Understanding God

What do you think… has God ever made a mistake? Messed up when creating stuff… maybe a planet or a flower or a sun or duck or something else? I didn’t think so either.

---

For most of my life, I was convinced that I knew who God is.  My parents, the church, the people in my neighbourhood, and the world around me taught me that God is loving, that He loves me because I’m His child, that He wants a wonderful life for me, that I was made in His likeness and image, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I was also taught that God is to be feared, that I would burn in hell forever if I sinned, or if I didn’t behave as I was taught God wants me to behave, or if I don’t believe in Him, or if I thought for myself and followed my own inner moral compass, or if I did any of the unapproved things regardless of whether or not they come naturally to me or anyone else… most especially sex.

If the fundamental contradictions between those two teachings are even a smidgen true, then I’ve been taught lies about God.

Here’s why I say that…

I like to think that I’m like every other parent.. deeply in love with my children and step children as much as humanly possible, as much as God does. Here’s the thing though… I cannot find it in myself to condemn any of them to burn in hell, not for even a billionth of a trillionth of a nanosecond, let alone forever. Clearly, I was not made in the image and likeness of God like I was told I was.

So, where then did all that stuff about God come from?? Early humans. We had some big mysteries to make some kind of sense of in order to quell the shaking fear those mysteries created in us… like the moon, the sun, comets, solar eclipses, volcanic eruptions, the sky and the stars, and some other scary stuff. We made sense of them through stories, some told by the village Wiseman, some by travellers, some included an embellishment or two, some were remembered or translated incorrectly, some where translated from previous translation, all of them believed to be true, and everyone told and retold those stories to each other over and over, and over time retold with ever more variations of them.

Over the course of human history, those stories continued to evolve with still more embellishments from fallible human memories, and became our spoken history. Pretty soon a bunch of those stories became organized religions, complete with sacred texts.. which, by the way, were nothing more than those spoken history stories that were written down by earnest people. Interestingly, those written versions were only accessible by religious leaders, thanks to them having been taught how read and write. And not surprisingly, all those religious leaders throughout the world and history fervently believed they were inspired or given or told by God Himself.

And yet those sacred texts are still just stories.. regardless how fervently anyone believes them. Everything we think we know about God originated as stories complete with the embellishments and faulty memories, and became one of the many competing versions of the ‘truth’ that became our religions, some that survived even until today.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t believe in God, because I do. It’s just that since the human brain simply cannot comprehend the true nature of God, those stories were accepted as stand-ins for personal knowledge about God… that all powerful, all seeing, all hearing, all knowing, all merciful(?) spirit that controls all of reality, heaven and hell, that needs appeasement, demands fealty, decides if we are worthy of anything, including life itself, and can take it all away as easily as given. It’s been that way since long before written history was even possible.

Today, we still tell our stories about God, some perhaps less cruel than what was done in the name of God. We also have science hard at work finding factual truths about the nature of ‘reality’, about life and death, and how things work, like nuclear fission and solar panels for examples. So far science has done a great job of improving the quality of our lives, and gave birth to things like like penicillin, cars, airplanes, MRIs, computers, the internet, electricity, and new advances in energy production. But science hasn’t yet made much headway in understanding the nature of God.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to the personification of God. I believe that God cannot so easily be constrained to such a finite understanding we humans are biologically capable of. Yet I still feel God. Given that our current notion of God is nothing more than a human created story, what might God be, and how can we communicate with and understand God?

I think one aspect of the story we’ve been telling each other about God actually has a spark of truth in it… the story that we were made by God, possibly even “in the likeness and image of Him.” Some people think of God as the force that causes everything to come into existence. Personally, I think of God as the source of all life, including ours, and not by a God nobody has ever met in human history. Not through visions. Not through burning bushes. Not in a parting of the seas. Nobody has ever met God because what we think we know about God is an attempt to describe God’s nature through a toilet paper tube of a human construct.

Whether you believe in God’s existence or not, we are all here to experience life through our own personal experiences, and through our own personal connection to God.

In order to communicate with God, there are no rituals, requirements, processes, promises, rules, or anything else needed from you. You simply listen to your very own Soul, the very essence and truth of Who You Are. You can find your soul’s urgings by carefully listening with metaphorical ears sticking out of your metaphorical heart. We can get confused when our soul gets drowned out by our ego, the logical, socially fragile, fearful, self awareness averse selves. Ego’s strategy is to become increasing louder and insistent as it tries to stop you from feeling your soul, let alone following its urgings.

Not to worry… there is a reliable way to know if what you’re feeling is coming from your soul (aka the spark of God living within you), and that is to notice your emotions… if they’re coming from your soul, your emotions will bring JOY. All others will be from anywhere but your soul. God’s language is love, and love’s lifeblood is joy. Not enough joy results in grief and loss.

We all are made by God.

And He placed within each of us a Spark of Himself.

God gave each of His children a soul

So he can communicate with each of us, directly.

God never stops communicating with any of us.

He first communicates through your soul,

or the next billboard that catches your eye,

or a chance overhearing of a word or a phrase,

or the next song on the radio.

Everything.

Think about that.

Now ask yourself…

What can I discover if my soul actually IS my direct connection to God?

What can my life be like if it’s true?

If not, you’ll have lived a life listening for and following love’s urging and calling.

Is there a more rewarding way to live?