The God I Serve (From the book, "ISSUES: The Opposite of Everything I was Taught")

12 THE GOD I SERVE

Common rules of etiquette discourage discussions of politics or religion in polite company. While I’ve never been considered ‘polite company’ and my adherence to any form of etiquette is usually questionable, I have learned that if I want to get along with people in general, it is helpful to keep that guideline in mind. Unfortunately, there are times when it is unavoidable; people are who they are because of their beliefs. I can avoid the subject of politics easily enough because my belief (or current disbelief) in my country’s choice of president has nothing to do with who I am, but my ‘religious’ (for lack of a better word) beliefs do. When what I do, say or am comes into question, the answer always tunnels down to my beliefs and my religion – or presumed lack of.

Religion, faith, and beliefs are wonderful to have – and we all do, whether or not any of us realize we are acting on them; they are all basically the same idea, too, but the word ‘religion’ seems to take precedence over the others because having a name for your religion, being able to label it, makes it easier for others to determine the right way to judge you.

I belong to no organized religion. To me, the idea of organization in religion is limiting. When you organize your room you limit the mess; when you organize religion, you limit faith.

This brings into question the God I Serve. For the record, the idea of ‘serving’ anything rankles. There are better actions to take to enjoy a fulfilling and giving life, and better words to describe the way a good life is lived.

What god do I serve? What god do I believe in? According to most, there is only one GOD. Despite my apparent contradictions, I agree, although I hesitate to use the term GOD because the widely-held definition is a little too organized for me. The one God that I believe exists is less limited in scope, ability, knowledge, and love than pretty much every definition I have been taught to believe – God more than a compilation of all gods, and so much more expansive than the common words and labels used to describe God (which, in and of themselves are more expansive than even the belief-actions used to support them).

Like everyone else, my first exposure to God came through the family I was born into. We went to church every Sunday, and repeated the same words each week. I never felt any connection to it; it was just something I had to do. I’m aware of some issues at home about it, when my father talked about the church wanting too much money from him. That was probably my first real thought about organized religion.

I believe that had to do with our leaving that particular religious branch. After my parents divorced, my mother went church-shopping. We tried on a number of different denominations and finally found one that fit, that made us part of their family – so much so, that we spent 4 days a week there between church services, age-specific classes, and youth groups. I resented the full immersion, but I liked that I felt I was actually learning about God and a reason to go to church. I really liked the new friends I made. I was in middle school and my three closest church friends were also in my classes. For three years, that church was the center of our lives.

It was also in control of our lives. We weren’t allowed to do anything the church didn’t allow. Two of the main rules that directly affected me the most were the rules regarding dancing and going to movies: we weren’t allowed to do either. Now, school dances were a big part of middle school – even during the school day, occasionally. My mother would send a note to the school saying that I couldn’t participate, and I would sit in the music teacher’s class or the office until the end of the day (those dances were held during the last two periods) – until I stopped telling my mother, or stopped passing in the notes. I’d get in trouble and mom would send me to speak to the pastor. Our conversations were always the same: I would say, “What’s wrong with dancing?” He would say, “What’s good about it?” I would say, “I love it. It’s fun.” Then, we’d pretty much stare at each other for the remainder of the time I was there. I’m guessing he had trouble telling a 12 year old girl that dancing leads to fornication (my mother passed on that little tidbit to me). I was still a virgin at the time who had spent most of my life dancing – music and dancing was the one thread that never broke in my family – and, despite the fact that I was well into my masturbatory years I never associated dancing with sex; I didn’t get the urge to ‘play’ after dancing, nor did I ever feel the need to play some music and dance to get me in the mood.

My mother eventually gave up on the dance battle, but held her ground about going to see movies. We were told that no matter what movie you went to see, the proceeds from the ‘good’ movies went in to making the ‘bad’ movies. This was all happening during the late 1970s and early 1980s when society was putting a particular focus on divorce, children from ‘broken’ homes, latchkey kids, and ‘weekend fathers’.

What did weekend fathers do to entertain their children? They took them to movies. That was almost the staple back then. At first, my sisters and I told him we couldn’t go. We did eventually go to the movies with him – and not because of pressure from him. We went to see Lady and the Tramp. It was actually funny how my mother found out.

My little brother was about 4 years old. He was sitting on my mother’s lap, and my two sisters and I were sitting around her on the couch. He started singing the Siamese Cat Song from the movie. I’ll never forget the first look on her face, the surprise and pleasure at his singing. Mom started singing along with him and when they finished she exclaimed, “I didn’t know you knew that song! Where did you - ?” and then came that second look that I won’t forget, that look of dawning surprise and then anger.

If my parents hadn’t already been divorced by then, that probably would have finished them off. I won’t forget the fight about it, either.

Nearing the end of our three years with that church, there were many arguments about it, between my parents and between us kids and our mother. I was learning about God, but I was learning about a rigid God that didn’t like to be questioned, and I had many questions.

In the end, God – or God-through-the-church – decided we weren’t worthy to be part of that family. My mother, who was welcomed into the fold as a divorced woman, was kicked out when she committed the sin of remarriage. By rights of relation, her children were also disinvited – and shunned. The ‘family’ that I’d known for three years had disowned us – even my friends had to stop talking to me. I was 13. That left quite an impression. I was told later that I would be welcome back in the church – but only as a guest, and only if I admitted my mother’s sin of remarriage.

No, thank you.

After church-shopping once again, Mom found another religious branch to settle into. By then I was questioning everything – or, rather, I consider it the beginning of thinking for myself. I went to church, listened to what was said, and eventually went with what I felt my heart was saying believing that came from God. I stopped going to church, because with all the shopping we’d done I’d come to the conclusion that I believed they all worshipped the same God, but each had different ways of going about it. The rules each church called ‘God’s Rules’ didn’t make sense to me, because what was said about God didn’t make sense. I saw it every time my mother changed churches; she prayed differently, spoke differently, and would become immediately adherent to new sets of rules.

There is a distinct dichotomy to what is said about God and how He is represented by His People, in His Name. To kill, shun, harm, hate, disregard, deny, denigrate, judge, and punish other people In His Name? Love, All, Everything, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Eternal, Creator …  these are all ‘limitless’ words that describe a God whose power apparently isn’t, if everything else taught is to be believed.

God created all. All. All is everything. Everything means that He created this and that. Here and there. Then and now. This and everything else.

Heaven and hell. Good and bad.

All of it. This and its opposite are the same thing, because you can’t have one without the other. You can’t know light if you don’t know darkness. It is the polarity that allows the existence of anything. Good would not exist if there were no evil, because good is only good in its relation to evil.

Did we create the evil? The polarity? The darkness?

The Devil?

Isn’t the boss responsible for the actions of his employees? In business, we don’t allow the boss to claim ignorance of what the people who work under him are doing – but God can? So, God created everything – except those things?

How can there be a Devil? We are supposed to believe that this all-powerful deity is concerned of losing a battle with something of his own creation? That this entity is actually powerful enough to worry God? Remember all those expansive words used in describing God? Even if there were a Devil, wouldn’t he still be a lesser being? Nobody calls the Devil all-powerful, yet somehow we should believe that he can overthrow God, or that an all-powerful and all-knowing God-that-has-it-all is worried that he can be overthrown. The Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, is worried about the middle?

As far as we’ve been told, the battle between God and the Devil is fixed – it has already been won by God. This would mean the Devil has been paid or coerced into throwing the fight – he must, if we are to believe that he is or has ever been strong enough to win. And yet God still walks around like a sore loser, smacking down his children that may mis-play/may have mis-played possibly costing him the game.

Hell, if we’re going to assign negative human traits to God, let’s not cherry-pick which bad traits he has – we all know that a bad person is completely bad, right? It’s always one or the other, isn’t it?

We are also told that we need ‘saving’.  From what? If God created all things, and God doesn’t make mistakes, and he already won the battle, what is there for him to have to save us from? Who is he saving us from, if everything comes from him?

Do we need to be saved from temptation? What is temptation? Temptation is the wanting to make a choice of the bad over what is good, and good and bad are relative to your beliefs. What is it that makes the ‘bad’ choice more desirable? Our thoughts? Where do our thoughts come from (or where are they supposed to come from)? Our church? Why were we given our own if we are not supposed to use them? Think about those ‘studies’ on children who were sat at a table and a plate of Oreos (or some other snack they liked) was put in front of them that they were told not to eat. What did they do when the adult left the room? Would you give your child an electric train set for Christmas and not let her play with it? Why not?

So, why would God do that to us? To give us our individual feelings, thoughts and abilities and not want us to play with them?

That is what Hell is to me; the denial of self. The flaming Hell after death could only exist if God’s love was conditional. Hell is our own creation, either by repeating patterns that we know hurt us or by denying who we are. The country-music-loving teenager who pretends to like metal to impress her friends denies what she truly enjoys just to be part of a group or accepted. Is she happy listening to music she doesn’t like? Is it right for her to sacrifice her own choice for the benefit of others? At some point, won’t she resent what she has ‘given up’ in the name of acceptance?

To me, the idea of a God is everything that I’ve heard said about all of them – at least in the sales pitch. The Eternal, the Life Force, the Universal Creator, Love. All. The words used to describe the indescribable. How can we reconcile the expansive meaning of the word God with the limited qualities of neediness, jealousy, judgment, intolerance, separation, bias, and control? What I find hard to believe is all of the negative human traits that have been ascribed to a being or force that is not human, as well as the “God works in mysterious ways” cop-out when questions can’t or won’t be answered. It’s a little too “because I said so” for me.

I feel that the idea of God-the-parent came about as a means of explanation – the easiest way to explain a large idea is to bring it down in terms easily relatable. Unfortunately, we have the habit of taking the easiest explanation and building a whole story around it, even if the initial comparison was used solely as an example, and we pigeon-hole it right there, forgetting we were talking about something much larger.

My own father used the fear-based parenting method, which is basically the method of the God who threatens eternal damnation for disobedience. Before I knew anything about God, I knew my father’s method was … not right. Learning of a God who parented the same way was both confusing and disillusioning. I had time to rethink my opinion again when I became a parent. The only thing that changed was my understanding of why my father chose that method. I even called him to let him know that while I still disagreed with it, I did understand it. It’s definitely easier to keep kids in line when they fear you.

By ‘keeping kids in line’ and expecting them to follow a set path we give them no opportunity to grow. If learning is a result of doing, what chance would they have to learn more than we know if that is the limit of what we allow them to do? What of mistakes? Aren’t mistakes considered the ultimate teachers? Yet the only way to make a mistake is to step out of line. How then can we preach of a God who allows no room for growth? What would be our purpose here?

We can’t be here to learn if we are not allowed to color outside of the lines and think for ourselves. Life cannot be a school if all we are taught is imitation and limitation. Here, again, we take an oversimplification and get stuck in it. Look how our educational system has changed, and how our beliefs about our educational system has changed – including what is being taught. We see that children from families with money have more advantages than those that don’t, and that schools in certain geographical areas are better than schools in others. We are aware that children need a basic education and that childhood education is not consistently basic across the country. If life is indeed a school and we only have one shot at taking the standardized test, a fair God would have created a level playing field, with every child having the same opportunity, background, and physical and mental ability. Even those who believe that ‘everyone will be told the message of God and allowed the chance to repent before they die’ have to admit that those who were born being ‘told the Truth’ have an unfair advantage over those that weren’t. Maintaining a belief is easier than changing one.

It is said that God doesn’t make mistakes, but it’s also said that we are born in sin. Who screwed that up? Because we have been born in sin we must spend our lives making up for the mistakes of whom? Isn’t the sinner a mistake? Is that fair, to punish all for some? How, then, can anyone truly believe they are one of God’s Special Creations with that kind of burden hanging overhead? Are we special, or not? Are we loved, or not?

Ask any new mother about her baby, her perfect baby. The child is told of his perfection immediately – not one relative or well-meaning friend visits the child for the first time and points a finger at that child yelling, “Sinner!” How would the mother react? And that same mother will turn around later and tell her child, her perfect child, that he is not perfect?

It’s hard to accept the idea that an all-powerful, all-knowing, God-who-has-it-all would need to create the unworthy, and task them with a lifetime of trying to earn worthiness with the threat of eternal damnation if they don’t succeed. For what purpose? If he wanted us to be a certain way, wouldn’t he just have made us that way?

What kind of God would demand perfection out of the imperfect? What kind of God would enjoy watching his creations struggle to be perfect, to vie for his attention? Does he sit back during the most fervent prayers looking to see who ‘wants it the most’? Would God only mete out miracles or cure someone when he ‘felt like it’? Which cancer patient is more worthy than the other? What makes him more worthy?

The God(s) that I have been told about give us choices we are not allowed to make, punish us for sins we didn’t commit, love us conditionally, and threaten us unless we toe a certain line (out of many). A puppet-master whose sole reason for creation is need for adulation and control. And the puppets should love him?

If God is love, and the oft-cited 1^st Corinthians 13 is true, then there is no way we were created for the sole purpose of worshipping and proving our devotion to this God because “Love is not self-seeking … it keeps no record of wrongs.” This also denies the thought that God seeks to punish us for not worshipping Him.

We talk about jealousy and what a negative trait it is – especially in relationships. And we also hear it celebrated that our God is a jealous God, and we are in relationship with Him.

I’ll be honest, it makes no sense to me that I’ve been told I should worship a God who has all the qualities of a man I won’t date.

I believe that we, and everything around us, are connected. We are both the parts of the whole, and the whole itself. The idea of us being created in God’s image means we are created as Him. Like a hologram, you have the whole image, but if you cut out even a small piece of that hologram you still have the whole view of the entire holographic image.

The Holy Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit), the triune - the three that are one - they are the id, ego, superego and the conscious, subconscious, superconscious. The mind, body, and spirit of each individual. Separate, but whole and part of a whole.

Am I saying that we are Gods? In essence – and at the risk of being crucified – yes. We are the creators of the time and space we hold ourselves limited to, we are the creators of our realities. What each of us believes is what is, because we act our lives out based on those beliefs – whether or not they are true to others. We are the expression of God in the multitude of forms a God can take; this is how God knows he/she is God.

“For now we see reflection as in a mirror” is another part of that chapter on love in 1^st Corinthians. When you know yourself, you will know God; know yourself and you will be known. Like the definition of the word ‘Namaste’ the spirit in me recognizes the spirit in you. The ‘still small voice’ of God is your own inner voice, your gut instinct, your intuition, and your own inner truth. We have been told “Ye are Gods” – although the definition of the word God changes a few times in the passage it is taken out of. All this that I can do, you can do also.

We play the game of Follow the Leader as children, where we mimic everything the leader does, and later learn contradictory statements like ‘those who can’t do, teach’. Books on leadership skills profess that the best way to lead your employees is to know what their job is; leading other people is about showing them what they can do. Following a leader is not about blindly doing what the leader says to do; it’s about following the leader’s methods and actions. Employees respect their employers more when they know they do not consider themselves above the work being done in the trenches. The best bosses help shape employees to become bosses themselves, otherwise there would be no parameters for promotion. We are coming to see that employee morale matters in performance; encouraging employees to want to do and enjoy their jobs will make them better employees. Those that come up with solutions not previously considered are praised. We know that job ability is not regulated by words written on specialty paper or the right words stated in an interview.

Society has decided that discrimination is wrong. If you are not an equal-opportunity employer you can be sued. Letting all of the kids on the team play the game is fair. We should never judge a book by its cover. Be happy. Be who you are.

Be who you are, because God-who-doesn’t-make-mistakes made you that way, and you are perfect. It takes many different wires to conduct energy in an electrical box, it takes different spices to make a sauce, each instrument in an orchestra needs to produce a different sound to create a symphony, and it takes different people to create new opportunities.

All of the qualities we are teaching to succeed in business and in life are the opposite of the childhood follow-the-leader qualities we are told best ‘serve God’ – at least the God of many organized religions who is judgmental, exclusionary, intolerant, needy, jealous, narcissistic, and unfair.

Do unto others as you would have done unto you. What you do for the least of you has been done for me. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. I am the still small voice. Ye are Gods. All that I can do, you can do also. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

We are Gods. We are the creators. Individually we create our own heaven and hell as parts of our collective Universe. The Sabbath is the day or time we take to relax, to reflect, to reconnect with the highest part of ourselves, the force that connects all of us as one.

Our connections are visible in instances of mob mentality, when people are considered to be of the same mind, in those who finish each other’s sentences, at a music concert where people of different walks of life are all swaying to the same beat. God is in us and the energy between us. The all.

When I speak of God using that name, this is what I’m referring to. My idea of church and fellowship is spending time with people who are loving and true to themselves, those of us who can move mountains by our mutual support of each other with allowances to the individual spirit of each that enhances the group: where two or three are gathered together in my name – that name of the life force in and among us, our separate part of the whole and our wholeness together.

Namaste.

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