I Believe...

I participated in a Building Your Own Theology course at my Teaching Congregation, culminating last week with the participants sharing, in some form, a statement of belief - our person credos, as it were. Here is mine as constructed for that course:

I believe I am an efflorescence of the cosmos, a leaf or flower on our tree of life. My life is not mine but a participation in the life of the tree. I emerge with the potential of bringing growth and beauty to the world. Then I will wither and fall to earth in perpetual recycling of the elements that composed me.

I believe knowledge comes only by experience. But since experience must be interpreted to have meaning, what I think I know may not match the reality outside my mind. So ongoing experience forces me again and again to revise what I know I know.

I believe that nothing and no one is in charge of reality or of any part thereof, but we exist in a matrix of cause and effect, a system where every action, every word, every thought has a perpetual impact on the shape of reality. We participate. We influence and are influenced. We co-create. But we do not control. Control is mere illusion.

I believe the purpose of my life is nothing more or less than to do good, leaving the world no worse for my presence and participating in repair and improvement to benefit future generations.

I believe my death is meaningless in the larger scheme of things. I do not fear or dread it. A leaf or flower falls from our tree of life, but the tree stands. The life of which my life was a leaf or a flower continues. Not eternally, but for a very long time.

So I believe.

On the island of Crete in the city of Iraklion is the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis. Because the Orthodox Church would not allow him to be buried in sanctified ground, his grave stands alone near the Chania Gate. The epitaph that he wrote for himself is scratched into the simple marker: "Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβάμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος." - I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. - A motto I accept as my own.