Excerpt from a Letter to My Brother

As for me myself, spiritually agnostic, obviously it doesn't mean anything by itself, really it denotes the absence of anything specific more than anything else. So, imagine it this way, take your spirituality, then try to take it and place it somewhere outside the bounds of church, scripture, community and doctrine. In other words, to a place where nothing exists to clarify the faith or spirituality that you feel inside of you except how you feel and what you think yourself. So, obviously the problem is, that you start from scratch and there's no overarching discourse, paradigm, theology, or whatever, with which to agree, or disagree, to compare and contrast with, etc. Now in a world without any real spiritual framework that resonates with how you feel, imagine trying to explain that to someone or even express it in words. I mean, really, I just feel very little urge to. It's a beautiful private vision of the world that I can't possibly explain in whole--partially cause I'm lazy too. Bits of it resemble aspects of christianity, bits of it just pure humanism and things I picked up here and there and made my own, bits of it verge on an environmentalist sorta way of looking at the world and nature and human beings as meant to be in synch with one another (even if human beings have more or less lost touch with the ebb and flow of the planet and nature, and even assuming an original state of nature, things are still quite nasty and viscous of course; life and death and survival and adaptation and all that, though spirituality, in this one of many spiritually related dimensions, nonetheless derives from having originally been a part of all that and being born of all that and acknowledging that technology, philosophy, civilization, whatever, only mask those primordial origins, they don't erase them. We are thus part of the seasons, the sunsets, the tides and the seas, the winds and the rain, the prowling wolf, the clever ape, the quivering wings of a hummingbird, the needles of the pine tree, the strata of the earth, and the light of the stars). I am not however an environmentalist in any traditional sense since my activism is essentially non-existent; like I said, it's a spiritual thing. (although as a side remark, intellectually and on principle, I believe that the environment is the single most important thing on the world agenda).

So... like really, it's almost impossible to explain. And I'd imagine that if you thought about it, you'd see that what it means to be Christian, to you personally, and how you FEEL about your faith in particular, is also nearly impossible if not impossible to accurately convey to someone, just because telling someone the things you believe in doesn't convey the experience of faith, and because deeply internal experiences can only be approximated in words, and since religion, faith, spirituality is the most internal and other-worldly experience one can have (love being the other possibility, and many would argue that the two are essentially one and the same, or different manifestations of the same thing) it's particularly hard. So... since as an agnostic, it's really rare that we verbalize externalize or codify the things that we believe or intuit from among our FEELINGS and deeply internal experiences, it's doubly hard difficult to locate one's self on a map of spirituality (if such a thing existed).

Ha, for the longest time in Berkeley, I felt like I must have become a sun worshipper. Because... I dunno. This was my fourth and fifth years. Do you ever think, as you go to sleep, how sleep is like a little death? I mean, you're not conscious or aware; it's just empty time; and if existence is consciousness, or at the least consciousness is the prerequisite to being aware that you exist, then in a sense, while you're sleeping and not dreaming, u could cease to exist for all you know. Then every time I would wake up in the morning, I would think how wonderful it was that I was permitted to live again and to see and experience life all over for one more day. And at night when I watched the setting sun from my balcony window, I felt that the day, or the sun, or the world, was saying goodbye until the next day, except that the sun, and the world, and the day, where really inside of me, because the significance and meaning that they had for me were internally attributed, rather than objectively or externally present. I wrote a prose poem about it in arabic (sorta). Actually most of the things I'm talking to you about right now creep their way into my writings; it's one of the things that find expression in my writing and one of the things that drive it.

neways, I can't believe I've written this much. I don't think I've ever bothered talking it out to this extent before now. Well, I'm gonna stop since I realize it's a lot and much of it may not make any sense. I really have no issues with normal religious people; actually I respect people of faith quite a lot, partially because of my childhood growing up in a catholic family, and partially just because I think that for people who actually examine their faith and interrogate it, believing can take a great deal more courage and strength than most people realize or appreciate. Plus, very simply, faith, when done right, is a beautiful thing. Ever since I was in HS, that's all I thought falling in love is: a leap of faith, a suspension of disbelief, a commitment whose foundations are laid in the soul. As such, I'm always open to talk to people about their faith so long as no one's proselytizing (one of my dear friends at Cal invited me to a tiny faith dialogue thing, just me and her and two others, and we talked about Christianity and what that means to them, and what my spirituality means to me, and how I feel about christianity; at the end she told me she was worried for my soul, and loved me like a brother, and I said I appreciated that a lot and try to keep an open heart and mind to things--although really, no one changes a heart or a mind by force; it has to be ready and willing, so I told her, I'm going to do what I do and anything else would be a lie), and obviously given my background and given everything I've just told you, I'm not one of those people who're likely to object to religion or faith based on the absence of logic or proof---that's just missing the point. So, basically, since I've forced you to read all this, feel free to write back with whatever you like or your own sentiments, etc. I know faith is a big part of your life, and that of our whole family as well.