Nature's Embrace - Melody of Darkness - Photobucket
One of my favourite things about the spiritual path I discovered through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is that I was invited to choose my own conception of God. This idea that I can make a list of everything I find objectionable about my own understanding of God and then make a second list of what kind of God I’d like to believe in is very powerful. Much in that suggestion breathes of the essential loving compassion and forever reaching nature of Spirit that it staggers me. Yet I first heard it as a simple statement made one alcoholic to another.
It conveyed to me the assurance that “If this belief you’re holding is getting in the way of your healing. If how you understand God is causing you pain, guilt, and shame. If the conclusions you’ve drawn separate you from Love and from other people then choose again. What understanding opens the door to healing and hope? What belief inspires in you the desire to find out more for yourself? What new conclusions might you draw if your knew I had stood where you are, full of anger, hate, guilt, shame and desperately wanting freedom and another person offered me the same out. Choose again.”
I grew up in the church where I had come to believe that there was only ONE way to understand or approach God. I thought I understood that ONE way and it tore at my heart to realize that I would never have anything good in my life. Turns out – I was wrong. Turns out – there are as many understandings of God – of Jesus – of Spirit as there are people who seek to understand. Belief is the result of teaching, experience, and interpretation. My interpretations never came out well for me. My best efforts to make sense of a world where people did icky things to little kids resulted in the conclusion that bad things happen to bad people and if it had happened to me then I was BAD and therefore not on God’s gift list. Thank God I was WRONG! Thank God for the people in AA who suggested I come up with my own conception of God.
Thank God for a God who met me in that place of seeking and lead me to a new understanding full of hope, joy, and love. This is the God I have come to know – a God who will show up in whatever way works for me and lead me ever deeper into loving relationship with God, Spirit, and others. It’s not new stuff – it wasn’t even new when the first 100 men and women wrote the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. But it offers a new freedom to anyone bound, by their mistaken identification of God, to a way of living that causes them to feel alone, afraid, and unloved. Is that you? Then choose again, and watch a new path unfold before you!
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