“believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” - Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

I’m super behind on the OneWord posts, which is disappointing but not surprising. If my math is correct, which is questionable on a good day, then this week’s word is faith. Mmm. Baggage.

When I was in sixth grade, I think, I read Stephen King’s “It.” Besides reinforcing a life-long and occasionally paralyzing fear of clowns, it also provided me with the best, most logical description of Creator I’ve come across. I’m sort of amused in thinking about how Stephen King might react to that. In the universe he creates, there is the Turtle, the creator of all that is, who does his work and then pulls inside his shell, wanders off into some vast corner of the cosmos and lets what will happen, happen.

There’s a lot of life that’s happened between then and now. I’ve rubbed shoulders with Jesuits and sung in gospel choirs with Baptists and thrown shade at Unitarians and knelt with Episcopalians, spent years away from organized religion and years inside it. I’ve read everything I can put my hands on and some of it feels more organic than others.

I don’t have answers, but that’s the whole point, right?

I look at my kids, I look at this world, I look up at the stars and even when I feel like I can’t believe in anything else I still see the Turtle out there somewhere, beyond our reach, that thing that set all of this in motion, all the things that even the most brilliant of our science minds can’t entirely explain. I look at my kids and I think about the way my capacity to love grew and shifted and metastasized in one horrible, awful painful push and think yes, okay. I have faith in creation. I have faith in love. I believe. I have faith that no matter what happens when I am not here the love that we are born into and that we bend and shape during the time we live it continues to wrap its arms around this world and every other, even after we’re gone.

And like bits and pieces of our DNA, a genetic code that tells the stories of who our people were and who our people will be, it stretches onward through time, eternal. And if when we sleep, we dream, well. That’ll be some adventure, too.