The Journey

I have something to confess. …I love God. There. I said it. Out there for all the world to see. No take backs. It’s true. It’s totally true. I am deeply, madly, sincerely in love with God. And it keeps growing everyday. Sometimes, it feels as if it might consume me entirely. Sometimes, it verges on the border of “I can’t take it,” and I have to pull back a little. I don’t know why exactly. There just seems to be limits on how much Love I can experience and access at this point. I don’t know why it feels like I can’t take anymore, but it does—almost as if I am afraid of it. And there you have. I am afraid of it. I am afraid that it really will consume me and there will be no more “me” left, if you really want to know the truth.

I have not always felt this way. Far from it. It is only in recent years that I began to fall in Love with God. At least, that’s how it feels. The Course would say that I have always been in Love with God, because God and I are one—inseparable—but I haven’t begun to realize that until recently, which is how I started to become aware of my deep, deep Love of God. And it’s funny because I used to feel quite differently about God. At least, I thought I did. I used to loathe Him. I used to resent It. I used to—dare I say it?—hate God. At least, I thought I did. If I’m being completely frank, I used to have trouble even saying the word: God. God. Jesus. Holy Spirit?!? Ugh. My skin would crawl. A trembling in my gut. A shrinking of my heart. Fear. That is how I felt about my beloved God, if you want to know the truth of it.

My dark feelings and thoughts about God were a result of a great deal of misinformation. I have to warn you: THERE IS AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF MISINFORMATION ABOUT GOD, on the internet, in books, on TV—in the world. Be careful. There are men and women everywhere who would love to tell you who God is, what He thinks, and where He is, and whose side He is on. I’m just going to lay it out there for you: THEY ARE WRONG. I can’t be polite about this. It’s just a fact. And I know this from experience. Do NOT take anyone else’s word about God. If you do, you are just asking to be lied to, cheated of Love, and led astray. There is only one way to know the Truth about God, and that is through direct experience. I urge you not to settle for anything less.

My misguided feelings about God were a result of nothing less than a great deal of religious abuse. I’m going to go ahead and coin that term right here. Religious abuse taught me that God is fearful, that God is judgmental, that God is distant. At an extremely early and impressionable age, and for many, many years to follow, I was subjected to an ongoing litany, an ever-present diatribe of misinformation about God. This is what I now refer to as religious abuse. There is no shortage of men (and women!) on this earth who claim to be “Men (and Women!) of God” and who are all too eager to tell you—preach to you, even—about their version of God, their beliefs about God, and their teachings of God. And they will share these ideas with such conviction and such ardor as to convince you that not only do they know what they are talking about but their words are truth. These teachings are full of judgement, laced with fear, fraught with contradiction, and they are poisonous to your heart. That is, if you allow them to be. I did. I allowed the lies I heard to enter my mind and my heart until I hated and feared God so much that I could barely bring myself to utter His name. These were the darkest, scariest, and saddest days of my life.

When I first walked into my teacher’s office, he started throwing the words “God,” and “Jesus,” and “Holy Spirit” around like it ain’t no thang. He immediately saw my aversion to the verbiage. Do you know what he did? No, he didn’t modify his language to make it more comfortable for me. He didn’t change God to “universe” or “energy” or “Spirit” so as to be less offensive to my ego. No, I think he used them even more. And he challenged me. He challenged my aversion to the words, my inability to squeak them out, and he forced me to take a good hard look at my hang up. Boy, am I glad he did.

After years of challenging not only the words, but the thoughts and ideas and belief systems that had me so hung up on the idea of God—the years of religious abuse and years of buying into it—I began to discover something shocking: I…love…God. !!! I love God? Yes! I really, really love God. The awareness came in small increments at first. But over time, as I continued to make choices that challenged my fearful beliefs and to restructure my life in accordance with the Truth that I was discovering, spontaneous moments of deep devotion began to occur. And they have only grown deeper.

When I began to discover my love of God, I held it pretty close to the vest. I began to confess my newfound love to my teacher, but not to anyone else, really. I was still afraid of that world out there, the world that taught me God is a profanity, or else something to be feared. The fact of the matter is that it is not socially acceptable to Love God. It’s not! It’s completely acceptable to hate God, to be indifferent about God, or to curse God. It’s accepted, in a way, to be a radical about God, a fanatic of some sort. Even the zealots have their place in society along with religiosity. But just to be a regular person, religiously unaffiliated, living, working, and playing in everyday mainstream society, and to Love God…now, that is a different story.

Just think about it. Imagine going into work at your office, standing around the water cooler and discussing your deep love and affection for God with your coworkers. Or going to the bar for happy hour and striking up a conversation with the bartender, “How ‘bout that God, huh? Isn’t he something? God, God is the greatest, isn’t he?” It just isn’t done. It’s not something you talk about at a cocktail party or an oyster roast. I mean, it’s such a touchy subject.

This makes me sad because I love talking about God. It’s just like when your best friend is dating this new, really hot guy (or girl) and every single subject you talk about with your friend somehow ends up coming right back around to their new flame. That’s how I feel about God, and that’s what my heart is always bringing me back to: Let’s talk about God. But unlike in the example above, it doesn’t fade over time like with the relationship where, as it becomes more familiar, the impulse to come back to it every other sentence begins to wane. It’s just the opposite. It grows. It grows to the point where you just can’t contain it anymore and here you are publicly typing a diatribe about your deep, abiding Love for God. You’ve been warned.

And finally, I have begun to reach that point where I don’t care if it’s socially acceptable or not. I can’t hide it anymore. God is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. And I won’t be ashamed of that. No, you won’t find me preaching from rooftops or passing out flyers on Market Street. I don’t need to. You can’t convince anyone that they Love God or that He loves them. It is only something that you can come to know through direct experience. And for that, you have to want it.

But you may find me inexplicably happy, or even giddy, while doing nothing in particular. I just refuse to be afraid of my Love for God any longer because I can’t seem to come up with a single good reason for it anymore. The crazy thing is, I’m not alone in this. We all feel this way. We just don’t all know it yet. Since I have begun to surrender to my love affair with God, I have realized that I have always loved God, passionately, unabashedly. The reason I didn’t realize it before is because I was in denial. I was in denial because I felt judged and hurt by God, rejected by Him; and as a result, I was hiding my true feelings out of a need for self-defense. But now that I know that I was just lied to, that God has never hurt or judged or betrayed or rejected me, I can Love Him openly and freely. We all can, just as soon as we realize this.

If you ever want to gush about God, and no one around the water cooler seems interested, just hit me up. I’d love to talk with you about God, any time, anywhere. He’s my favorite.

In Love,

cc