The God Question

Am I the only one uncomfortable with God?  The God I grew up with was a discrete entity with an implausible digression into Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  He (always He) knew everything, saw everything, and was everywhere, all the time.

I stopped calling myself a Christian at 17.  First, because the definition of  Christian is believing that Jesus was the son of God.  If you don’t believe Jesus was divine, you aren’t a Christian.  The second reason was that I didn’t like the company I found myself in: small minded, gossipy people that didn’t seem to remember the part where Jesus yelled at the Pharisees for being cups with sparkly outsides and filthy insides.  Also, I’m a big believer in the “he who is without sin, cast the first stone” rule.  Dealing with my own failures is a full time job that doesn’t leave me much time for trying to pick other people apart.

That left the question of God.  Does He (She?) exist?  How can S/He be good if bad things happen?  My 20’s answer to this question was Deism.  There’s a God, S/He just set it all in motion and then stepped away to watch the clock unwind as it would.  Existentialism was a favorite construct at that point.  No inherent meaning, meaning is what you make of it.  Nietzsche was a favorite author.  All sorts of things fell into a weird kind of place through the lens of  Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  Yes, i’m pretty sure that makes me weird.

Anyway, I was pretty content with this answer, all until I got divorced and hit rock bottom with a velocity that stole my breath.  I got foxhole religion in a hurry, which looked like waking up in the middle of the night howling out a prayer that was so visceral, no language could even begin to hold it.

As the urgency of my crisis subsided, I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I’d started praying again, not just in the guttural 2 AM pleadings, but in conversations with Neal.  Theories and proposals that I am well aware are fruitcake in nature started making sense to me.  I found an energy-lady/empath.  I pulled out my Tarot cards again.  I read The Four Agreements.  I read The Secret.  I had extensive conversations with a man who believed in past lives and karma and meditation, and he was the least fruit-cake person I’ve ever met.  God slipped out of my vocabulary, only to be replaced by the Universe.  I re-read Neal’s letters.  And this all eventually coalesced into a synthesis of everything that will probably evolve again, and isn’t even original to me (though the original philosopher’s name escapes me right now).

For God to be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, then God must be everything and everything must be God.  God must be the entire system, the interactions, the material world, the butterfly effect, the ups and the downs, the music, the transcendental nature of listening to Robert Glasper play Smells Like Teen Spirit live, the uncertainty.  Good and bad, dark and light, the way that nothing is ever taken from you without the left-behind void being filled with something else…  Time.  It’s all God.

And beyond that, I don’t know.  The Nobel Prize is going to a Department of Commerce employee who showed that a particle can be beside itself.  I’m open to the possibility that all kinds of things that previously have gone unproven are going to shake out to be verifiable.  I’ve seen things I can’t explain, had prayers answered, known friends who have experienced things that don’t fit into what’s possible.  Fallen for someone who answered questions I hadn’t asked…  it’s a mysterious, funny thing, my new everything is everything God.

But it’s a better answer than any other that I’ve come up with thus far.