Why Not Design Your Own God? June 1, 2008

This Week’s Reflection

What if you could design your own God? What would he-or it-be like? I’ve titled our time together “Why Not Design Your Own God?” Notice I didn’t call this a presentation, or a sermon. What it will be, actually, is a spiritual rumination in the pattern of some of the great ruminators: Samuel Clements, Will Rogers, and Andy Rooney.

Before I start to ruminate, though, you need to know a little of my background. You see, I am a “recovering Christian.” And no, I don’t go to meetings and stand up and say, “Hello, my name is Vic, and I am a recovering Christian.” The irony is that here I am, in front of you dear people of Journey’s Community, saying just that. Well.

I’ve experienced a bunch of “passages” since I was confirmed in the Methodist Church in 1950. They have included confusion, concern, anger, renunciation, and letting go. There may be more passages on the road ahead. As Yogi Berra once said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I feel like I’ve forked fairly often in the 58 years since I was confirmed. And I suspect most of you have as well.

I was puzzled by the early teachings. God was all loving and totally forgiving. The meek were to inherit the earth. I began to wonder who God’s solicitors were as I looked around for all those meek inheritors. The fault must be mine; I just didn’t understand. I was taught to “fear not.” Did you know that the Christian bible directs us not to fear more times than any other concept? Fear not, it says, over and over. And yet I began to have these creeping fears even though I wasn’t supposed to. I feared doing wrong and being condemned to the nether regions. I feared I wouldn’t understand all of the messages or worse, that I was finding some of them hard to believe. Some seemed contradictory. Turn the other cheek wasn’t exactly what we had done during WW II, and we had just gone to war in Korea. I began to suspect it was okay to fight for peace. Then I read where this guy had slew 40,000 soldiers with the jawbone of an ass, and I began to suspect that the bible was filled with exaggeration. What parts were exaggerated, I wondered? Which ones could I put my faith in? And how does one go about creating faith, anyway?

My confusion transmigrated into concern as I tried to come to know a God who was all-loving, AND: wrathful, vengeful, and judgmental. What kind of a God, I wondered, was so insecure that he needed to be worshipped by his beloved children? Mankind turned on Jesus, yes, but could God turn on his own children in a manner sometimes described as far worse than what was done to Jesus on Golgotha? And there seemed to be little if any consensus amongst Christians about what was the right way to worship.

My concern finally blossomed into anger. What, I asked myself (and a few others), was I supposed to do to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven? There seemed to be widespread disagreement on that. How, I asked, could one play by the rules when the rules kept changing? In my teens I was told that interracial marriage was a sin, along with living with a woman out of wedlock, not to mention being homosexual, and even that sex was primarily meant for procreation, and definitely NOT to be enjoyed just because one had raging hormones. Why the hell did God give me raging hormones if I wasn’t allowed to use them? I was being tested, they answered. I was an okay student in school, but I sure flunked that one. Well, was I damned? No, they said, you can be forgiven if you never ever do that again. Right.

It felt like I was waist deep in hypocrisy. My anger grew. A pox on the whole business, said I. I renounced religion and God as one big unknowable mystery. I opted out of the game. Well, not exactly. Something important was missing in my life. So I started looking under every rock. Maybe not every one, but a bunch. I was looking for meaning, for answers. I tried self-hypnosis, deep relaxation technique, Transcendental Meditation, massage therapy. The search was long and arduous, primarily because I was looking for the answer from other people. Surely someone out there had the answers. All I had to do is find him. Or her. Them. But my anger begat more anger. I was driving with the brakes on. And it was wearing me out. But slowly I began to find some bits that made sense.

Before I continue, I want to show you a picture of God. [a blank page in a frame]. Notice how it is framed. That’s so you can create your own image of God, if in fact you need one. This was the first picture of God I had. By now, however, his image is so large that I can’t find a frame big enough to hold it. But I made that okay.

I learned that life is all about where you place your commas. Most of us have heard about “the dash.” Remember that? You have a start date and an end date. In the middle is a dash, and life is all about what you do with your dash. Well, that hadn’t come along yet, so I learned about the place where you put your comma. Where would you put your comma in this sentence?

Goodbye God I’m going to college.

Good comma By God I’m going to college.
Goodbye comma God I’m going to college.
Goodbye God comma I’m going to college.

I said goodbye to God and went off to college. It got spiritually lonely. Twelve years later, when I was in Vietnam, I went to the base chapel six days a week. I wouldn’t go on Sunday because I didn’t want to deprive a true believer of a seat. I asked God where he was and why he steadfastly refused to speak to me. I did all the talking, of course. It never occurred to me to listen. The Vietcong blew the steeple off the chapel in 1966. I wondered if there was a message in the rubble. My quest continued.

Years later I Googled God. I learned that you had to be out of your mind to find God. But how do you get out of your mind? I asked plaintively. Feelings are the language of your soul, I learned. They will guide you far better than written or spoken words.
Wait. I had always heard that if it felt good, it was bad. Who have you been listening to? this voice asked. By now I was talking to myself, which, I was to learn, was a good thing.

I learned that we have all been should on a lot. The number of people willing to tell me what I should do was legion. We have been convinced that spiritual authority is out there somewhere. Spirituality’s Holy Grail is the recognition that the way, the truth, and the light are inside each of us. We do not need someone else to tell us what we should do to inherit the Eternal Kingdom. It is up to each of us to open ourselves to that answer, one that is tailored and designed by each of us for ourselves.

You had a designer birth, you lead a designer life, and you will create a designer death, by which I mean transition into the world of spirit as a living, eternal entity. And wait for some far distant Judgment Day? The God I designed for myself says the only judge of you will be you yourself. And my God also informs me that I will enter the world of spirit immediately. My God is a God of Reunion. The spiritual essence of me-many people call that their soul-will re-join (and rejoice!) with The Creator. And Aunt Sally will be first in line to greet us, along with all our loved ones who have made the transition before us. The God I designed also will have my beloved pets waiting for me as well.

The impact of people “shoulding” on me has sharply declined. I have a darn good start at creating my God. And it was only after I did that that I began to understand what it meant to love God. I do now . . . but it took years to get there. One of my most influential spiritual mentors once said: “You have all eternity and not a second to lose.” I like that.

Let me take a timeout here to say that if you resonate to anything I say, feel perfectly free to incorporate it into your belief system. And reject anything that doesn’t work for you. What do I mean by “work for you”? Well, does it make your life work better to believe it or not? What better test can you devise? I hold all my beliefs in suspended animation, by the way, so that I can cheerfully pluck one of them out of the pack and toss it over the edge, replacing it with a higher truth that I have discovered. I have done that several times with the notion of Karma, for instance. Okay, end of timeout.

So if we make our own spiritual rules, create our own lives, why not create our own God? What would your God be like? Insert here the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for. . . .”
Do you need him to be negative in any way? Wrathful, vengeful, judgmental? Not mine.
Would he not lead each of us, eventually, to a perfect state of enlightenment?
Would there be a role for fear in your relationship with your God?
Would he not give you all the chances you need to get it right? My God grants me as many lifetimes as I need or choose, how about yours? It doesn’t make my life work to think that I have to master living in just one lifetime. That would not be the act of a loving God, given how hard life is-or at least seems to be for most of us. My dash is infinitely long, by the way. I’m still working on the commas. . . .

I will never forget a comic strip in Family Circle many years ago. Two little kids are on the edge of a massive cemetery. The older one turns to the younger one and says: “The trouble with being dead is that it’s for the rest of your life.” Isn’t that just wonderful? Some day I am going to write about that.
I believe there are some ascended masters here on earth to help us as we stumble along. Some people call them angels. I met one once. Maybe I’ve met more than one and just not been aware enough to recognize the others. My sense is that each one of us at times plays the role of an angel. That may be when we do best at listening to our higher self, or our spiritual guardians.
When Will Rogers said, “I’ve never met a man I didn’t like,” I think he was referring to the God-self in each one of us. Many people sleep walk through life, never giving birth to their own life force. We, in Journeys, need to find some of those folks and allow them to rest among us until they are ready to awaken.

I am sure that your individual God and mine will have much in common. They are, quintessentially, the energy of love. And when you come to a spiritual fork in your road, ask yourself, where would an angel go now? And what would an angel do when it got there? Then listen with your feelings. God speaks to me in many ways, yet I’ve never heard a word he’s said. Maybe one day I shall give him the quality of speaking, but we are doing okay without that so far.

I urge you to work on creating your own God; it’s not about finding him. He is always as close to you as your breath.

In closing, I invite you to join me in repeating the Light Mantra. I will say a sentence, and then you repeat it. And feel the vibrations as you do.

“I am the Light.”
“The Light is in me.”
“The Light moves throughout me.”
“The Light surrounds me.”
“The Light protects me.”
“I am the Light.”

Namasté

This entry was posted on Monday, June 02nd, 2008 and is filed under Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.