I don't always set out to provoke. Honestly, I really don't. Sometimes it just happens, and I promise, there's no malicious intent involved.
I recently stated in a public, church setting that I struggle with the idea of a 'Personal God.' I got an email the next day that I might as well have thrown a grenade down the center aisle. The e-mailer was probably right. You would have needed a host of angelic medevacs to cut through the theological tension in the room.
Now, I know that my existential struggle may sound ridiculous as I work with people on a daily basis on discovering the God of their understanding. I help people discover their spirituality. That's what I do for a living. How could Mr. Spiritual be so completely unspiritual? And in church no less!
But I just don't understand God.
Oh I have a good handle on some spiritual principles. I can help people breakthrough spiritual blockades. Ive done it before and I'm fairly confident it will happen again.
But I've been unlearning a lot. Things I thought I knew and understood about spirituality got scandalized through very real human experience.
For example, I went months--literally months--of barely surviving financially. I got really good professional, business, and spiritual counsel and made tough decisions based on collective wisdom. And things continued to go pear-shaped. Not for weeks, but for months (about twenty-four in all).
That's a hellacious amount of time to watch economic decline in one's life. Still, I knew the Divine Presence was there (well, out there somewhere) but he certainly wasn't answering my text messages.
Things were very, very silent. Things were very, very pessimistic, despite my best efforts. The Personal God I knew went rogue. How dare he.
Things were so dim for a while even close friends and family shook their heads with dismay, responding they just didn't understand what was going on. At least they were honest. Trite, religious cliches don't help pay the bills.
Now before you start praying for my personal salvation right here and now, hear me out. I've said "the prayer" many times. You know, the one where you ask Jesus into your heart and to forgive your sins so that you can go to heaven. But when that's said and done, what next?
I've built much of my life on prayer and meditation, on the premise that one can get good, orderly direction from a Spirit one has never seen. It has worked for most of my life with astounding results. I have seen things happen that I have no rational explanation for.
But what do you do when your Personal God stops speaking? Where do you turn when Elohim is silent? What do you do when collective wisdom fails? Worse yet, what do you do when your religion fails?
So I have been in a place of re-thinking God, of unknowing the God of my limited understanding. Life's experiences have challenged some of my deeply held beliefs. Some of those beliefs have remained, some are being amended, and some have had to go. They just weren't effective enough to pull me through.
Here's what was meant by my unintended grenade: I don't trust myself with a Personal God.
How I can take something so transcendent, so awesome, so all-encompassing, and reduce it to a limited, finite personality that responds to my every beck and call? While I'm getting manic over unpaid bills, is the All-powerful One somehow obligated to come down and work out this mess? And if I lose everything, does that mean he is uncaring, unfaithful or unhelpful? Or could it mean that God isn't obligated to help me out as much as I thought but is more interested in me working my internal world out?
I don't want to make God in my own image. I don't want to reduce the Majesty of the Universe to the god of my personal understanding that may work for today but fail me tomorrow. I don't want an idol built by hands of human imagination. I need a bigger God than that.
Now of course, I personalize God every time I pray. Every time I have a God-thought I am engaging in a spiritual discourse trying to understand something that far exceeds human understanding. It's not to say I can't understand a few things, yet it is to say that my understanding has come up short and barely scratches the surface of something that I suspect is much greater than my experience dictates to date. I don't want to rob myself--or the God of my experience--of beauty, majesty, and awe.
So I'm unlearning these days and in the process, learning a lot more about me. I'm having some profound insights about me and what makes me tick. I'm growing in personal, spiritual awareness.
Some could argue that's the fruit of Personal God at work in my life. Maybe it is. But for now, I'll try to be more careful with the grenades.
