During lent and Easter I’ve pondered my decision to leave the institutional church. Not because I question my decision, but because the reasons became so apparent.
I’ve written about my feelings of dissonance with the idea that God is separate. Phrases like, “Our Father, Who art in heaven” or “seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead” and “For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the most high” and finally, “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” leave me cold. These words don’t resonate with my definition of “God”.
I truly struggle with the Lenten and Easter stories and their focus on original sin and suffering. I can’t embrace the idea that the only path to redemption, or even the need for it, is death and resurrection.
As a mother, I love my children with all my heart. I would lay down my life for them, but I wouldn’t lay down by life because of them. The idea of original sin, nope not going there! As a mother, my children are perfect, warts and all. I can’t even imagine looking down at them just milliseconds after birth and saying, you need to be cleansed of original sin and then you are worthy. That’s just ludicrous.
Then you have the crucifixion and resurrection. The story of the Christian God is filled with horror, guilt, and separateness. My “mother God” can’t imagine telling a tale to my children of being abandon, carrying a cross, being stripped naked, having nails driven into my hands, and weeping “my God, my God, why have you abandoned me”. Only to get to the punch line. I died and suffered for you, for YOUR sins. How does this story invoke comfort? I know, I’m missing the subtly, but how does this add up to “love”?
My God isn’t somewhere else. My god is not everlasting life. My god, is love, joy and justice, now on earth. I don’t worship a God in the hopes of one day joining a mythical figure in the heavens. The energy of unqualified love and acceptance is the voice of God that I believe exists here, now, and in every being.
One of the corner stones of my old faith was holy communion. If I am honest, I use to feel like an interloper when I heard the priest intone, “this is the bread of life”. I’m pretty sure it is a cardinal sin in the Catholic church to partake in communion and not actually believe that the priest had somehow magically turned a wafer and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ. Now that I’ve left the church, my “bread of life” is a meal with my family or a stranger, a smile, or not only giving a dollar to a homeless person but seeing them. The list is endless.
That doesn’t make my understanding of God easier, in some ways it makes it more difficult. If God is alive in every being, the goal is to create heaven on earth. That means I must work on living a life of love, without qualifiers. I must stand up against injustice, even when it’s uncomfortable and scary. I will fall short every time. But the difference is there is not judgement in the falling short. It’s in the act of trying that I am in tune with the god within myself, not in the ultimate outcome. My “rewards” aren’t in a far-off place that we can only imagine.
I once had a conversation with a retired priest. He was upset and conflicted about his nephew’s upcoming wedding. You see his nephew was marrying a Jewish woman and they were getting married in the Hilton ballroom. He was considering not attending and if he did attend he was sure that the authorities in the church would not allow him to wear his clerical attire. In his understanding of God, attending as a priest would be condoning something uncondonable. He asked me a simple question. Where is God in the ceremony? My answer was just as simple. I asked him if his nephew loved his future wife. He answered, yes. And there my friend lies God.
In my opinion the institutional mythicized God is a judgmental entity. He lays out a playbook for worthiness. But an institution that isn’t screaming from the pulpit about nationalism is not speaking my god language. An institution that doesn’t take to the streets to fight against a “big, beautiful wall” that keeps the poor, the frightened, the sick and the hungry in peril, can’t be the voice of my God. A God that labels who you love as right or wrong, can’t truly understand the meaning of love. An institution that would fight and march against a women’s control over her own reproductive rights but is silent in the face of children being separated from the parents and held in cages can’t truly believe that everyone is worthy.
My god doesn’t have any qualifiers.
These are unusual times. The entire world is being forced into a slower pace, many of us living a life of solitude for the first time. A gospel refrain keeps resonating in my head. Be still and know that I am God. To many in the institutional church, the I, means our father who art in heaven. For me, the I is simply me and you.
