From time to time I get E mails from a friend who used to live here and has moved to another state. Sometimes they are examples of inspiration that she believes come from God. This or that person asked God for help and voila! Help came. And I am supposed to jump up and down and think oh boy, maybe that can work for me!!! I just got one. I know she is a believer and I love her anyway. But I wish she’d leave me out of her inspirational network. She will not change me and I am irked when she tries as in “see what you are missing”. I almost sent her a reminder that I am an agnostic at best. Then I decided that it was mean-spirited of me and deleted it. I just won’t answer this one.

I will never forget the venerable Sophie, my piano mentor, member of a world-class musical family, telling me about a friend-student who was always trying to convert her to the Christian faith. Sophie was Jewish. Sophie did not go to Synagogue; Sophie did not pray nor consider herself devout. But Sophie knew she was Jewish, fled the Nazis, the whole magilla. She just knew she could never be a Christian. I’m surprised she didn’t push this proselytizer out her rear window into the Hudson.

My dear Jay, bereft of most of his memory, ill and in the hospital looked up one afternoon to see a priest walk into his room. He slowly shook his head (he couldn’t talk) from side to side and the priest left. It gave me great joy to know that he still, compromised as he was, knew who he was.

We all of us have our beliefs. I do not feel it is useful and certainly it is patronizing to think that because someone has a different mindset than you do, that somehow they haven’t thought things through, something is wrong with the way they think, they just haven’t seen the light, and if they would only see things YOUR way, then they would live happier lives. Or something. I know plenty of the faithful who are totally miserable.

What matters, believer or non-believer, is that you are happy with your choice. If you feel you have to change others, that is unfortunate because it has nothing to do with belief and everything to do with, at best, convincing yourself that you have made the right choice by convincing others, or, at worst, exerting control over others.

xx, Teal