This is why I'm relieved to have religion in my life...

I never saw myself as the religious type.  If anything I’d developed a vehement opposition to it since childhood.   I believed Karl Marx was wrong in his assessment that religion was the opiate of the masses, only in as much as opiates tended to chill people right out, where religion gave purpose and legitimacy to irrationality, bigotry and violence.  I grew up in the eighties when “the troubles” in Ireland were played out on the nightly news.  I can still see the images on the tele, of grey skies, firebombs and men in balaclavas marching menacingly in the name of their religion, my religion, and it was terrifying.

“Where are the dinosaurs in the Bible?” was my favourite question for the nuns at school.  The plot holes in the Holy book were further proof to me that I was being indoctrinated into a nonsensical cult that favoured incense over intelligence and ritual over reason.  “Well not me,” I thought, “I’ll take the truth thanks,” and I scoffed for the next 20 years at other people’s “higher powers” and “spiritual journeys”.  I blamed religion for all the troubles in the world.

That was until, in 2006 I lost a friend and I lost a job, and six months later, found that I was still mired in a darkness that just swallowed up every light I tried to shine at it.  It was a depression that wouldn’t budge no matter how many old tricks I tried.  I was so desperate I tried the oldest of tricks, religion.  I shopped around a bit, went back to church, read some of those New Age secret kind of books, dabbled in witchcraft, you know, the usual stuff, and found myself finally at a Dharma Centre, a Buddhist school, and the light began filtering in.

This is not a post about my religion being better than anyone else’s.  I recognise I’ve found my religion because Buddhism resonates with me in a way that Catholicism does with my Mum.  I realise I have always been envious of her having that faith to lean on.   My religion is as truthful to me as hers is to her, and I don’t ever trouble myself with trying to figure out which one of us is “right”.  I just think that we are both so very lucky to have them.

As a former non-religious person, I just don’t know how I’d have lived through today without the Buddhist structure and explanation.  As I sat in the little room at the vet’s, holding my boy, listening with him to some beautiful Buddhist chanting while the doctor administered the injection, I felt strangely happy.   Happy that I’d been able to give him a gentle death, that from a Buddhist perspective we had all our ducks in a row towards a happy rebirth for my beautiful old mate and that I had some jobs to go on with in his memory over coming weeks.

That’s what religion is all about in the end, isn’t it?  The end?  About being ready for ours and coping with other people’s.  At it’s best, religion is a framework that holds us together when it seems we will shatter into a million pieces, it’s an instruction manual for navigating life’s most frightening mysteries, it offers reasons when it all seems so unfair.

Is it “true”?  Who knows.  I don’t really care.  It feels good and it makes me a better person. Is there more to life than that?