Opening the God-box
I began my spiritual journey (or my awareness of it in this incarnation) in the First Baptist Church in south Texas. The church was a colonial style as one would expect a church in the south to look with white pews and blood red carpet that stretched all the way from the back pew to the pulpit and beyond to the gates of hell. Each week my family attended Sunday school and church services. In the basement preschool class, I learned about Jesus pictured knocking on the door of my heart where the only doorknob was on the inside. It was my responsibility to let him in. I gradually moved up the stairwell as grade school, junior high and high school classes reached the rafters. The faith of my childhood had all the answers; the world was completely dualistic. Black and white boxes for people and behaviors meant my questions were more than annoying. Hell, fire and damnation pronounced the threatening powers of a very angry God every week. High school graduation and departure to college was my salvation.
Much, much later, my journey introduced me to the Christian mystics which I had never encountered in a Southern Baptist Church. I expect they were banned along with all other Roman Catholic icons, saints and practices. In the mystics, I saw faith with new eyes and through new eyes. I saw women leading reform in the church in Europe centuries prior; women using intimate love language to describe their God experiences, and women who went beyond dogma and doctrine to know union with the Holy. My eyes were opened. My heart was touched not with fear but with longing, and my journey took me to seminary.
“Don’t leave your brain at the door,” was one of his favorite sayings spoken with a thick Irish accent. My seminary professors blew my mind wide open and ripped at the roots of that angry God of my childhood. Academia, the Jesus Seminar, biblical scholarship and a whole new set of authors unpacked those questions I had inflicted upon my early Sunday school teachers. Finally, there was a place to question, doubt, embrace, disassemble and reassemble a faith that made sense.
My journey did not stop with academic answers; my soul knew there was more. I found Celtic Christianity, particularly honoring the natural world and seeing the Divine in the world around us. I dove deep into Celtic lore and visited the Emerald Isle where my heart was opened by an energy healer throwing pottery south of Dublin. We are one with nature and the Creator of all was so vastly different than that angry God of the pulpit pounders. Interwoven knots connected us all to one another and the trees and ocean and the Creator of it all.
The path continued as I found perennial wisdom teachings and the gifts of inter-spirituality. Opening to the wonder and awe of a Cosmic Creator connected to metaphysical Oneness with all people of all places and all times. I am a far place from my ‘orthodox’ beginnings. The old-white-guy-god-on-the-cloud-eager-to-zap-me to hell does not exist anymore.
When you let “God” out of the box, do you lose God or find the Divine?
If you lose God, was it really God in that box?
