A Higher Power

(As always, take what resonates for you, and let go of the rest.)

Who is God?

Oh, the eternal question. Everyone has a different answer for that. Your understanding of God, or your belief that there is no God, is based on your own experiences. Millions of lives, and billions of experiences. The likelihood of even two people believing exactly the same way is small. There are always minute details that can differ. Everyone's viewpoint is based on his/her own belief system. Here is just a small taste of mine.

So again, who is God? 

That notion has changed drastically for me in the last 5 years.

Raised Catholic, I embraced my religious beliefs with much contentment, until the whole world fell apart for me. When my 24-year-old son, Eric, passed away unexpectedly in May 2017, my first question in my outrage was, “Who are you, God?“

I then began a search, a search for the meaning of life, for an explanation of that which seems senseless, for an understanding of who God is. And in doing so, I eventually found myself looking back at what my Catholic upbringing had taught me. With new eyes, I looked through, and found the jewels of my early religious teachings. Around these truths were many mistaken beliefs that had seeped in, probably through the personal belief systems of some of those well-intentioned humans who taught me. All people take in God’s truths through their own experiences. I looked again at those gold nuggets of truth and let all the false beliefs filter out. The treasures were there. They were just hard to see at times with all the gunk floating around. 

You see, I still had God in a box. Until life as I knew it was blown apart, I still saw God in the way I was brought up as a child, as an old man in the sky who we prayed to. And if we were good enough, maybe our prayers would be answered. Isn’t that what people say? When good things happen, they give thanks to God, and when bad things happen, they believe this must be a punishment for something they've done wrong. When we pray to God and our prayers are answered, we believe it’s because we said the prayer the right way and must be a good person who is looked upon with favor by God. And when our prayer is not answered, we have to assume we didn’t deserve it because we must be lacking in the eyes of God. So, if my mother is gravely ill and I pray hard enough and God loves me enough, she will recover. But if my friend is praying for her mother’s life to be spared from stage 4 cancer, and she dies, does that mean she didn’t pray hard enough, or say the right words, or maybe wasn’t a good enough person? Does this make any sense at all?

This can not be an unconditionally loving God. This is that God that is sometimes described as angry and vengeful and ready to send us to hell for doing the wrong thing. Some people have experienced unconditional love from their parent, or spouse, or even a very good friend. I have unconditional love for my children. So why can’t God provide the same unconditional love? 

Why did God do this to me? I wasn’t the only one asking this question. Not only were thousands of other parents whose children had passed away asking this question, but so were millions of others who suffered other types of painful losses and challenges in this life—major disease diagnoses, divorce, job loss, loss of home, etc. Why does God do this to me? 

I took this question to a kind man at our church who used to be a priest within weeks after my son’s passing. Though he had chosen to leave the priesthood, he still had much to offer our church community which included making himself available for counsel. At one point during the four occasions that I met with him at our church’s Pastoral Center, I asked him where God was when my son was killed in an accident. His answer gave me much food for thought, and I did not completely understand it until many months later. 

He said that when he was still a priest in 2001, he was helping out at the

Pentagon during the aftermath of 911, and that many people asked him that same question. In his answer he suggested that they look around at all the people doing everything they could to help, the firefighters, the police, the nurses and doctors, and just regular citizens offering anything they could do to be of assistance. There, in these people, is God. Though it wasn’t the answer I was looking for, eventually I would come to understand the profound truth in this answer. And later, I ran across a Bible quote I had heard thousands of times: “The kingdom of God is within you,” also translated as “The kingdom of God is in your midst.” I now got it. I understood. God is not somewhere in the sky or far away. God is here among us, within us.

Over time, and after reading so many books and listening to so many speakers on the subjects of spirituality death, afterlife, near death experiences, and various religions and philosophies, I came to understand that I had a misunderstanding of this mystery of God. First of all, God is not a man or even a woman. God is beyond gender, though we may choose a preferred pronoun when needed (He, She, or It). God is a force of life, and even more than that, the fullness of love. People throw that word “love” around a lot.  It’s easy to forget the power of that word, the profound magnificence of what it really means in its truest form. True love is beyond our understanding as well. It is indescribable. 

For me, love is equivalent with what I now understand to be God. God is the Creator and the Source of all Love. We all came from God. A well-known passage in Genesis says that we are made "in the image and likeness of God. These are words that I (and probably most others) initially heard in a way that, as my Dad liked to say, “went in one ear and out the other.”  Since my son’s transition, those simple words that I learned so very long ago took on a whole new meaning. God is the Creator, we come from God, we are made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore we actually are love. Each one of us has this power, this potential. But most of us don’t remember that and get stuck in the materialism of the world and in the search for earthly power. We forget that we are all connected and that we belong to each other, hence, the separation, the hate, the fear, and the wars.

This world is not meant to be perfect. Only the spirit realm, Heaven, whatever you want to call it, is perfect. Here, the whole point is to deal with our challenges and from that there is growth. From that, there is the potential for us to do what we came here to do—love.

There are many names for God – Creator, Divine Source, Divine Spirit, Universe, Love, All That Is. I’m comfortable with the word God but choose what works for you.  There cannot be one name because no words can ever properly describe God. God is mystery. God is greater than the human mind can fathom or experience. People fight over the right word. What a waste of time that is.

Your childhood experiences can also affect your idea of God. If you understand God as a father figure and you had a mean and angry human father, then the word God can have a negative connotation. If you grew up with a loving and benevolent father, then the word God can have a positive connotation. Richard Rohr says, “God is uncapturable in any form, even by our words, by our mouth, and yet as available as the very breath within our lungs.” People search for other ways to describe God. Any of it is right, and all of it is right. For God is personal and therefore each person will have a different interpretation, experience, and words to describe God.

Every day my prayer is to know who God is and to know who I am, both in the same breath, both of equal importance. If I am made in the image and likeness of God, then to know myself is to know God and to know God is to know myself. I found this idea in the Bible as well: “I am in you and you are in me.“ (John 14:20). 

I make references to the Bible because that is the religious book I am most familiar with. However, all major religions have seeds of the same basic truths at their foundation. To put it simply, all roads ultimately lead to the same God. There are various faith traditions and cultures, but these are all different ways of expressing an understanding of the inexpressible, the indescribable, the expansive truth and love of God.

A couple years ago I was struck by the new meaning I found in a simple line from The Lion King. Simba is told by his father, “Remember who you are.” I understood that at one level when I first saw that movie so many years ago. Now I will never hear it the way I did before. It carries a much greater meaning. If we do truly remember who we are, then we will know that we are love and, in that love, connected to God in an unbreakable bond. If we can remember that, then the world will be a better place.

You already have everything you need within you, because the kingdom of God is within you – the indwelling spirit of God, the breath. We (I included) spend most of our time looking outside ourselves for answers, yet when we go within, there we find them, in the silence, the stillness, the still, small voice. That is God. Some call it the higher self. For we are made in the image and likeness of God. We cannot be apart from God.

Looking outside is still worthwhile. We encounter various ideas and philosophies which we can discuss, consider, collect, or throw out. These help to build and shape our own beliefs. But more than anything, the ideas of others cultivate what is already within us. As Thich Nhat Hanh has said, “I cannot teach you anything. I can only water the seeds that are already in you.”

I recently looked through my yearbook from senior year in high school. Underneath my senior portrait was the quote I had chosen to have published. Some people used quotes from great thinkers or writers or even music artists of the day. Others wrote their own. That’s what I did. And as I read what I had written so long ago, I was a bit surprised by it because I could see that my words came from a truth that was deep within, and that I was just now rediscovering. In my 17-year-old

vernacular I wrote, “Listen to others, you can learn so much. But don’t let that keep you from believing in yourself and trusting in your own ideas.” Exactly. The seeds were there, and I have spent my life, and especially this past 5 years since my son passed away, reaching out to others to water the seeds that were already within me. Of all that I listened to, I had been discerning of what felt true to me, and that is what has continued to grow. 

And that truth, that pain, that joy, that love that I feel – THAT is God, holding me, guiding me, and always right there with me. There, in the tree in my front yard, in the rose that I let kiss my cheek, in the brilliant orange sunrise, in the bright glow of the full moon, in the embrace of my husband, and the spark in each one of my children’s eyes – there, is God. Right here. Always here. And when life knocks me down, when it’s turbulent and challenging and sometimes too difficult to bear, all I need to do is look around. And there is God. 

Do I believe God exists? Yes. Do I believe he took my son? No. Do I believe Eric is in Heaven? Yes. Do I believe Heaven is far away? No. Do I believe Heaven is right here? Yes. And Eric? He is, unmistakably, still around. Not because anyone else has told me so. I believe this, know this, because of my own experiences, my own connections with God. And that’s all that really matters.

 

(Read more about my journey from grief to hope in my books Look Around and A Bird Called Wisdom.)