When I was young, my God lived in the sky. With angels and believers by his side, He looked down at me from Heaven, and I sent my prayers into the air so that He may listen.
As an adult, I lost that God. He does not exist to me now. There is no one watching, listening, guiding, or even judging. He no longer serves as an explanation for everything I cannot understand. There is no room for God behind the last known star in the sky.
I don’t want it to be this way but it’s just the truth. Sometimes I miss praying. More often, I miss the security of Knowing. The loss is deep.
Lately, I have been creeping back toward faith. But it has taken a very different form from what I knew before.
The god that I am coming to know lives in the ground. Not somewhere deep in the cauldrons of inner earth, but where my feet touch, the part that holds me up, the stuff of tree roots and shallow waves and snowdrifts, the place that supports all life on earth.
This god has no mind no opinions no knowledge, it has no ego, no gender, no thoughts, no body or shape. It is a pervasive essence. It is simply and vastly the collective, continuous consciousness of life.
I don’t even know if I have the right word for it. What is a god that has no need for a capital “G”?
This god doesn’t know me, it will never embrace or reject me, it just is. And one day I will rejoin it, not in the kingdom of Heaven, richly adorned, but in the ever-loving dirt, timeless and still.
It feel uncomfortable to face the idea of something so vague and formless. I miss the structure of a faith with commandments, names and dates. I miss even the narrow certainty of atheism. But vulnerable as it makes me feel to consider it, this god leaves room for love and possibility.
I’m not yet finished figuring out what I believe but, with my feet on the ground, at least now I know where to look.
Beautifully written; deeply felt. How blessed we are when we ‘ get i ‘, there is no one in the sky looking down upon us per say. And that what we once thought, even believed, is so much deeper, wider than anything we could ever have fathomed. Bless you…