I was brought up Episcopalian, "Catholic Lite", and never understood how a newborn baby could be tainted with "sin". Hell, I never understood "sin" at all.
I don't believe in sin, the devil, hell, purgatory, any of that. Or that since Jesus died for my "sins", I owe him big-time.
When I was younger, I seemed to be one with everything, and miraculous things seemed to happen to me and around me all the time. Not that I was raising people from the dead or healing with a touch or anything like that, but that the world was a beautiful, lovely, friendly place to be in and abundance and beauty was everywhere I looked.
At some point in mid-adolescence, that all changed. I fell out of union somehow, and with that separation the world grew hostile.
This coincided with my indoctrination from church officials both in the Episcopal church and in the Southern Baptist church in whose Youth Choir I sang with friends and whose services I attended on Sunday nights. Suddenly I was "bad" and "sinful" and there was nothing I could do about it because I had been born that way. Hell, it was bad enough to be gay, but to pile this crap on top of it was worse.
I found out that almost everything I loved, everything that gave me pleasure, was 'sinful', or at least frowned upon by The Church. ("What? You mean dancing is frowned upon by The Lord?")
Thankfully I'm asserting what I've always known deep down: that I am at one with the universe, and that the universe is abundant and always giving, and that there's no emotional charge attached to our choices. Sin simply does not exist in that landscape. Things just are as they are.
Taking a cue from the Toa te Ching, the God that can be described is not the real God. What I believe now and have always believed (but almost had it ground out of me by The Church) is that
everything that is, is alive, and that cumulative life, the Big Life, is God.
My desires, the things that I want to ex-press, that make me feel good, are holy and divine. My expression of the divinity within is the reason I'm here. That's "God's Plan" for my life.
Worship the Lord in the holiness of Beauty.
Thou art God. We all are God.
If God is all this, how could he be the wrathful, vengeful, "jealous" God who takes sides and kills whole towns and turns people into pillars of salt for a mere glance? And if he is all that petty and small and smite-happy, where the fuck is he now when we need him most with all the bad behavior going on in the world today?
What if, instead, "God" is none of those things? What if all that hateful, favoritism-showing, side-taking smite-iness was made up by his followers and wasn't part of the real God-nature at all?
What then?
What if the world really is Eden and our Emperors really Have No Clothes? What if it were that simple?
What if we really were one family of people on this Earth, sailing through an exquisitely beautiful universe and have been ignoring it for over two millenia just because we've been told to?
What if you and I are really one?
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3 comments:
The sad thing is, it is that simple. It's all our man-made stories of separation that keep us from realizing that we are all one, sacred being expressing itself in a myriad, unique ways. I lost that inherent connection about the same age that you did. (Seems to take until about puberty for insanity to be learned!) Perhaps the whole purpose of the insanity is the utter joy that comes about when you drop all those layers of complexity & just get back to the simplicity of being. Eckhart Tolle said a lot of things that I really love, but one of my favorites is this: "God is not a Being; God is Being itself."
OneTree
You're bang on this one. Growing up Roman Catholic has taught me that for most of the time, the Church has very little to do with God and that all this really is is just a place where all parts of God -us- are supposed to learn to love each other.
Yes! When my mindquake first began, I remember writing in my journal that the god I had been taught to believe in got his jollies from putting us in detention for failing a test for which we were not allowed to study.
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