God

*Please see this link for an explanation as to why in this post every time I refer to God what I am really meaning is Godde.  And even though I'm not happy with referring to s/he becuase it is clumsy and just plain ugly, until we invent a third category in the English language that is gender neutral, or gender inclusive, I can't for the life of me work out what else to call ... them/it/her/him.

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It is very uncool to believe in God these days.  Whenever I hear someone referring to God like I did the other day on the radio, it gives me a bit of a jolt.  We are a secular nation here in Australia and when I attended my second cousin's Scouts meeting the other day and the Akela prayed a prayer at the end, that sort of shocked me too.  Not because the prayer was boring and perfunctory but because a group of six year olds bowing their heads and talking to God barely happens in this country.  It just felt really weird!  And I turned and sort of smirked at my cousin who was standing in the corner and it might have looked as if I was turning to smirk and say, "Wow, what morons.  They're praying."  But it was more the delivery that made me smirk.  I am always sort of touched when people pray out loud.  It is a vulnerability.

But anyway.

I remember a few years ago my cousin telling me that if I stopped believing in God, then things must be really bad because I had such a strong belief that God was just there, and didn't seem to waver off that.  And I know what she means.  For ages I that a sense of that thing that threaded its way through everything like a perfume - the golden thread weaved through all living beings - well, that was God.  It just didn't really seem to make me waver at all because I felt it there, every day.  It strengthened when I meditated, when I did creative things, when I loved.

I still do feel that.  But the last two years - only sometimes.  I have wavered over the past two years in ways I haven't in the previous 16 years simply because it has felt like God has flipped the off switch.  Just ... not there.  That sense of the golden thread is like a golden memory in some ways to me.

And then it comes back, out of the blue, and the world all turns golden.  And then it's gone again.

Maybe it was never really there all the time like I thought.  Maybe it's still here just as much now as it was then, but I'm imagining a golden age.  Memory is bizarre and weird and deceitful and we imagine things were all sorts of ways in the past that they patently just weren't.  Hindsight and frozen history puts a glaze over things, makes them seem clearer than they were at the time.

You know, it's never really been an intellectual exercise for me about whether God is there.  I find reductions of God down into doctrine and dogma to be patently really fucking boring really quickly, and everything gets lost for me then.  All the things that feel like God to me are not reducible.  They just are.  To get caught up in what therefore you need to do or be or behave in order to show that you are following after that God in the particular camp of [insert your particular tribe here and tick box] seems weird and childish to me.  I just don't want to play.

So intellectual exercises about God have never really been the main point.  It's been the experience of God that I've been after.  If God exists, you must be able to feel him/her.  You must be able to interact in some way.  When I believe that God is everywhere, I begin to see God everywhere.  It is as if a fine layer of gold dust descends on everything, and it makes people more lovable somehow.  I notice much easier that spark inside of everybody that makes us all priceless.  This might sound like squibbly bullshit but it's how it has been for me.

And Jesus ... well, I don't know about Jesus any more.  And I'm not talking about the believe-in-the-resurrection-or-you'll-go-to-hell-forever kind of stuff.  That has always seemed like banal nonsense to me from the get-go, ever since I first picked up a bible and started reading it when I was 21 years old and felt something stirring in there somehow.  I still feel it whenever I read the words ascribed to him.  Whatever or whoever he was, he had a fine grasp of the absolute shining pinpoint of it all, the gist, the stuff that humans diligently must work on all the days they breathe so that life on earth is not hell.  I am still hit by the profundity of his words.  I still love him, or the thought of him, whatever he is.

I remember reading something Mother Theresa had written maybe a few years before here death where she said that she'd dried out like an old leaf at the end of autumn in terms of feeling God's presence.  She didn't even know if she believed in God anymore.  I understand that space.  I guess we all do.  Everyone who professes to believe in God must often have doubts or else perhaps what they have is really only intellectual assent to a particular view, rather than any faith at all.

In one sense I don't feel any more separated from God.  In one sense what it feels to me is that I have come from that called God, and one day I shall return to it.  That I am a part of that creation and there can not ultimately be any separation unless it is wished for on our side.  That if there is a hell it is a purging.  That if there is a devil it is in every single one of us and we all come under its fire and influence at certain times in our lives.  And if that devil, then that god too, in every single one of us.  I do think maybe I believe those things, and that maybe they are more than just archetypes (though as real in archetypal form as in literal, and work as such too).  But those are intellectual assents.  What I would like very much is to feel God close the way I did before.  But maybe I have gone from the person of great feeling faith to the person of very little.  Perhaps that is all I need in the end.  Faith the width of a thread.

How about you?  What do you think about God?  What have you experienced of Godde?  Has it changed over the years?  Are you surprised/amazed/loved/disillusioned by/with Godde?  I know there are people who read here who cover the spectrum when it comes to your beliefs.  If you feel comfortable sharing here, whatever your ilk, I would love to hear how it is all looking for you :)