This I Believe

By Volodymyr Kish

My wife and I were on vacation last week in the U.S. and spent a good deal of time driving, during the course of which we stumbled across an interesting program on the American NPR (National Public Radio) network called “This I Believe”. This has been a long-running feature on NPR in which a wide cross-section of Americans present an audio essay on some of the core things they have learned in life and on which their values are based.

Regular readers of this column will know that sometimes, I use it as a platform to voice my own version of “This I believe”, and it got me thinking about some of the core beliefs that I have formed through my own adventurous journey through life these past six decades. I thought it might be interesting to share some of them with you.

One thing that I have noticed is that most people spend a good chunk of their life and energy accumulating things – money, houses, properties, cars, art, wine cellars, fame, stamps, you name it. Of course, no matter how much they collect, it is never enough. One of the foremost lessons I have learned in life is that the best things you can collect are experiences, memories and friends. These can never be lost, stolen or taken away from you. I include friends here, because true friends age as well and stay with you as do good memories. In the end, when we are on our death bed and reflecting back on the life we lived, all we will have left are our memories. In fact, as we make the transition into whatever form our afterlife takes, about the only things we may be able to take with us are our memories, so it behoves us to make sure we have good ones.

Another realization I have come to as I have matured and aged, is that no matter how old I get, most of my behaviour patterns and character are the direct result of the trials, tribulations, slings and arrows that I suffered during my youth and teen-age years. Even as I slip into my sixties, I am still trying to prove something to parents and peers long gone. I am still trying to make up for deficiencies and inadequacies I harboured in my youth. I believe that our successes and failures in life have their roots in the successes and failures we experience growing up. And of course, we can never live up to the idealized standards we create when we are young, thereby creating a futile life-long quest to live up to our own unrealistic expectations. The hardest person to forgive and to come to like is oneself. Yet we will not find peace and happiness until we do.

In this list of beliefs, I must of course include some mention about the Ukrainian aspect of who I am. I have learned through long involvements with Ukrainian organizations and the Ukrainian community, that Ukrainians are both blessed and cursed by an abnormal streak of independence, individualism and stubbornness. On the one hand, it has enabled us to carry on an almost thousand-year struggle for cultural and national independence. However, it has also caused us to be incapable of acting cohesively and with common purpose for any length of time. We are driven almost by nature towards factionalism, uncompromising idealism and political anarchy. Recognizing this, people often ask me, why I continue to be so involved in Ukrainian community life? I guess I must blame it on this culturally inherited stubbornness!

What list of “beliefs” would be complete without of course mentioning religion? In my case, what I have increasingly come to recognize is that a lot of what I learned about God and religion through my formative years had probably little to do with being a “good Christian”, and more with unquestioningly accepting a couple of thousand years’ worth of behavioural social rules and dictates engineered by church nobility and bureaucrats whose motives may have been more geared towards maintaining obedience to a feudal system and power structure than in teaching people to lead a truly moral life. I have spent the last few decades trying to find the essential spiritual truths and the God that has been buried under a mountain of anthropomorphic and apocalyptic myths, distortions, rituals, simplistic dogma, and carrot and stick theology. Although there is much I still don’t understand, one thing I am certain of is that God did not give us intelligence simply to have us suspend it completely when it comes to trying to understand our spiritual dimension. Furthermore, I am increasingly beginning to question the form and content of many of the established religious services, whose primary purpose seems to be to extensively and repetitiously praise and glorify God. It strikes me that a perfect and all powerful entity like God would neither need nor desire such veneration or worship. Would not that time be put to better use by focusing on spiritual teaching and development rather than servile praise?

I realize that raising such religious issues is akin to disturbing a hornet’s nest. However, I am also convinced that mankind and civilization evolved and developed by asking questions and challenging accepted conventions, and not just blindingly accepting the status quo or historical precedents.

This I believe.