Whispering Wyrd

The Healing Web

recent posts

  • The Perfection Trap

    Trying for spiritual perfectionism has derailed me more times than I can even count.

    For so much of my life I had the very misguided and distorted view that God demands perfection. So each and every time I would try to approach God, that’s what I aimed for, perfection. And predictably each time I would fail. Fail again. And again. I’d get so frustrated and distraught that each time I’d just give up. That was a recurring pattern throughout my life.

    I also can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say that they’re afraid too, afraid that they’ve upset God regardless of the religious or spiritual tradition they follow. Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews. I’ve seen the same unhealthy, obsessive fear I had.

    What I understand now is that I’m not a perfect person, so I literally can’t be perfect. Nobody else is either. Anybody, and I do mean anybody, who tries to give you the impression that they’re perfect in the way they approach God is one of two things, a liar or deluded. There have been countless cases of both throughout history.

    The goal of spiritual perfectionism and performance always backfires. At least for me it did. If God truly knows all hearts, and knows mine, then He knows I tried.

    The time I wasted.

    When I think about how much of my life I’ve spent worrying about what people thought of me, the people who were never going to accept me anyway, it makes me sad. So much of my life utterly wasted.

    So much time also wasted worrying whether God loved me or whether He was going to send me to hell. What an utterly twisted, distorted, and completely transactional view of God I had. So much time wasted thinking I could control things beyond my control. Thinking I could make God love me.

    All that time wasted. All that grief and sadness and fear. Once time is gone, it’s gone forever, like words spoken in anger. Once they’re spoken, there is no withdrawing them.

    What that transactional God actually was and did.

    That transactional view of God, the belief that as long as I did everything perfectly, God would love me, I now realize was deeply unhealthy and misinformed/misguided. Because the very second I inevitably “sinned” in thought, word, or deed, whether by commission or omission, that love was immediately withdrawn.

    This is just another thread of the same tapestry, the same fear and shame that fed my alcoholism and addiction. I remember a therapist I went to many years ago telling me that he’s never worked with an addicted client who wasn’t on a “spiritual journey” and that when I finally healed, I would finally have a healthy view of God.

    The kind of transactional relationship I used to believe about God is unhealthy in human relationships and it’s unhealthy spiritually. It’s a repeated spiritual whiplash… now God loves me, now He doesn’t. Now He does, now He doesn’t.

    What I want to do with whatever time I have left

    With whatever time I have left, even if it’s just one more breath, I want to spend it unafraid and not worried. I want my wife, my sons, and my grandkids to know I love them beyond the capability of language to convey. I understand now that God does love me, even with or despite my inability to be perfect. So do my wife, sons, and grandkids.

    That’s what I lean on now… LOVE.

    ~Buck

  • What’s Really Important

    A lot of us, definitely myself included, burn through life as if we have all the time in the world. That is until something happens that forces us to come face to face with the fact that, wow, this life really is brief.

    Things that seemed so extremely important suddenly aren’t important at all, and other things, things we took for granted, become all important.

    Peace in the heart and mind, time with family, finally being at peace with the God of your understanding… suddenly those things become the only things that really matter.

    Suddenly, other peoples’ opinions of you are completely irrelevant. Only the opinions of your closest loved ones and God really matter.

    I think it’s important to let go of the regrets of the past and focus only on the here and now. The love of your spouse, the hugs from your adult children, and the smiles on your grandchildren’s faces.

    Instead of replaying old wounds from the past, listen to the gentle sound of raindrops falling. The leaves rustling in the trees as they are released from the branches because Fall is here. The warmth of the sun on your face. These things we’ve taken for granted our whole lives, suddenly they are more precious than all the gold in the world.

    Wherever you are in the world, I wish you peace. I wish you love, the most precious gift we can have.

    ~Buck

  • Where My Heart Actually Lives

    I haven’t posted anything here in a while. A lot has happened between my last post and now, and I’ll do my best to describe what I experienced. It may not look like it has much to do with recovery, but I believe it has everything to do with recovery. At least for me, I don’t pretend to know what’s best for anybody else.

    Because of a health issue that has become impossible to ignore any longer, I’m going to be speaking and writing freely from this point on. The health problem is that my memory and thinking aren’t what they were, and I can feel it and my wife and sons have noticed it. Some pretty rapid cognitive decline. I’ll leave it at that. Until now, I’ve held back what’s in my heart out of worry that if I said what’s really in my heart, it would upset a few family members’ religious beliefs and that they wouldn’t understand, or wouldn’t even try to understand. I’ve come to realize that holding back my own heart has been backfiring and causing me grief. So, definitely no more of that.

    If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ll know I practiced Buddhism for somewhere around twenty years. Not always actively, especially not during active addiction. But when I started on my recovery journey I leaned heavily into Buddhism, and it got me through the worst of it.

    There’s something I’ve touched on only vaguely and infrequently in my writing. Something that had been eating at me for a long time. I won’t go into all the “technical” details here, that would take more space than a single blog post allows. But I want to finally say it plainly.

    During one of the most intense, painful, and frightening phases of withdrawal/detox, I really thought I was going to die. Not like “oh, this is terrible, what if I die”. No, I really thought I was going to die. I had two seizures and that terrified me.

    What I’ve never mentioned in my writing is that until recently I carried a very intense fear of death. More accurately, a fear of what I had been taught from a very early age happens after death.

    The teachings I grew up hearing were, at least to my young ears, nothing to take comfort in to say the least. My young mind heard all that talk of “hell” and “the wrath of God” and understood it to mean there’s a monster waiting on the other side, so death is something to be avoided at all costs. That fear stayed with me for decades.

    It made my life miserable and it flared more intensely whenever I got sick. Because sickness can lead to death and death was the doorway through which one fell into the hands of that angry, wrathful, vengeful god literally just waiting to throw you into an eternal burning lake of fire.

    The verse that lived in my head from a very young age was Revelation 14:11: “And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night…” That is an absolutely terrifying image for a kid to absorb.

    So when I thought I was dying during detox, I tried my best to believe in Christian doctrine and started going to church. Not because I actually was a Christian, I wasn’t and I knew it, but because I was so afraid of that “monster on the other side” that I was doing it solely to avoid hell. That was the only reason. I didn’t believe the rest of it. I still don’t.

    Fast forward to recently, from around the time of my last post here. I came to realize more and more that I wasn’t being completely honest with myself in my spiritual beliefs and practices. Buddhism answered the vast majority of my questions, and there’s absolutely no doubt its teachings on the mind were a big part of what got me through detox.

    But there was something I kept getting stuck on and it’s where my dishonesty with myself finally became undeniable and unbearable. The firm, unwavering Buddhist teaching on Atman and anatman/anatta. Self (capital S) and non-Self. In plain English, soul and no soul. Nothing permanent whatsoever within a person. This is a foundational concept in Buddhism and there is absolutely no budging on it. When I finally became honest with myself, that’s what I fundamentally disagree with. That, and the teaching that there is no God.

    I will say this though, I agree with Buddhism’s absolute refusal to entertain the question of who created the heavens and the earth. I completely agree that question is utterly irrelevant to the problem of suffering and liberation from suffering here and now.

    That left me in a particularly confusing and painful spot. The faith I’d practiced for a large part of my life didn’t answer my deepest questions, not after it had gotten me through detox. And I don’t believe in the teachings and doctrines of the Abrahamic faiths either. So what was I to do now? Where could I possibly turn?? Pretending doesn’t work for me, especially at sixty years old.

    What I did was start reading the mystics and contemplatives from several traditions. Merton, Francis of Assisi, John of the Cross, Rumi, Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Meister Eckhart, and modern contemplative voices like Richard Rohr. Almost every page I found myself yelling “Yes!” in my head. These people were talking about things I utterly do believe. Finally! Here were people speaking of God in ways that actually makes sense to me. Reading them had a profound effect on me. It would be accurate to call it life changing because it was/is. So began my search.

    I longed for, ached for, connection with the Godhead they wrote of. I went in search of it, knowing that at last there were words for what I had only briefly touched before and what I had been so desperately seeking. I found it in the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita uses language very familiar to me from my decades of Buddhist study and practice. Words like “dharma” and “Atman.” But it goes beyond those words to describe the very essence of what I’ve been searching for. Finally, answers to the questions that have been gnawing at me for so long.

    I suppose I’m a bit late to the game at 60. But that’s OK because being late is better than not arriving at all. I still have deep respect and love for the Buddha and his teachings. But I’ve finally admitted that I disagree with the anatman/anatta doctrine so fundamental to Buddhist thought, and I’ve finally found where my heart actually lives. I feel settled. I feel at peace, even with this new/worsening cognitive decline, this battle I must fight. I feel… like I’ve arrived home.

    ~Buck

  • AI and Recovery

    Disclaimer: I don’t like AI, so obviously I don’t take a neutral stance here.

    I know that AI can be a useful tool in certain circumstances. For very important things, like health, it’s crucial to get an actual doctor’s opinion. The same holds true for topics regarding recovery. AI makes a lot of mistakes. A lot.

    It can be very tempting to just take what AI says at face value because it’s designed to sound very confident in its responses, even if those responses are nothing more than AI “hallucinations”. Personally I think that’s extremely dangerous, it can be very misleading.

    People all over the world are asking various AI chatbots questions about their health. I’ve read several news articles about AI diagnosing things doctors had missed. That’s great… when it works. But there are many more stories about AI chatbots giving horrible advice, causing great harm to individuals.

    Then there is the affect of AI data centers has on local environments. These data centers require an insane amount of energy and water. I’ve read that just asking a single question to any AI chatbot consumes, at minimum, a bottle of water.

    A single question. Imagine every person in the country asking just one question per day. That’s a minimum of 342 to 349 MILLION bottles of water per day.

    People in recovery can be particularly vulnerable during certain points in recovery. We need help, and fast. Sometimes it can be the middle of the night or 3 AM and we need help right then. Unlike people, AI never sleeps. It’s always there.

    It’s extremely tempting to open up the laptop or use the phone and ask an AI chatbot for help as if it were a person. AI is trained to mimic empathy. The key word is “mimic”. But it’s a machine. It has no feelings one way or another toward a suffering human being.

    And as good as AI is at mimicking human emotions, it can be easy to forget that’s not a human on the other side, it’s a machine. It has no body so it has absolutely no interoception. With no interoception, it is utterly incapable of accurately guessing a human’s current emotional and physical state.

    I write this because I know there are people out there who feel isolated and turn to AI. That’s why I think recovery groups are so vital. Recovery groups are both in-person and online. Real people, not machines. And those real people can provide something no machine ever could, true understanding through lived experience.

    A machine has never felt afraid at 3 in the morning, experienced flashbacks from trauma, or desperately wanted a drug or alcohol.

    A machine doesn’t know what any of that is like because it’s never experienced any of that. The people in recovery groups have. They KNOW what it’s like because they’ve experienced it themselves. They can help someone in ways no machine ever could.

    I’m under no illusion that AI is going to disappear or that it doesn’t have its uses. But I’m also under no illusion that it knows what’s best for us or is even capable of WANTING what’s best for us.

    As someone in recovery myself, I just want to encourage others to connect with real people, not machines. We are social creatures, we need each other. If you ever find yourself in great need and wanting to use or drink again and decide to use AI, please consider asking it about the nearest recovery group. That would be the best use of an AI chatbot at a time like that.

    Amituofo
    ~Buck

  • Letting Go Of The Struggle

    I haven’t published anything for the last several days. I’ve still been writing but those writings have just been for me. I needed the break.

    I want to publish because I want to, not because I feel like I have to. I don’t write as a job, and sometimes the things I’m working through need to stay private for a while before I’m ready to share them.

    I’m 19 months and one day out now with no substances. 579 days and I’ve realized something during these past several days… I’m still learning. I can still get knocked down pretty hard by a bad day, or by a couple of bad days in a row. But the important thing is I get back up.

    Nineteen months and one day. 579 days. That may not seem like much to some people but it’s huge to me. I don’t pick up a bottle. I don’t seek out pills. I can vividly remember so many times when I would have done one or the other or both.

    I’ve come a long way. I’m still alive. I’m not drinking or taking pills. I’m still healthy enough to practice Tai Chi and qigong every day. Since I last published anything I’ve even started learning Bai He Quan (White Crane kung fu).

    But something had been eating at me somewhere in the back of my mind since January 15, 2025, the day I took my last benzo after more than 20 years of taking them, alcohol before that, and more than a year and a half of tapering.

    I couldn’t put my finger on it. I just knew something was there gnawing at me. At times I got really frustrated because I knew something needed my attention, but I couldn’t identify it good enough to address it.

    During this break, it finally became clear. I had been holding on to the struggle. That’s hard to put into words. My nervous system had been on high alert for so long, not just during withdrawal, but for decades. Getting off benzos certainly didn’t make that any easier. My brain and body have had to learn how to regulate themselves without the substances I relied upon for so many years.

    But this goes back a lot further than substances. I’ve been on guard to one degree or another since I was a kid. There’s a reason I started drinking vodka in seventh grade and using drugs at 15. Things like that rarely happen in a vacuum.

    Somewhere along the way hyper-vigilance felt “normal” to me. Always watching. Always scanning. Always looking at people, places and situations for some sign of danger even when I was somewhere safe. Even when I was alone. Even when there was absolutely nothing to defend myself against.

    I finally saw this clearly during a particularly prolonged meditation session. I had gone into that meditation specifically wanting to understand what was happening inside me. And when the realization actually came it was utterly and painfully clear. I broke down and cried… “wept” would be a more accurate word. And then I wept some more. It was such an intense release that I actually felt a little physically unwell afterward.

    But I needed it, I needed to understand. Because once I could finally see what was happening I could start working on it instead of blindly struggling against something I couldn’t even name. And that’s what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been actively working with my body, my mind and my nervous system. Reminding them over and over and over again that we’re safe now.

    I’m learning that I can’t just “think” my way out of patterns that have been carried in my body for decades. So I’ve been using practices that involve the body as well as the mind. I already feel a little bit more at ease. Not because everything is suddenly or magically fixed but because I finally understand now what I’ve been carrying for frikkin decades.

    Letting go of the struggle doesn’t mean that the struggle magically disappears forever though. It might just mean realizing that I don’t have to stay braced against life every second of the day. I don’t have to constantly scan the horizon. I don’t have to keep fighting battles that ended a long time ago. I can learn every day bit by bit that this time in my life is different.

    And that I’m still healing. That I’m still learning and still in the process of becoming who I am when I’m not in danger anymore.

    There’s a saying heard a lot in recovery that goes “One day at a time.” After 579 days I understand those words more now than I ever did before. There isn’t some imaginary finish line where I’ll finally be able to declare myself completely healed. There is just today and what I choose to do with it.

    So if you’re struggling too, be gentle with yourself. Whether you’re healing from substances, trauma, hard or bad experiences, or from years of living in survival mode, give yourself time. Healing is a journey not a race toward some imagined finish line.

    We are all works in progress. Sometimes progress is just realizing that we’re safe enough now to start letting go of the struggle.

    Amituofo
    ~Buck

  • The Kindness That Never Makes Headlines

    I spent all of yesterday sick and in quite a bit of pain. I’m feeling better today, not completely back to normal, but good enough to run some errands and go grocery shopping with my wife.

    We stopped by my favorite little indoor produce stand too. I only needed some jalapenos this time so I picked out the ones I wanted and took them to the counter.

    “This is all I need today” I said.
     He bagged them up and said “These are on us.”

    I was surprised. He said that I’m a repeat customer and support their business and then asked if I’d ever seen the movie Pay It Forward. “Do that,” he said. “Pay it forward.” I thanked him and told him I definitely would. It was just a handful of jalapenos. A small thing really. But it completely changed my day.

    There’s so much noise in the world screaming for our attention. All the anger, division, suffering, and scary headlines. Sometimes it can make the world look a lot darker than it actually is.

    And then an regular person does something kind. That man had no idea what kind of couple of days I’d had. He didn’t know I was hurting or that I’d been in a pretty dark headspace because of feeling bad and the pain. He was just kind. And that small act of kindness shifted my whole mood.

    It reminded me that underneath all the noise everyday people are still doing good things for each other. Most of those things will never make a headline. They probably won’t ever be noticed by anybody except the person receiving them.

    But they matter. What we say matters and what we do matters. How we treat the person standing in front of us matters. Don’t think your act of kindness is too small to make a difference. You might have no idea how badly somebody needed it that day.

    Amituofo
    ~Buck

  • Today I Chose Peace

    I use the word chose deliberately because that’s what happened.

    I saw a headline that sent me down a rabbit hole. Clickbait works. As I kept on reading I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier. Before long at all I had started writing a post fueled completely by that anger and my sense of moral outrage.

    Then I caught myself. The anger was showing up in every sentence. If I finished writing and hit “Post,” all I would have done was add one more angry voice to a world that already has more than enough of them.

    Whether it’s the news, social media, or just the constant, unrelenting stream of things competing for our attention, it’s too easy to let someone else dictate our emotional state. Today I almost let that happen.

    But my peace is way more important to me and to my family than any headline. An angry heart tends to spread anger. A peaceful heart has a lot better chance of spreading peace.

    “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1

    “Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal law.” – The Buddha

    I don’t write this as a “look at me” post and I certainly don’t write it to preach. Like most of what I write, I’m just documenting my own journey. Some days I do better than others.

    If you’re anything like me and you catch yourself upset by a headline or caught in an endless cycle of outrage, maybe it’s worth pausing for a second. Ask yourself whether holding on to that anger will actually change anything… or whether protecting your own peace might be the better choice.

    Today, at least, I chose peace.

    Amituofo
    ~Buck

  • Growing More Than A Garden

    Last night I ate a lot of cherry tomatoes with my evening meal. Usually there wouldn’t be anything special about that but these came from our own garden. There’s just something special about eating food you’ve grown yourself. Food you’ve watered, weeded around, patiently waited for, and finally get to enjoy. After living in apartments for so long without a garden it makes this tiny harvest feel even more enjoyable.

    Back in Texas gardening was hit or miss. Some years the grasshoppers would come in clouds and destroy an entire garden overnight, stripping not just the vegetables but even the leaves and bark from trees.

    This year though we have a garden again. One thing about gardening here in the high desert is that it’s so hot for so long the growing season should last till January! Just kidding, it doesn’t, but it’s definitely a longer growing season than Santa Fe. We’ve only been in this house a short time but we’ve already been able to plant and harvest. Most of our plants came from Home Depot instead of from seed since we got started so late in the season. But they’re already giving us fresh produce.

    I planted the garden the day after we moved in. It was one of my highest priorities after we bought this house. For the first time in 6 years we have enough backyard space to really enjoy gardening again. So far we’ve harvested shishito peppers, radishes, jalapenos, and tomatoes. Today I’ll be picking squash and the zucchini and bell peppers won’t be far behind.

    Of course gardening is about more than the food. It gives me more time outside. It gives me exercise while I work the soil, pull weeds, water the plants, and collect what they’ve produced. More importantly though it teaches me patience.

    Patience has never come naturally to me but I think I’m slowly getting better at it as I get older. A garden doesn’t care whether you’re impatient or not. It’s gonna grow at its own pace and all you can do is tend to it while you wait. I think every garden grows two things, food and patience.

    Next year I want to expand it by quite a bit. It’ll mean more work but also more rewards. Along with what we’re already growing I want to add corn, okra, cantaloupe, and pumpkins. Speaking of growing things, I was worried about my bonsai trees when we moved here. Trees don’t like being moved and moving them to a completely different climate and elevation seemed really risky. To my surprise though they’re actually doing better here than they ever did in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. Even my aspen is thriving here!

    There’s just something about caring for living, growing things that brings me peace. I can’t explain it or adequately put it into words. I just know that it’s very rewarding and for me deeply spiritual. It’s a hobby but it’s also something more than just a hobby.

    I think it’s important to have something in our lives that becomes a sanctuary. Something we come back to day after day that gets us away from our worries and reminds us to just be present. Whether that’s a garden, a meditation cushion, a woodworking bench, a paintbrush, or a favorite walking trail doesn’t really matter. What matters is having something that brings us back to ourselves.

    This life is unrepeatable. There’s so many distractions fighting for our attention every day. I think we all need something that helps us slow down and notice the beauty that’s already here and remember to be grateful for the miracle of being alive.

    Amituofo
    ~Buck

    The Sandias turning pink with the sunset.

  • The Whole Picture

    What to write about today?

    I could write about a beautiful experience I had two days ago while doing standing meditation outside. A hummingbird landed on a bush less than four feet away from me and stayed there for a good five minutes while the sunset exploded into colors behind it. I just stood there in awe. Moments like that remind me how beautiful it is just to be alive and healthy enough to enjoy them.

    Or I could write about what led up to that moment and why it meant so much. The nightmares have been interrupting my sleep again. I already wrote about that recently though. The lack of sleep has had me so tense that my whole body hurts. By the time I went outside that evening I desperately needed the peace that little hummingbird and the sunset gave me.

    That’s life though ain’t it? There’s always more stories than the ones we happen to tell. On any given day I write about whatever’s been on my mind then. Sometimes it’s recovery and how much better life is without alcohol and benzos. Sometimes it’s nightmares, anxiety, meditation, Tai Chi, or just finding some hope outside in nature. But whatever I write about is just one small piece of my life. It’s not the whole picture.

    I think that’s true for everybody that shares anything. Whatever people choose to share is just what they’re choosing to share in that moment. We catch little glimpses into each other’s lives but never the whole story. In a lot of ways it’s like social media I think. Most people share the highlights like the vacations, celebrations, victories, or beautiful sunsets. The ordinary days though, the struggles, the disappointments, and the hidden battles mostly stay hidden because they don’t attract as much attention or we think they may be too boring.

    If I’m being honest with myself I probably do something very much like that. I’m not really interested in collecting “likes” or building a huge audience. If I was I’d be spending money on premium themes for the blog and SEO tools and stuff like that. My goal has always been to document my recovery journey and if possible encourage somebody else who is walking a similar path. Even so I usually try to write more about hope than hardship. I really want people to know that life really can be good again after active addiction.

    Yesterday for example we spent time with our little grandson. It was one of those days filled with love, laughter, and joy. I love days like that. But not every day is like yesterday.

    Not every day is terrible either. Sometimes a day is just… blah. A little heavy maybe. Nothing big or dramatic just one of those days where you’re carrying way more than you feel like talking about.

    When I first started writing, I kept those kinds of entries to myself. They stayed on my laptop, encrypted, where nobody would ever see them. Then in my recovery group I heard people talking about sharing their experiences online hoping that somebody else might know they weren’t alone.

    So I started doing the same. There are still a lot of things I’ve written that I’ll probably never share publicly. Every now and then I go back and read those early journal entries. More often than not they bring me to tears. Reading them reminds me how scared I was and how uncertain everything felt. And how badly I doubted whether I was going to make it.

    Sometimes I guess we need those reminders. They remind us how far we’ve come and they remind us to be grateful. They remind us that healing can happen so slow we don’t notice it until we look back. Or at least I need reminding from time to time.

    So if you’re in the early days of recovery or even if addiction has never been part of your story and you’re just going through a really hard time, please keep going. Don’t give up. Your life is more than just this moment.

    There are still hummingbirds to surprise you and sunsets waiting to take your breath away, grandchildren to make you laugh, and quiet moments that remind you just how precious it really is to be alive. Life can be beautiful.

    Amituofo
    ~Buck

  • Faith Should Never Be Met With Violence

    Recently in Albuquerque, a city not far from where we live, a man reportedly pulled a gun on a Catholic priest after getting mad over the priest’s public support for religious freedom and his wife arguing with the priest. According to local news reports the disagreement centered on the priest’s support for the construction of a mosque and his belief that people in the United States should be free to worship according to their own conscience, as protected by the Constitution.

    This isn’t a recovery-related post, but I think it’s an important one.

    What bothers me most isn’t just one insane incident, but what it says about how easily some people seem willing to dismiss one of the most fundamental freedoms our country was built on. The First Amendment, adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, protects the freedom of religion. Not one religion. Not one denomination. Religion. And no, the word “religion” is not synonymous for only Christianity.  That protection applies equally to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, and every other belief or lack of belief.

    This is a subject that hits close to home for me. Because I’m a Buddhist I’ve experienced disapproval and discrimination just because of what I believe. Some of it has come from complete strangers and, sadly, some from people I care about. Thankfully nobody has ever pulled a gun on me because of my faith, but I’ve certainly been made to feel that my beliefs were somehow unacceptable or that I should keep them hidden. Nobody should have to feel that way. Ever.

    One hopeful thing did come from the events in Albuquerque though. Leaders and members of a lot of different faiths stood together in a public show of solidarity against religious violence. I found that deeply moving and hopeful. It reminded me that there are far more people who want peace than there are people willing to use fear or intimidation.

    Pretty often these days you can hear somebody say that the United States is a “Christian nation.” It’s true that Christianity is the religion most commonly practiced in this country. But constitutionally, the United States was not established as a nation with one official religion. Our founding documents deliberately protect the freedom of every person to follow their own conscience.

    That protection is there and it’s important. It matters for Christians. It matters for Muslims. It matters for Jews. It matters for Buddhists. It matters for every person whose beliefs may differ from those of others. If we only defend religious liberty for people who believe like we do then we aren’t really defending religious liberty at all.

    Violence, threats, and intimidation have no place in disagreements over faith. If our beliefs lead us to hate, harass, or threaten others just because they worship differently or believe differently, then maybe the first place we should examine is not somebody else’s religion, but our own hearts.

    I stand against religious violence in every form and I stand with those of every faith, and of no faith, who are committed to protecting one another’s right to live and worship in peace.

    Amituofo
    ~Buck