INSIGHT That’s the spirit!


A spiritual kid tries to reason with her rational parents. by Jules Sutherland


See, I was the random mystical kid in a family of rational-atheists. Actually, to be fair, my dad identifies as agnostic, but he maintains a considerable skepticism towards anything that smacks of pseudoscience, dogma, religion, idealism, or that can’t be substantiated with empirical evidence. My sister, and to a lesser extent my brother, are cut from the same cloth. Yet I was born with a rambunctious


appetite for the esoteric, for mystery, for anything that might illuminate answers to little questions like, ‘Who’s this God dude I’ve been hearing about?’,


‘Are


ghosts real?’, ‘What number comes after infinity?’, ‘Where do you go when you die?’ And of course the humdinger, ‘Why are we here?’ I’ve often joked that for my third


birthday I experienced an existentialist crisis. Fortunately, for my fourth birthday I got a sense of humour. To their great credit, my parents


never told me outright what I should or shouldn’t believe, but always encouraged me to look for reason in whatever I investigated. And investigate I did, to the best of


A 10 JULY | AUGUST 2017


re you a spiritual person? I am. But depending on who’s asking, my answer to this question may


vary a tad. Or a lot. I’ll explain. I am one of the very lucky people who


had an incredibly fortunate childhood. I had – and still have – a remarkably functional family. My emotional and material needs were met with love and generosity in abundance. I wanted for very little. But I definitely wasn’t born with a spiritual spoon in my mouth.


my ability. When I wasn’t busy staging one-woman productions of The Sound of Music in my family’s living room, I was traversing parallel universes in my imagination or trawling through the library trying to find anything that would satiate my thirst for spiritual sustenance. I even insisted on going to Sunday school for a while there, while all the other kids were begging their parents not to make them go. Again, hats off to Mum and Dad. They didn’t try to stop me. They accepted it with grace, and I imagine, a fair helping of amusement. “God’s not a person. He’s a spirit.”


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