My Father's Legacy

There are childhood memories that survive as images. Some blurrier than others. Some rise to the surface when we hear an old song or catch a certain smell. 

And then there are childhood memories that somehow become part of your internal compass.

For me, one of those memories was my father telling me when I was six years old:

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you what you believe”.

I can still see the setting clearly.

He was outside in the driveway, working on one of his cars, sweaty and greasy, with the three wisps of hair that normally acted as a combover sticking straight up in the air. That happened when he got sweaty. The combover would somehow start defying gravity.

I had been thinking about religion because even though I was only six years old, I was already exposed to very different versions of it.

The neighbors across the street were Roman Catholic. I spent so much time at their house that I regularly went to church with them. I didn’t understand much of what was happening and I certainly didn’t enjoy sitting through it, but I’m grateful that their family included me in it as though I was one of their own kids. 

My new best friend in my kindergarten class was from Israel. Whenever I spent the night at her house, I entered a completely different world of traditions. I celebrated Hanukkah with her family and often sat at their table for Seder. 

And on certain Thai holidays, we’d get up at the crack of dawn to drive down to the temple in Homestead. I knew that the monks led some sort of prayer service in the main building, but I was rarely ever required to sit through it. Instead, I took folk dance lessons or played in the open fields of the temple grounds while the aunties prepared food for the monks.

So one afternoon, standing there in the driveway, I asked my dad:

“Daddy, what religion are we?”

He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “Why do you ask?”

I explained that the Pippins were Catholic, and the Nisons were Jewish, so what were we?

He sat me down, and then tried to explain faith to a six-year old.

He told me that people all over the world had different ways of understanding things that nobody could really understand or prove. Different cultures had different stories, different beliefs, different mythologies, different explanations for the big questions.

He told me that my mother was Buddhist, and that although he was raised as a Methodist, he was actually an atheist.

He firmly believed in science. And only in things that could be proven scientifically. 

But he never taught me that religious people were stupid. He never told me that faith was ridiculous. He never replaced somebody else's dogma with his own. 

Instead, he explained it very simply: “When you become an adult, you’re going to read a lot of books, and learn a lot of different ideas. And then you get to decide for yourself what you believe and what religion, if any, you want to be.

Then came the sentence that I never forgot:

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you what to believe. That includes me and your mother. Now, you still have to listen to us, but nobody can ever tell you what you should feel in your heart”

My six year old brain took this explanation very literally. I somehow came away believing that turning eighteen involved an official religion-selection process. Like registering to vote.

I pictured graduating high school and someone directing me to a library, where I would sit down, read all of the important books, review my options, choose a religion, get some kind of membership card, and then proceed into my grown up life properly classified.

Catholic. 

Jewish. 

Buddhist.

Atheist.

Other. 

Check one.

I’m not exactly sure when I realized that there wasn't an actual registration form.

But oddly enough, that misunderstanding may have shaped me almost as much as the lesson itself. Because if adulthood was eventually going to require me to choose a religion, then I obviously needed to do my research.

And I did. As a teenager, I became genuinely interested in world religions. I loved learning how different cultures had tried to answer the same impossible questions.

What happens when we die? Where do we come from? Is there a soul? Does anything about us continue? Is there some order to all of this?

I was especially drawn to belief systems built around reincarnation. 

At twelve years old, I read Many Lives, Many Masters and it made sense to me in a way that could only be described as faith.

The idea of omnipotent beings on the other hand, never quite landed. I could understand why other people believed in them, and I could appreciate the stories and rituals built around them. But some all powerful being personally overseeing the universe was a leap that my brain never really made. 

It didn’t help that most of my exposure to white Christianity involved blonde haired, blue eyed adults telling me that my family was going to hell. Of all the different cultures, religions, and belief systems that I encountered, Christianity frightened me the most.

Still, skepticism never canceled out curiosity for me. If anything, curiosity was always the stronger impulse. I wanted to know what people believed. I wanted to know why they believed it. I wanted to look, but I didn’t necessarily need to believe.

Years later, when I married Adam, I found myself encountering another kind of certainty. Adam had been raised atheist. His father had once been a Catholic priest in the Carmelite order in France, and part of his work was interpreting old scriptures. But the deeper he went into the old texts, the more questions he accumulated, and he came out of the monastery as a fiercely committed atheist. 

Adam had inherited his certainty. At first, I respected it. 

Since I had never been especially comfortable with people that identified as devout Christians, being with someone who had no interest in religion felt easy. 

But over time I noticed that militant atheism could be every bit as irritating as militant religion. 

Different conclusions. Same posturing.

The absolute certainty. The condescension. The need to make sure everyone else knew they were wrong. It made me understand my father’s lesson with a new lens. 

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you what to believe” didn’t mean that religion was foolish. And it didn’t mean that atheism was superior.

It meant: be aware of anyone who is too eager to do your thinking for you. Including the people who agree with you.

As I look back, I think that sentence shaped far more of my life than my relationship with religion. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the systems that insist there’s one correct way to do something. 

One correct way to believe. One correct way to love. One correct kind of relationship structure. One correct expression of sexuality. 

One correct modality. One correct path towards healing. 

Even now in my work, I resist the idea that one framework should become the gospel simply because somebody gave it a name and certified people to teach it.

I’ve been trained in different modalities. I use them constantly. I value them...but I don’t worship them.

I take what's useful. I test it against my own experience. I pay attention to the person in front of me. I discard what doesn't fit. 

And I have my father to thank for that .

What I’m realizing now is that he never told me not to believe in anything. That would’ have been its own kind of dogma.

He told me not to let someone else decide my beliefs for me. 

There's a profound difference between the two sentiments.

For most of my life, skepticism came easily to me…but faith did not. I wanted evidence. I wanted explanations. I wanted to know where an idea came from and whether it could survive scrutiny.

I still do.

But lately, I’ve been playing with the possibility that skepticism doesn’t have to require certainty either. 

I can acknowledge that I don’t know anything.

I can let a ritual mean something without needing to prove that the universe received it.

I can pull a tarot card and let the image provoke a question.

I can look at my birth chart, roll my eyes as I read my horoscope...and still admit how eerie it is when so much of that shit lands.

I can burn bay leaves under a new moon and give myself something to release.

I can dance under a full moon and let myself manifest whatever it is I'm trying to make more room for.

I can become curious about ancestors I never knew.

I can learn about traditions that make some part of my rational brain roll her eyes and still ask if there is something there worth experiencing.

None of this requires me to abandon the lesson that I learned in that driveway. Because that IS the lesson. 

“Dont ever let anyone tell you what to believe” also means that I don’t have to let my inner skeptic dictate what every other version of me is allowed to explore.

I can believe provisionally. I can change my mind. I can hold science in one hand and mystery in the other without insisting that one of them immediately defeat the other.

Maybe some things will eventually be explained.  Some things will turn out to be nonsense. Some things may forever be unknowable. And some things still matter even if I never exactly know why.

My dad never handed me a religion. He gave me an inheritance of perpetual curiosity. 

And more than forty years later, I’m still deciding what I want to do with it.