God Who? and the Garden of Eden

As I have previously written about (See: God Who 1/12 post) I can frequently go into a “God Who?” state. This is not a state where I doubt the existence of God but rather where I forget The Holy One.  Simply drop into the World and forget that I’m divinely connected to a Higher Power.  What I have also learned after decades of struggling with this is that fear is the surest path into this God who? state.

I was in a relationship that God lead me into and yet when the going got hard I got so scared that I went into the “God who? state” which eventually lead to its end.  I am pleased that at least in the beginning I did a better job of staying connected with the divine.  In one conflict, meeting my partner’s self-righteous anger, I felt defensive and also angry.  However, when the next day we went to sit in silent meditation I remembered in that silence that the position my partner had argued for was one I had been lead to many years ago and in fact reflected the Truth as I knew it.  It was a series of life events, accommodations to life struggles, that had taken me in another direction.  I realized that while my partner’s anger was agitating me that he was in fact calling me back to the Truth as I had found it, and with that clarity I was able to easily change my behavior.  In this incident I did not feel the fear of loosing our relationship and so I was not derailed from listening to and hearing the Holy One’s voice.

In the previous post I talked about how the Story of the Garden of Eden has also something to say about the state of forgetting God.  I’m not a bible fan, but certain stories are powerful allegories, and the story of Adam and Eve is such a story.  It is story of being in a seemingly perfect place, much like love is when we first fall in love.  As anyone who has ever been in love will tell you, as well as quite a bit of research, we sadly cannot stay in that rosy colored classes, oxytocin induced state forever.  Eventually, we come in contact with knowledge that makes us see the world/ our partner as they really are, to come in touch with the difficult places.  However, there is more than one possibility at that point.  There is the exile from Eden or there is the learning of how to navigate love inside of reality, the learning of the lessons The Teacher would have us learn at that point.  But that does require remembering that there is a Teacher and being attuned to that Teacher.  Adam and Eve forgot God, and so they did not receive his guidance but the false guidance of the serpent instead and thus were exiled from Eden.

For myself fear is a sure way to forget God and once the fear of the relationship breaking up hits I go into that frozen fear state.  As I did when I was a scared child I try to think my way out of the problem, I take actions or desperately demand actions out of others.  Both of these are out of the head and not out of the Spirit.  In Adam and Eve terms they are listening to the Serpent rather than the Creator of the Garden.  Unfortunately, when I’m in that scared frozen place nothing seems to help, not being at the Ocean – normally a sure path to the Holy, not sitting in prayer asking for answers…only sometimes can the message be delivered to me through others.  And of course it does not help if both me and my partner are in a state of fear for no Light can come thru either of us in this state.

So what next?  Now comes the learning we do after we have left the Garden of  Eden about how to walk with The Gardener in the World where we now live.

Living with our own Darkness

Recently my daughter did something and she was embarrassed by and she feared the judgment of others. So she kept it secret.  Not really unusual behavior.  All of us have done this at some point in time.  My reaction was mainly that I was sad that she had struggled with it alone and that she has felt so self-judgmental.  It was not the best choice she has ever made, but it was not the worst either.  She was primarily the victim of some bad luck in an arena in which our society is harshly judgmental.

When we talked about it later I told her I did not want her to ever live her life with the feeling that she had to keep secrets or be ashamed of anything because then she would become separated from a part of herself.  "What do you mean she asked?  This was hard to articulate.  I think of her father, my ex-husband, who literally committed a horrible crime.  This was something that he rightfully felt horrible about and carries much guilt about.  Some who read this will say that is a feeling of self-loathing that should never be laid down.  Do we contribute to the Good of the All by keeping ourselves small and in shame?

However, if we believe that all humans are children of a Divine Parent and an Unending Source of Love, then it follows that God has the capacity to forgive us all our diversions from the path of the Holy One. It follows that more good will be done by overcoming our own personal patch of darkness.  I believe that in the journey of the soul that everything we do holds the capacity for learning and growth in the Spirit. When I met her father he was in an Alternatives to Violence Project workshop, a program he participated in for eight years.  I also met Dan in AVP, a friend to this day, who two years ago was released from prison after serving everyday of a 30 year term for committing multiple rapes.

What these two men did represents extremes that most of us do not go to. However, the basic problem is the same; after we do something bad, something regrettable, or something embarrassing there is no taking it back.  Sometimes there are big consequences.  How do we integrate our own darkness into the tapestry of our own life?  How do we make peace with that which we regret and cannot undo?  Trite as the saying is: "How do we make lemonade out of lemons?"

I thought when I met both of them and all the men who came through the AVP workshops that they were doing the only thing we can do with darkness....redeem it. I have quoted the late Rev. Jon Nelson saying: (see 7/11/11 post) "Lean into the pain, that is where the redemptive possibilities lie." If one has come to this life to learn about violence in its most decisive way then to engage in violence and learn first-hand its horrible cost, and to renounce it, and to live without it, is as complete a learning as I imagine one life could achieve. (I believe my own walk as pacifist reflects the learning of many lifetimes, of being both the victim and the perpetrator of violence.)  

The two of them exemplified the two paths people can take in attempting to reconcile with ones own darkness.  My ex-husband could never internally reconcile what he did, so he hid it, and in so doing separated from himself. He could not be at peace in this separated state.  Over time this went beyond not putting down an accurate job history, to actually making up a whole fictional life which he told to others, thus severing himself forever from the Truth.  

Dan on the other hand, chose to tell the truth in prison about why he was there, earning him the lowest place on the prison totem pole and yet allowing him to live with the Truth of who he was.  Thus when he got out he also told the truth on every resume and job application.  He was rejected over and over but was loved by his wife and friends and eventually hired by an acquaintance who appreciated his integrity and his skill set.  He said he had expected to feel out of place when he got out of prison after such a long absence as he had before he went to prison; instead because he walks in his own skin and knows his own intentions towards others he feels deeply at home in the world.  

It has occurred to me that this indeed is the difference between leaning into the pain and not doing so.  When we are so afraid of pain, or of our own darkness that we avoid it, we never learn what it has to teach us.  We live separated from the Spirit whom we are afraid to approach and we live in constant fear of others and their judgment of us if they were to truly know us.  When we have the courage to go through the pain we come out the other side, not unlike a mother giving birth to a child.  The only way out is through, and we are "baptized" by our own struggle and its integrity—or lack of.

I'm not suggesting we just throw ourselves into darkness, or surrender to whatever evil impulse we may feel tugging at us, or lie in depression.  I'm saying that we recognize that darkness exists also on the spiritual path just as surely as night and day co-exist.  And that in whatever darkness we find ourselves we never stop looking for the Presence of the Light.  That we use as a lantern in the darkness the question, "What is my soul trying to learn from this experience?"  Redemption, if there is such a thing, must be in learning the lessons we came here to learn.

Note to reader:  My New Year's resolution was one post a month and I was doing very well until the end of May.  Then came the end of school and two church conferences in July and ...no June or July post.  Please read this as my July post!

Why do we Die?

Why do we die? is a question humanity has been trying to figure out since the beginning of time.  Alternately we ask: why do we live?  And what happens when we die? And what is the purpose of life?

I think it is perhaps more useful to ask the question what if we did not die?  I think this formation begins to reveal some of the purpose of death.  Most of us are not fond of deadlines, experiencing stress around them, or having had bad consequences for them or disappointing outcomes.  Nonetheless, if we are honest with ourselves they do push us to get things done; they do lead to the completion of tasks and to a sense of accomplishment.  Death is a deadline on life.

If you knew you would live forever would you set goals?  Would the goals matter?  Would it matter who you married or how you parented if you could just marry again or have "new" children?  (would people even marry?  What does till death do us part mean then?)  Would job performance matter?  Would career path matter?  Would there be any push to get anything done?  In fact in the Star Trek series there are a people called the Q who are immortal, and they are shown to be very immature, aimless and self-absorbed because of the lack of finality in their lives.  And in fact throughout history many martyrs and heroes/heroines have the meaning of their life be defined by what they were willing to die for, to forfeit their life for.  This formulation also points out that if we live "safely" all the way to the finish line, preserving our life at every turn, but never really doing anything, will we have lived at all?

In some belief systems we do not live forever, but we live multiple lives.  However, the belief in reincarnation would actually underscore the importance of death.  For each life then is conceptualized as building upon the learning of the past - constructed in a way that allows for specific learning.  How then would that happen if we never died and had the chance to try in a new or different ways, to learn the lessons that our soul  is trying for?  Many people have found their meaning and purpose in life by asking themselves the question what do I want to do before I die?

Death also puts a time line on love.  It means we do not have forever to get it right.  It means that if we want to be generous, kind, supportive, involved, etc., NOW is the time to do that; we may not have tomorrow.  It means that if we have rendered a hurt it is important to rectify it quickly.  It means that there is a deadline on forgiveness.  If we lived forever would we have motivation to move in decisively with love?  I have heard people say that they say "I love you" when they part from a loved one because, God forbid one of them be killed before they are together again, they want the last thing their loved one heard to be "I love you" and not "why didn't you put the dishes away?"  While this line of thought could be considered a bit morbid, there is a certain priority set in knowing that if our time is limited Love is the most important motion.  It is not uncommon for people on their death bed to say that Love is all that matters, for then as the deadline approaches all the detours and time wasters, and irrelevancies drop away and we see that we are here to Love.

Live the Questions

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Rainer Maria Rilke

This has always been one of my favorite Rilke quotes.  Well actually one of my favorite quotes.  I found it when I was young and wanting to know right that minute what my profession should be, and who I should marry, and where I should live.   And someone gave me this quote and it calmed something in me.  It made me realize that answers are not born into us full grown, that life is a process of finding our answers.  It allowed me to patient with myself, to relax a bit which was a very useful thing.  I often see with my clients this same urgency to find the answers to know RIGHT NOW, to be off the uncomfortable spot of not knowing and uncertainty.  That desire to leave the uncomfortable spot of unknowing is yet another way we avoid our questions and the spiritual process.  And yet is even clearer when viewed from the outside that sometimes we need more experience in order to find the right answer.  What would we learn if we stayed with the discomfort?  Can we open to that learning?

It is also true that we can find answers from a head place (e.g. I should eat this because it healthy. I will earn more if I have this profession.  I like this location better).  But finding answers from a spiritual place is a different process.  A spiritual process requires submitting our questions to prayer (as addressed in earlier posts) and learning how to "hear" the answers which by its very nature sort of means living into the answers.  God's timing is often different than our timing and yet perfect.  Sometimes we are held in waiting that seems unbearable and unfair only to realize later that what would have ensued had we moved more quickly would have been disastrous.  Sometimes we are pushed into something that feels too quick, too fast, that we feel unready for...only to see later that very important or precious things could not otherwise have happened except quickly.  Part of the spiritual process therefore is letting go of our own preconceived ideas to hear God's promptings and to act within that timing.  It maybe some comfort to realize that when we feel stuck that we may not yet be ready and to wait with patience and faith.  This is true within a spiritual process, but is not true within a "head" process.

There are many questions that arise in spiritual life: who is God? How do I pray? What happens after death? Why do we suffer? These are also questions that people can feel sometimes very urgent to know the answers too or very concerned about finding the "right" answer.  I think that again the anxious holding of these questions makes it harder to find the answer.  The fear of wrong answers can hold us back from exploring possible answers.  Can we brave enough to try on all possible answers and listen for whether they resignate as Truth?  Then we may live into our answers.

Choosing Our Parents

In my twenties I first read Illusions by Richard Bach.  In it he says: "Every problem has its gift" and other pieces of wisdom that suggest we are in charge of our own life experience, not passive victims to it.  I recall taking the worst event of my life and saying:  "Ok what is the gift of that?"  And strangely I could see it, and I could feel it shifting something that had lived in me as a sort of “victim oh poor me” story.  Something in this same exploration suggested to me that we in fact choose our parents.  About 7 years ago I finally read the Celestine Prophesy.   In this spiritual novel he also suggests that we choose our parents; and in fact he suggests we come to earth with a spiritual purpose and that the parents we choose provide certain lessons, for good or for bad, which help shape us for that spiritual purpose.  He calls this our “evolutionary question” and says we each have one.  He somewhat lays out a method for figuring it out (which I have further developed and have done with numerous friends.)  In the last few years in reading various books by Neale Donald Walsch and then most recently Inspiration by Wayne Dyer this idea has again been repeated that we choose our parents.  (This belief does fit best if you believe in reincarnation and karma.) 

In a previous post: God the Father/God the Mother, I talk about the idea that our concepts of God are often powerfully shaped by how we experience our "all powerful" parents during our childhoods.  These two ideas seem to go hand in glove: that we choose parents that provide a certain spiritual (or not) experience that then shapes our spirituality and the tools and concepts with which we pursue our spiritual task on earth.  This has powerful implications for both how we relate to our parents and our experiences with them, but also for those of us who are parents, how we parent.  Do you see your child as a soul that you have a sacred trust with?  Do you nurture not just their body, mind and emotions, but also their spiritual nature or their soul? 

What are the healing potentials with your parents (alive or dead) if you consider that you actually chose them?  For someone who was treated abusively or hatefully by a parent this may seem a fairly repugnant and nonsensical statement...at first glance.  But keep looking.  I think for example of a friend of mine who was beaten by his father during his childhood.   He says it taught him to question authority and to be strong and to be centered in his own internal sense of truth.  He has been an activist throughout his life and this has served him well.  I think of another person whose parents were not religious at all, but has a deep love of beauty, and how that prepared her to create art which has been a path to mysticism.

For myself, despite believing that we choose our parents, I have been mystified for decades trying to understand why I would choose a mother, a good mother, who would die during my childhood?  It has finally come to me in doing Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects, that I have learned how to be present to grief and loss unflinchingly and unwaveringly....and that in this time of so much loss on this planet, that those of us who fight for peace and for justice must be able to be present to the pain of the world.  As Joanna says:  "Be willing to have your heart be broken open to the pain of the world; it is what your heart was created for...to connect you to life." So I commend to you the question:  Why did I choose my parents?  How have they, for better or for worse, prepared me for my spiritual purpose in life?

Santa Claus Prayers

I have in past posts covered various ideas of how God might speak to us, and I have also described several people’s experience of asking God for answers and the answers they received.  Various denominations teach various ways of praying from meditation, to chanting, to memorized prayers which are repeated at appointed times, to prayers made on one’s behalf by others, etc.  And again I would ask the reader to consider all these forms and how they fit or do not fit with the Image of the Divine which you have embraced for yourself.  If you don’t know if they fit I encourage you to try these different forms and find your own experiences with them.  I don’t believe there is a right way to pray.  I think you will have to find the way that brings you into intimate and reliable relationship with the Holy One.

Once I had a conversation with a friend where we agreed that the “trap” in prayer is to make the Santa Claus prayer.  This is sort of praying for things.  It seems to me that we need to be clear in ourselves what it is we really need: to pray for a home not a house, for transportation rather than a car, etc. and have faith that the Divine Provider will sort out what best provides for us.  I remember really wanting a baby, but instead being given the Divine nudge to go to graduate school.  As it later turned out after she was born my circumstances changed, and I needed that degree to provide for that baby.  The Provider had known the right order for everything to unfold as it should.

Part of praying in my experience is reflecting on my current situation and being able to name in what ways I need help, and to name the truer need – not the outer package of that need.  It also means seeing my emotional state and recognizing when I need to ask for comfort, recognizing when there is fear, anger, worries, or confusion that I need to turn over to the Divine Comforter.  It can be way to easy to try to carry everything going on in one’s life oneself, or to try to make a partner or parent be Godlike in what we want from them.  This is when it is good to offer up the burdens or the desires of our heart and then let go of the outcome and be able to listen for God’s response.  This listening would be the kind of listening as described in previous posts.

Praying for others, or intercessory prayer as it is called in some traditions, takes into account some of these same qualities (avoiding Santa Claus prayers on behalf of other people) and offering up to God our concerns for others and then letting go of them.  As a therapist I carry concerns for many people; if I kept them all as mine to carry I would loose my mind.  It is the Sheppard that makes it possible for me to be with people’s pain and not be overpowered by it.  Prayer for others is also remarkably effective.  There are studies where people in hospitals have been put in two groups: those not prayed for and those who had people praying for them. Those who were prayed for healed faster and did better.   My partner tells a story of when he had been diagnosed with a tumor pressing on his inner ear and was scheduled for surgery.  Many people prayed for him.  When a finally scan was done to give the surgeon an image to work from, he was called by the doctor to say that in a month’s time it had shrunk to almost nothing and that he no longer needed surgery!

There are of course many different traditions which suggest that prayers be made in a certain way, calling on God by a certain name, using certain objects or postures or rituals to aid the prayer or make it more powerful.  If you find yourself drawn to these traditions it will be important to learn these ways of praying and to be sure that the methods of a religion you are attracted to really assist you. 

I know what God Looks Like

My daughter when she was about 7 told me casually one day:  "I know what God looks like".   "Oh," I said like one who has had a butterfly land on them and does not want to scare it away by to quickly moving, "what does God look like?"  She calmly described for me something that had happened when she was about three, a time when we were camping right down at the ocean's edge.  The water coming up to about two feet below us during the night, and then in the morning it was low tide and it was also foggy.  As we walked along in the fog we could find marvelous things: starfish and barnacles now exposed on big rocks,  little fish caught in tide pools, objects washed up in the night by waves.  There was a mysterious, magical and yes mystical nature to that moment.  And this moment was the one my daughter now described and then pronounced:  "That is what God looks like"  

There are parents somewhere who would have felt the need to explain that that was just "low tide", or to say that there was nothing to see, or to tell them instead about Jesus Christ, or Allah, or to otherwise deny or argue with their child's spiritual experience.  Who is to say that children do not see God more clearly, easily and with less distortion than adults?  For me it was important to simply validate her spiritual experience.  I simply said: "Yes that is what God looks like?"  She has grown up into a young woman who is confident of her relationship with The Holy Mystery and able to tune in to the Inner Voice.

I remember a client of mine who sees auras, telling me that when she was young she tried to describe this to her parents, and they made her feel so crazy for this that first she stopped telling them, and then she stopped noticing herself, till as an adult she had to work hard to reconnect to her ability to perceive spiritual energies.

How were your spiritual experiences or instincts responded to by adults around you?
How do you nurture the spirituality of children around you?
Do you believe that people of all ages can experience the Divine?
What if the Divine does not look the way we think that God should look?