Chip Chats | I wear a cross and a crucifix. I also think I’m an atheist but still figuring it out.
Make of that what you will.
The crucifix belonged to a great friend who gave it to me because he thought I needed to find Jesus. He wasn’t the first to think so — and he said it with love. I wear it not because his mission succeeded, but because of what the gesture means. Connection. Care. The kind of nonjudgmental friendship that hands you something sacred and doesn’t demand you do anything with it.
The cross has my daughter’s birthstone. An emerald. She was born in May 2017 and changed my perspective on everything — including death, which I wrote about recently.
Neither the crucifix nor the cross makes me Christian...or a believer. They make me someone who understands that symbols mean what we need them to mean.
And then there’s OM. No, not Old Memorial — the Sanskrit symbol: ॐ .
I had never heard of it before a conversation with one of my other great friends this week. OM apparently predates most of the world’s organized religions. It doesn’t belong to one tradition. It belongs to the idea that beneath all the noise — the grief, the uncertainty, the world on fire — there is something that connects us all.
I don’t know what that something is. I’ve stopped pretending I’m close to finding out.
What I do know is that the crosses I wear aren’t about God, Jesus or Christianity...yet. The OM won’t be about Hinduism or Buddhism. They’re about the people and the moments that remind me what actually matters.
Family and friends — across every faith or no faith at all — trying to figure this out.
That’s the only theology I’m confident in.