A Personal God

*Originally published on my Wordpress blog 05.24.2022

God. This is a tough post to write but that’s the reason I need to/want to write it.  I can’t talk about God. That topic is way too touchy for me.  I can talk about anything else.  Where some people get tongue tied when it comes to talking about sex, I am curious and open about it.  I am comfortable talking about death in both the abstract and the concrete realms. Family dynamics? Those turn into fascinating and often valuable conversations no matter who the family is. Ditto conversations about what makes and breaks romantic couples. Politics? The discussion can get heated and sometimes I shy away because I see no point in arguing but I am not afraid of the talk. God? Total shut down. 

Just to be clear, I don’t get God. I was raised in a rigid Catholic home, brined in rules, prayers, and a distant god. That god was scary. He (and he was a he) was authoritarian, commanding, omnipotent, and remote. His love was conditional. Behave and you got it. Be human and you were not enough. My family was present at church every Sunday and holy day and a collection of other days too. Confession was mandatory. Typically every two or three weeks, we were trotted off to church to recite all the ways we had failed (including the failure by feeling: anger, envy, lust, despair - all sinful). We had to perform penance and that penance was prayer. Does that make sense? To pray as a punishment?  In every respect, I was told what to believe and how to behave. No questions allowed.

By the time I was eighteen, I had decided this was not for me. I wasn’t bold enough to fully break away as long as I lived at my parents’ house but once I got out of the house, there were no more churches in my days or nights. As part of an advanced psych class that focused on guided imagery, I took the image of all the detritus that was my experience of the Catholic Church. I tied it up all up in a white box and put a wide yellow ribbon around that box.  I put that box up on a high shelf in the closet of my mind. I told myself I could leave the box up there unless I became a parent. Then I might have to look at it again. 

Basically it’s been up there ever since.  I did take it down briefly when my two children were born. I looked over the contents of the box and felt mostly anger and annoyance. I could find some beauty in the music and some beauty in some of the words that bordered on poetic. There was some hypothetical beauty in the notion of community but even that was weak for me. Simply attending church did not mean I ever felt like I was part of a community. I was merely following the rules. I put the box back in the closet.

Why is God so hard to talk about? I think I associate belief in God with compliant sheep.  If you believe in God, that means you just follow along. You don’t think for yourself. Also, belief in a personal god just does not make sense. Who can know and care for 8 billion people all at once? People talk about having a relationship with God, but I can’t  figure that out. How does one have a relationship with an invisible entity?  If there is any relationship to be had, it can’t be clear and direct because God isn’t concrete. God is an abstract concept that serves to soften the anxiety of being a human being. When you believe in God, when you put all your trust in God, then you can assume that everything is going to be okay because isn’t that what God tells you? But is it true? 

I suspect one reason I have such a strong reaction to talking about God, is that even the conversation about God invokes insecurity and fear on my part. Those unpleasant childhood memories are buried deep in my bones. I do recognize that I am defensive and I feel foolish even considering the conversations. I don’t think I have the tools to adequately talk about God. And, worse yet? I am not brave enough to go get the tools.

I am painfully aware of the tragedy and pain that religion has wrought on the world but I know that a relationship with God is not necessarily part of a religion. I know and respect a few intelligent, articulate, and thoughtful people  who  believe in God. Knowing those people and having high regard for them makes me wonder what I am missing.  I do have enough wisdom now to know that the god of my childhood was just one representation of God but it’s awfully hard to set that one God aside. He is cantankerous that way. 

I am not saying that there is no God. In fact, I lean more towards the existence of some higher power, some essence, but a personal god? I wish I understood more about how that even works.  I can’t even say why I lean towards that idea of an essence as God. Maybe it’s because of awe and wonder, because of the delights and joys of being a human being?  Maybe it’s because I know that there’s so much we humans do not know. We can only wonder about what is revealed by both the electron microscope and the James Webb Space Telescope.  We can only marvel at the thousands of tiny miracles that make up the human body. We are overwhelmed at the deepest feelings of love and connection that we don’t understand. Maybe that’s it. Maybe lack of understanding is one invitation to consider something bigger, something divine. I don’t know but I actually do want to talk about it. I just don’t know how. I am not interested in being assigned a sales person. I just want a warmhearted conversation.