Cutting and Running

...clearly it’s bizarro world because I have stumbled on a scenario where I could sympathize with W…

It’s easy to pretend that faith is just a question of three more-or-less simple positions: I believe in God, or I think the whole notion of God is ludicrous, or God is a possibility, I haven’t enough evidence to make up my mind one way or the other. I’ll even grant that you could consider these positions a spectrum and that most of us find ourselves drawn to one spot on the spectrum and move a little this way or that way, but mostly we’ve got a gut feeling and construct philosophical world views that fit the gut instinct. But I am beginning to suspect that faith is a much more complicated relationship with authority.

I grew up (and remain) Bahá’í, which doesn’t make for a simple relationship with authority, since one important principle is individual investigation of the truth. We’ve got no clergy and every individual is responsible for their own spiritual progress, the institutions of the religion aren’t there to mediate for you — and a lot of Bahá’ís carefully build caveats into answers to questions you put to them — “my understanding of this is X based on citations Y and Z” or “many people have interpreted this thus.” At the same time, Bahá’ís believe that religion serves not just individual spiritual progress, but also the creation of social order, harmonious relations between people, even those with clashing opinions, and there is no higher principle than the creation of unity. So an individual who holds a different point of view than a consensus arrived at by the group, is obligated to concede to the will of the group even if the group is wrong and the individual is right, on the notion that dissension is more harmful than being wrong. This runs counter to a cultural icon we have the lone dissenter who sees reason, stands up to authority. The drama of the heat of debate is addictive and exciting, and I am often frustrated with myself by what seems like a lack of commitment in always getting both sides of an argument.

The chinks in my relationship with authority came with immersion in the world of midwifery and confronting this notion that not everything a doctor does is always in the best interests of an individual patient, which might not seem like such an epiphany, only it comes up again and again. When you try researching immunizations for children you find very intelligent, rational people looking at the same evidence and rationally arriving at different conclusions about what is best for their own children, and I don’t feel anywhere near wise enough to decide that half of these people are right and half of them are wrong. I met a mother who had a story about suspecting her child had some milk allergy and was reacting to the dairy in her diet when he was six months old and breastfed exclusively and had some eczema. But then a dermatologist told her the eczema was completely normal, so she merrily continued drinking milk. And then when he was one, the first time he had cow’s milk, he broke out in a huge rash and she kicked herself for not following her gut instinct. I commiserated with her frustration at not knowing as she was doing this for the first time, but it’s not like with son number four I’ve already made every mistake possible and so I go about all of this perfectly. And the people I know who are most sure of themselves are, um, a little fringe, they passionately advocate urine therapy and lotus births and things I can’t quite rationally justify. As if rationality were the criterion by which we all go!

This is the catch-22 of parenthood, and of life — there some things you can’t know without experience and the only way to get experience is to go out there and make a mistake, but there are things too crucial to risk big mistakes. Which doctor do you listen to? When do you get a second opinion, a third, a fourth? We all have crazy voices in our heads and it’s easy to suspect that our intuition that we shouldn’t get on an airplane tomorrow because it is going to crash is just a mask for other anxieties and fears. But then you get the stories of the people who didn’t go on Titanic, and you think “what if, this one time, it really is a gut instinct and it’s right?”

The authorities we have to trust aren’t just doctors — they are investment counselors and plumbers and auto mechanics and teachers and the friend who tells you you’re dating a loser. My relationship with my children’s violin teacher is where my drama is playing out right now — there’s this act of will and faith, trusting that months of practicing bow hands and holding the violin with the natural grace of the weight of the head rather than by clenching it between shoulder and jaw, of letting the weight of the back transmitted through the arm to the bow create tone rather than pushing and pulling against yourself, all before the fingers of the left hand ever come near the fingerboard — are going to make progress easier and more rapid once they actually do start with the Twinkles. But it takes so little to set off spasms of doubt — sit-ups for a seven year old to give him core strength to stand up straight holding the violin? Her theory that girls just innately learn faster? How long do I give this experiment before I go seeking elsewhere, what authority do I trust, how susceptible am I to flattery, and what’s to say I wouldn’t just be shopping around for someone willing to tell me how amazing my children are and what a great job I’m doing as their mother and violin coach? I really like the violin teacher, and then she makes me a little crazy, and I waver between wanting to give this a chance to work, and berating myself for not standing up and saying “this is crazy!” Where do I get my own personal version of the Iraq Study Group?