Spiritual life is a key component to one’s personal sense of belonging. Belonging to a religion provides one with a descriptive hope for the future and guidance through problems in their current life. Following a set of beliefs provides followers with customs and ceremonies that allow for comfort and normalcy in daily life. Solar Storms, a novel written by Linda Hogan, shares the story of Angel, a young Native American who is discovering what she believes throughout a journey to a new place.
Angel is a character who is discovering what she believes in terms of spirituality. Coming from a life of constant movement and unstableness, she has never been able to develop her beliefs in one or two religions, instead she experienced many variations of native and modern religion. Angel begins to reveal her experiences with God when Hogan writes, “The birthmark of Indians, a blue hand of God, was on my back as if to comfort me. Perhaps God himself had rocked me in his arms, and I was loed. I’d heard once in a Baptist church that God loved me so much he knew the number of hairs on a person’s head.” (p.74) Due to Angel growing up across different denominations and subcultures, she experienced popular religions of the subcultures, one of which being Christianity. Because this religion was one of the first spiritual experiences that she remembers, she suggests that “I’d lived by the story as a child.” But, Christianity wasn’t going to be the last religion that she would experience.
After moving back to a reservation, she began to be fully immersed in Native American culture. This being said, she experienced religion like she never had before. Angel began to experience polytheism and the importance of balance in the natural world for the first time. Hogan represents Angel’s first impressions of the new culture when she writes “The people at Adam’s Rib believed everything was alive, that we were surrounded by the faces and lovings of gods. The world, as described by Dora-Rouge was a dense soup of love, creation all around us, full and intelligent.” (p. 81) Angel grew up to believe that life was created, rather than life existing in balance with other things. This being said, the concepts that the Natives celebrated a spoke about around her with were new and different from what she had ever known.
Eventually the concepts presented by members of the tribe began to resonate with Angel. She began to see the world through the eyes of the earth, a key component to Native American Religions. In Native American Religion, an article published by a website supporting Native American knowledge suggests, “Native American religion tends to focus around nature. The landscape, animals, plants, and other environmental elements play a major role in the religion of Native Americans. [...] Animals were used to represent certain ideas, characteristics, and spirits.” As Angel began to be submersed in Native American culture, she began to see things similarly to those surrounding her. Hogan shows this following Dora-Rouge’s explanation of the Earth when she writes “I saw the earth as a seed, with some great life stored inside it, waiting. [...] And gradually I saw this world as that which gave birth to fish. [...] The division between humans and animals was a false one. There were times, when they both spoke the same language.” (p.81) After being explained what the common Native American spiritual practice was, Angel began to recognize aspects of the religion that were, in her opinion, undeniable. Although she accepted some concepts to be true, this did not mean that she felt like she was immediately a ‘member’ of the spiritual practice.
Later in Solar Storms, Angel contemplates the ideals of a Native American religion causing her to decide who she is in terms of both the religion and of her own personal being. Hogan begins this trial when Angel began to experience frustration after failing to be successful in a shirt making business. After providing an analogy of separating grain to determine individuality, Hogan show Angel’s drive to discover herself when she writes “Perhaps I was remaking myself. [...] One day I would wake up and know that everything started to change, that I was no longer empty space, that I had become full, or was growing towards it. [...] It was everything that entered through my eyes.” (p. 106) Angel was ‘picking through grain’ one piece at a time to determine which pieces she felt fondly for. She was picking through everything that she had ever experienced to decide what she would like to represent personally.
As Angel continued her journey to find her mother, she continued to develop new thoughts around her personal religious beliefs. After approaching God Island, Angel synthesizes the knowledge that she has about God and the multiple religions that she has experienced. Hogan shows this when she writes:
Perhaps it was the word “God” that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon. (p. 169)
Because Angel had experienced so many meanings of “God” throughout her short existence, it was unclear to her what he truly symbolized. In certain contexts, God represented nature and balance while in others, he represented the creator and the judge of all good and evil.
Following her synthesis of what God is, Angel began to determine where God was. Hogan shows Angel’s not yet completely developed ideology of God when she writes “Something lived there, [...] I would call it God and that was how I came later to understand that God was everything beneath my feet, everything surrounded by water; it was in the air, and there was no such thing as empty space” (p. 170) After tinkering with the idea that God represented some sort of unity, like his ability to inspire people to pray, Angel began to believe that God was everything that was around her. He influenced the people around her, but also existed through her environment.
Due to Angel’s history and the concepts that she describes God to be, it is unclear to whether she believes in Christianity, or whether she believes in an indigenous religion, such as the one she is experiencing on her journey to find her mother. She believes in God and that he exists through nature, but she also believes specifically in creation and in the book of Genesis. Due to her conflicting ideals, it seems as though she believes in certain aspects of both religions. Moving from location to location provided Angel with a struggle to determine who she is in terms of religion, a concept that she has not completely mastered yet.
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