Jackie Danicki

I just finished A Girl Named Zippy and read half of She Got Up Off the Couch this morning, and I can think of few writers whose sheer talent has moved me the way Haven Kimmel’s has and is. Maybe I’ll write more about that later. In the meantime, I think this quotation from Kimmel is worth pondering, considering her own history with religion (much of her memoirs deal with her rejection of her mother’s Quakerism, and she later attended Quaker seminary after warning the dean that “You’ll never turn me into a Christian”):

I don’t think there’s an intelligent person of faith who doesn’t struggle. As Keats called the world a “veil of soul-making” so is religion a veil of meaning-making. As Buddhists or Quakers or Hindus we are to deepen ourselves, and to learn in that process how to live. And not just how to live but how to do so with more compassion and kindness and acceptance of finitude and decay and mortality. Except that finitude and decay and mortality really really suck, and they make merry with our attempts at depth and growth; the plain facts of human existence make religion look naïve at best. So it has to be a choice, like marriage. You get up in the morning, you decide to stay married. That’s marriage. You get up in the morning, you believe in the Buddha-field or Quaker Universalism or Allah or whatever, and that’s religion. Some people find it much easier than others, for whatever reason. For some people it seems indisputable; objectively true and self-evident. Bless them.

Filed under: Life