Faith and Cotton Candy
Miles Beauchamp

Hmmm, my faith, my story; let’s start with an analogy: I liken my faith to cotton candy. Why cotton candy?  Well come on – cotton candy is light and fluffy, not much substance, and disappears all too quickly. But there is another way to view cotton candy: You usually have cotton candy at fun places, it tastes good, it’s pretty, calories sure but no fat, it’s like air, and yet when it melts and gives way, it lingers.  When it melts, it’s difficult to remove.  

My faith began with two grandmothers. My father’s mother was a nice enough woman but one of the vicious born-again Christian types who would rather be punished into doing good than make reasoned, rational choices on her own.  My father remembers his dad taking her to church every Sunday for a two or three hour damnation-from-the-pulpit sermon while he and the kids - my father and his brothers - waited in the car for her outside in the heat of summer during depression era Phoenix. Because of this, my father’s only interest in church was during holidays – and then a bit grudgingly. His abundant goodness comes from his own heart.

My mother’s mother was a much gentler Christian who studied the Bible and met with her friend Sister Holowel - my grandfather called her Old Lady Holowel to me though she couldn’t have been much older than him - to talk about the bible and pray and, well, gossip.  I have my grandmother’s old bible with all of her writings in the margins as she worked to come to terms with it and adapt it and herself to each other.  In one of the margins she wrote simply, “Be good.” Not a bad philosophy at all. She didn’t push her religion down anyone’s throat – it was simply for her. She would go to church occasionally, but usually weekends were spent on some land they owned outside LA or in their backyard making homemade ice cream.  She played jokes on us, she was fun, she enjoyed life whether it was hard or easy, and she helped me see that life is well played when in peace with the here and now. My prayers are usually just an internal dialog with that grandmother rather than to a deity. 

Because of this, and my father’s anathema to church, my mother’s subsequent interest in church, besides the usual holiday sermons, plays, pageants, and programs, was for her kids.  But somehow this worked fine. The family was always associated with a large Presbyterian or non-denominational community church. My sister and I went to Sunday School and youth programs and the family as a whole went, well, during the occasional holiday.


But in about the 9th grade or so, I started becoming seriously interested in religions and began studying them.  I studied on my own, in Bible as Literature classes in high school – remember when some high schools had those - and college, in examining various church dogmas and attending assorted places of worship.  I was interested in religions and what made them work.  I wanted to know why we needed religion.  So I studied Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, Muslims, Judaism, Mormonism, Hindus, Buddhists, and many more – the people and the religions. Plus I also seriously studied Christian Science – not because I was actually interested in Christian Science because I couldn’t see the point in praying to get rid of a headache when an aspirin did just fine, but because of a girl I was dating at the time.  When she and I broke up so did my waning interest in Christian Science.

But I continued to study religion, including at the Crystal Cathedral, because I had the most difficult time reconciling two things: What religion purports to be, and what it actually seems to be.  If a Baptist or a Catholic or a believer of a similar doctrine truly believes in what they claim to believe, how could they be on street corners and in front of churches demonstrating against two individuals because of their gender who are in love and getting married?  Or screaming “Not in my backyard” at city council meetings when discussions on where to place homeless shelters come up? Or who view money spent on prisons as more important than money spent on rehabilitation? Who would rather scream “three strikes and you’re out” rather than do what their bible prescribes and turn the other cheek?  Who somehow find no problem with believing in a dogma that says thou shalt not kill as they kill in the name of god.  Oh, those great religious paradoxes.

My story has for any number of years now been one of coming to terms with religions and those paradoxes. How do you kill in the name of peace? How do you throw your own child out of his or her home because of who they wish to love? How do you build huge, monolithic churches and multi-story crosses and not take food to someone standing on a street corner? How do you send women and men around the world to convert someone to your religion without considering their own culture and beliefs? How do you send women and men around the world, dress them up in ties and modest dresses to talk to us about Joseph Smith and Mormons when there are uneducated and hungry people in that country?   How do you dare subjugate women in the name of religion? How do you dare put guns in the hands of children? How do you dare kill in the name of god? How to you allow someone to starve in the name of a prophet who broke bread with the masses?  How do you wrestle with hypocrisy in the name of truth?

My faith? My faith lies not so much with holy books, stained glass, crosses on hills, preachers screaming about hellfire and damnation, priests with horrific secrets, ministers on television who drive off in cars that cost more than double the average national income because god wants them to prosper, or with any of the trappings humans use to associate themselves with the holy or what they perceive as holy.  My faith lies….here. My faith lies in you. My faith lies in our kids back there in RE and the life we show them can be led.  May faith lies in those who sew clothes for the homeless, who donate time or money to battered women shelters, in those who teach when their degrees could offer them much more, in those who write comic books instead of Left Behind end-of-time novels. My faith lies in those who look ahead instead of behind.  My faith does not lie on a cross on Mt. Soledad or a 120 foot tall statue of Jesus in Rio De Janerio or in a holy city.  My faith does not lie in beads, on alters, on water dabbed on foreheads, or in sitting in darkened booths confessing some perceived – or real – sin. 

My faith is not centered on me.  It is not centered on where I’m going to spend eternity, who I want to follow, who I need to kill in order to be loved by a god.  I don’t need to be loved by a god.  My faith lies in the knowledge that I’m not going to pick up the gun. My faith lies in the knowledge that I’m not going to turn on the gas. My faith lies in the knowledge that I’m not going to prevent someone from loving someone in the name of god.  My faith lies in the knowledge that I will look at the person on the street corner in the eyes. My faith lies in the knowledge that I will be a good neighbor. 

Faith may indeed move mountains but my faith isn’t one in which I wait and hope and pray that somehow a mountain will be moved but rather that I will find a way to get the tractor to move the mountain.  Or have the patience to truly see if that mountain really needs to be moved.  My faith is not based on ego – mine or anyone else’s.

Now I would be decidedly less than honest if I didn’t admit that my faith has been tested of late.  Not tested in any sort of biblical sense, but tested in ways that make me wonder at my own abilities and strength at coping with the vagaries of life.  Last Thursday I was sitting in a chair behind my father as he struggled to do what the eye doctor asked.  He is for the most part blind, very hard of hearing, and at times during the testing seemed to drift in and out of the situation. On that same day my mother was with my sister helping her eat, and clean up, and cope with her terminal cancer.  After leaving the doctor, dad and I stopped for a late lunch, and we made it just in time to pick Ryan up from school, pick up Paige from school, run by Michael’s for poster board, drop pop at home, say hi to mom and see how my sister’s doing, and then run home to have dinner and finally clean up while Michelle helped the kids carve pumpkins after her difficult and tiring day in a classroom.

I bring up that particular day to simply show that we all have “those days.” And when those days come to me, I don’t reach for the sky, look heavenward and say something akin to “I am weak and I leave it all in your hands lord.”  I do what most of us have to do and that’s simply put on my shoes and head out the door hoping I remembered to put gas in the car.  My faith lies in doing what I know to be right, what I believe is just, and what I trust will give the most comfort.  And that way, when my faith is tested, I can answer that test with the best prescription for faith I’ve ever heard. A college professor simply said do the very best you can with everything you know and then, when there are no other choices, choose “C”.  And you know what? For the most part it’s always worked. Do everything you can with everything you have and then do one more thing – choose something. 

We have heard a great deal of late about things that are faith-based; faith-based careers, faith-based solutions for drug problems, the homeless, hunger, and more.  Well I think that’s great; it’s just dependant on what you have faith in.  Now what I have faith in and what faith-based organizations think I should have faith in are distinctly different.  I have faith that my son – or more likely my daughter – will embarrass me before the week is up. I have faith – faith – in my own knowledge that I don’t know even a miniscule amount of what to have faith in.  It would be so easy to walk into a Christian mega-church and say sign me up.  Because then I wouldn’t have to think anymore. I could vote for whom I’m told to vote for, could donate to whom I’m told to donate to, could believe what I’m told to believe and be secure in the knowledge of a human-designed heaven.  But I can’t.  I’m too old for stories, too questioning for dogma, too curious for absolutes, and too open-eyed for hypocrisy.  So finally I have the great opportunity and joy to have faith in you and me.

My story is everyday average and my faith is everyday simple. I believe in us as individuals. I believe in us as parents, kids, grandparents, grandchildren, voters, workers, artists, and keepers of whatever flame we keep.  I believe in us as a congregation, I believe in us as a city, I believe in us as a nation, I believe in us as a world.  I believe in the gentle sweetness of cotton candy when it’s placed in the mouth and the strength of cotton candy when it’s dry and you’re trying to remove it from a crying child’s hair.  I believe in cotton candy.  And I believe in Summit.