God ?
A dance of discovery
All this is written with joyful humility and delightful uncertainty, a dance of discovery between God and me.
In October, a friend and I walked a Charlotte neighborhood looking at Halloween decorations. Somehow God was mentioned, and I told her how the prior couple months brought me back into my relationship with God. For the last few years, I’ve called myself spiritual, believing in a Universe that distantly wants for my highest good, but God and my personal relationship to God took a backseat.
She asked me, “What is your idea of God?” While I’ve felt this reconnection in the past months, I hadn’t yet revisited what I personally thought God was since I shied away from the Christian verbiage given to me. I’ve used the term Universe to refer to the whole of material and spiritual, but I hadn’t come to an understanding how I believed the Universe and God might be different.
I grew up in the Lutheran denomination with the kind of parents who picked me up from a sleepover on Sunday morning for church. I am grateful for this rooting as the focus was on Grace and the love of God as a gift; there’s nothing I have done to receive it, and there’s nothing I could do to lose it. I learned about Jesus’ teachings as caring for one another and being One Body.
I continued my diligent Sunday church going, even when I went to a boarding school for high school and had to find my own church and a ride to get there.
The Summer after my freshman year of college, I was a backpacking guide for a youth ministry. I was in charge of creating a scripture-centered conversation at the campfire each night. Even though I was still going to Christian church, I remember intentionally choosing scripture that ideologically fit any religion, curious if I couldn’t theoretically be working at a Buddhist backpacking camp. While hiking, I pondered questions that started to peel back the layers of what I believed - why is God supposedly inherently masculine? If all of Nature is God’s Creation, why are Christians treating it as if it’s not Holy? Questions that felt like cracks.
My Sophomore year of college, a few various experiences synchronized to send me on a path of spiritual exploration. A disheartening dissonance in my college church ended my Sunday routine to this day (unless my parents are in town).
At this time, I was a class in Gnosticism, which taught me that in many religions there was often a divergence of believers: those who thought one came to be in relationship with God through a church or the leader, and those who believed the individual had an inherent, personal connection and knowingness with God, called mystics. In Islam, there is Sufi. In Judaism, there’s the Kabbalah. In Hinduism, Vedanta. The word Gnosis refers to mystical or spiritual knowledge, known through intuition. This clicked with me since it was the church itself that I had a problem with, not God.
Through Gnosticism, I also learned of a Creation narrative that wasn’t necessarily at odds with the Genesis story, but that opened my mind to a broader idea that the world is born of God’s mind, linking the creative process with a psychological process. This made sense to me as I pursued my psychology major and used my understanding of psychology to shed light on Creation. The micro reflects the macro and vice versa.
If the world is born out of God’s mind and God’s Spirit is in everything, then the world is essentially God thinking about Godself, as if each of us is a thought process reflective of God, serving a divine stream of Consciousness. There are parallels between having negative personal thoughts and the worldly manifestation of the dark and ugly of God’s Consciousness, and the magnitude of discovery and redemption that is possible within each when they are shown loving compassion.
Human brain - neural network
God brain - Cosmic web
For the following five years, I had no spiritual practice beyond meditation, and even so, it was a type of meditation to simply become aware of thoughts. I took a class on Islam, learned about Vedanta thanks to JD Salinger, and went to a 10-day Vipassana silent retreat. There were tinkerings of dreamwork and astrology, but to pray felt like talking to myself, and anything regarding higher realms was mostly just getting high.
Then I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, and a new spiritual connection found me. On the trail, we say “The Trail provides”, and I experienced this is such vast ways that it became undeniable to me that there is a receptive and conscious energy that responds to our yearnings up close.
On the Trail, once I ran out of food a full day before I would make it to town for resupply, and then just over the next hill I found a bag of food waiting on a post. A man told his story of needing new hiking boots after the hundreds of miles worn into them, and when he wandered off trail to dig himself a hole, he found a new pair of boots in his size sitting on a stump. Another man told me of a game he made up with a friend while hiking but they would need a 12-sided die to play it. When they got to their campsite that night, buried in the dirt they found a 12-sided die. Jobs, partnership, healing; what you seek, you will find. Or it will find you.
Having a new sense of immaterial awareness, I dove into dreamwork, astrology, mediumship, tarot, and indigenous relationship with Land. Given my Christian upbringing, I contemplated what I knew of Christian God and Jesus’ teachings while I learned new forms of spiritual practice. While these practices can sometimes be seen in opposition to a religion like Christianity, when I think about it I wonder, how? If God made the stars and put them in their place, do we not believe they would have as much intelligence, intricacy, and impact as the DNA that is also on such a different scale that it’s difficult for our human minds to grasp.
As for Tarot or mediumship, I wondered what the Bible had to say. To me, these pagan, alternative, or magical practices are not inherently excluded from a Christian faith or belief in God, and rather, they seem right in line:
“There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them… Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.. to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit”
from 1 Corinthians 12:4-11.
But more important than the gift itself is the intention:
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
from 1 Corinthians 13:1-2.
Also, Jesus quite prominently said that those who believe will perform greater miracles than he did.
In a similar way, I don’t think other religions preclude the beliefs of another religion. To me, it feels more like God dropped wisdom into the world through earlier prophets, philosophers, and leaders, took note we needed a potent message in an identifiable, relatable form, and then sent Jesus to say this is literally what I, God, am saying to you people: to love one another. But to view all the wisdom from all religions gives us a better, broader understanding of the material and spiritual world we live in, keeping in mind each religion also has misunderstandings that I’d contribute to the errored transmitter of the human mind and ego.
I was at dinner the other night with friends, and a woman who is a priest, said “I don’t think God gave any one religion the whole truth.. that wouldn’t be fun”.
While the Christian practice lacks an explicit message of caring for the Earth and personal relationship with it, Indigenous spirituality, on the other hand, is itself an honoring of and relationship with the land. Black Elk Speaks was a pivotal book for me in illuminating this sentient relationship with all beings, and given my experience on the Appalachian Trail, Nature as a Spiritual presence felt right. I think each religion, philosophy, and spirituality has a piece of the whole.
While I had a vague idea of God forming, I still didn't have a personal relationship. Then a few months ago, a momentous shift occurred in my life. I hit a rock bottom both physically and spiritually. And actually from this rock bottom I understood how intimately physical and spiritual experiences are connected, so much so that my perspective shifted from seeing a physical world with a spiritual story to a spiritual world with a physical story.
During this time, I was driving to my forest therapy guide immersion thinking, I can’t keep asking for my friends to fill me up, it will never be enough. “A God-sized hole” I heard somewhere. If not my friends’ love, then my own? Nothing. So what, God’s love? What even is that? I let the question linger, knowing answers come when they’re meant to.
The first answer came not long after I asked. I’m in a creative business cohort and our meeting occurred during this drive, so I pulled over to log on. To begin the meeting, one of our members announced it was another’s birthday and everyone began to sing “Happy Birthday”. Because of the digital mechanism of Zoom, everyone’s voices couldn’t be heard at the same time, and instead, the speaker switched every second or so between each person singing, forming the whole song from one frame at a time of each smiling, singing face. What an unexpected moment of love and joy, I didn’t deserve to experience that. An underserved gift. God’s love, I thought.
I arrived at the forest therapy immersion on some strange mountain lassoed by a river in Tennessee. I checked in and soon after, met a young woman whose eyes had the look of pure love. An angel, I thought. Over the next four days, my group spent less than three hours a day in conversation, given that forest therapy is more of an “alone together” activity. But through our few words, I felt comforted by each presence. And through our silence, I felt held in a way beyond understanding - by their unearned love, by the Forest, by these emanations of God.
How intruiging to have felt my most broken on the way to a place of generous healing. Almost like someone who knew my life gave me what I needed. Like a divine stream of consciousness found me.
References
This was a gorgeous read. Thank you for sharing. I'm thrilled to be connected and hearing more of your journey. <3
Great read, thank you for sharing.