Michael Giles, was run over by a car and killed in the middle of the night. Finally, death had struck a grievous blow on me. I was devastated, and the merciful numbness that had allowed me to get through the death of my brothers did not return to me.

I was at work that day, a Saturday. It was just me, my father, and my Saudi Arabian boss in the building when I got the call. I ducked outside to hear over the noise of the powder compacting presses, and barely kept my composure while receiving the news. I hung up, and it was when I told my father what had happened that I broke down crying. After giving me a half hour or so to work out my initial grief, I was taken home. Later that night, all of us gathered at his house, and I cannot forget that vigil. I popped the top off of a beer, a Magic Hat #9, and read the fortune: "How did You get like This?"

Again, I was destined to walk into a church for a funeral. It was not this that brought me back to religion; I could never agree with the faith that I had gone so many years of my youth despising. But it was then that I felt death in all his terrible power for the first time, and an aching emptiness welled up inside me such as I never though possible. It was different from the numbness I felt at my brothers' funeral, more acute and much more painful. I dwelt on the fragility of life, its fleeting and brief nature, and it nearly drove me mad. I couldn't stand that we humans had been placed on this planet to lead futile lives brimming with suffering, only to be snuffed out and cause more suffering in that final act.

One day in the middle of September, as I was sifting through a storage room at work in search of oil rags, I came across a box full of books. Among them was the book that changed my life. It was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by a man named Sogyal Rinpoche. I took it home, though I did not begin to read it until probably December.

When I finally did get around to reading it, I was blown away. The book begins with Rinpoche as a small child, accompanying his master, Jamyang Khyentse, as they are fleeing Tibet under the Chinese occupation. The journey was hard, and Rinpoche watched two of the monks they traveled with as they died. His description of the deaths of these monks struck such a perfect chord in me that the book had me completely enthralled and eager to learn as much as I could about Tibetan Buddhism. The book goes on to explain basic practices and beliefs of his sect of Buddhism, all of which I drank in with the thirst of a man lost in the desert. The words resonated inside me and filled my heart in a way I had never felt before. I finally found religion, after all those years of disavowing it as society's band-aid. It waited patiently until I was ready to receive it with open arms, and then, by chance or fate, religion had found me at the edge of my blackest despair. I was saved.

I took up the practice of meditation, and through it I have found a measure of peace, that grounding that all religions seek to impart upon their followers. It is fleeting sometimes, and the path I have chosen is a long one, fraught with countless obstacles. But no matter how deep my sorrows, no matter how little distance I have covered on this path, I retain that grounding, and it is my strength. My church is now the Earth, in all of her splendor and mystery, and my God is everything.