Chewing on the Lessons

Now to begin explaining how I got from there to here.

God loves me absolutely and unconditionally. And extravagantly! A whole mountain of love just for me? If that isn't extravagant, what is?

Wait a minute. I had been cursing God, I can't say I hated God but for sure I didn't like Him very much, yet there I was, placing myself in His power, saying, "Whether I live or die, it's Your decision." No wonder I hesitated! What would any of us do in such a situation? If God is as angry and judgmental and vindictive as we have been taught, wouldn't He have zapped me for good? Instead of doing that, He handed me my life back to me on a silver platter.

Why me? Not, why did I have to get so sick, but why does God love me so much? What am I to God? What is special about me?

The answer to that one, frankly, is: NOTHING AT ALL!

So what does that mean? Is it possible that God loves everyone the way He loves me? I am unique, and in that respect I am special to God, but if God loves everyone the way He loves me, there is nothing to recommend me. Nothing at all.

So the first thing I realized was that God does, indeed, love everyone the way He loves me. Sometimes that is hard to face. After 9/11 I struggled with it, because if God loves everyone the way He loves me, then He loves those men who hijacked the airplanes and flew them into the towers. There's no getting away from that. He loves Hitler and Stalin the same way He loves you and me. I still struggle with it, but there is no other way. Either God loves all of us, or God doesn't.

Along with that came the realization that I now desired to have an intimate personal relationship with God. No, not desired, itched to. Ached to! I have explored quite a few things since then, each with the hope that it would bring me closer to God. And they have done so.

Again, am I special? Well, we already know the answer to that one. Then could it be that God desires to have an intimate personal relationship with each of us? Why not? He loves each of us. Wouldn't it be natural for God to desire relationship with each of us?

But then the earthquakes began. This love is absolute. This love is unconditional. What does that say about Jesus? The church's teaching about Jesus makes the cross sound like a condition of an unconditional love. I haven't been able to get around that either. I grew up in a mainline Protestant denomination and I'm clinging to membership in it even now, but I hear nothing said in church about unconditional love. Or of God's love for each of us. I hear a lot about Jesus. We sing to Jesus, we pray to Jesus, and we literally worship Jesus. It's painful. To me, God is the Head Honcho, the Big Cheese, and it is God Whom I worship. Jesus clearly had a very close relationship with God, a mystical relationship, and everything my Encounter taught me is confirmed in him. But I do not worship him.

And in all the church's emphasis on Bible study and mission, which are good, there is no guidance for people like me who seek to know God intimately, through experience. Up close and personal.

So the result of the activity on the first point is that God loves each of us absolutely, unconditionally, and extravagantly. God desires to have an intimate personal relationship with each of us. And, sadly, I am no longer at home in the tradition in which I grew up. I am not quite sure yet what I will do about that. When in doubt, wait, and I am waiting for the solution to come.

And it will, when I am ready for it.

How Did All This Begin?

What happened to turn me from a staid, conventional Christian into a flaming contemplative semi-mystic, anyway?

I won't go into all the gory details here. (This doesn't need to be a novel, after all.) But 27 years ago this November, I was living in the city 800 miles away from home, and I went to the wrong surgeon for an appendectomy. Had he known what he was doing, the whole thing wouldn't have happened, but he messed it up big time, and I was in the hospital for three months trying to get over it.

No, not that hospital. My family came down from the Midwest, moved me to one of the large teaching hospitals, found me a better doctor, and the rest is history.

Well, anyway, there were several setbacks, and I fought my way through each as best I could. The moment came one night, as the nurses were settling me in for the night, and I knew that all the setbacks had been encountered. I don't know how I knew that; I just did. It was time to start healing now.

And I had run out of strength.

I didn't even care, for a few minutes, if I lived or died. It was just too doggoned hard to face going on.

I had been in a period of rebellion, to put it in orthodox Christian language. But that night I crawled back to God on my - no, not my knees, but my belly. I told God that I didn't care if I lived or died, I just wanted out of there ASAP, and how I got out - gurney or body bag - was up to Him. I knew exactly what I was saying, and for a moment I briefly hesitated, but I went ahead and finished it.

Then I went to sleep.

Something happened to me in the night. I have to admit that I have no actual memory of it, although I do have a couple of pictures of what it must have been like. But there was an Encounter in the night. There is no other explanation for the transformation that I discovered when I woke up the next morning, still alive and glad of it, joyful mind you, feeling all cleaned out and free of baggage. I was another person, and I hope it has been an improvement over the original version.

There were still several weeks to go in the hospital, although after that experience I soon graduated from Intensive Care. I had time to think and "process" what had happened.

By the time I went home to finish recuperating, I had two main concepts to chew on:

• God loved me unconditionally, absolutely, and abundantly.
• God was colossal, far grander than anything I or any other human could ever comprehend, and utterly beyond all our attempts to confine Him in our boxes.

I will expand upon them in the next post, because they sort of grew. For now, let me leave with a description of the picture I took home with me, the picture of the Encounter that is the closest thing I have to an actual memory of it:

I am standing on one side of a chasm about the size of the Grand Canyon. On the other side of the chasm is a vast mountain, wide, high, massive as Mt. Everest. It was made of love. And it was all for me.

And ever since then, I cringe for all the people who are afraid of God. We are loved! There is a mountain of love for you as well as for me. What are we so afraid of? How can we be afraid of such love? I love God, I revere God, and I speak candidly to God, but I have absolutely no fear of God. I can't be afraid of a mountain of love.

To be continued . . .

Maundering On

I don't have any single specific thing I want to say today, but there are two or three "short shorts" I would like to touch on. Here goes.

Today I received one of those emails which require you to read some inspirational or nationalistic verbiage and then forward it to X number of friends. The implication is that if you do not, you don't have time for God or you aren't patriotic. To be perfectly candid, I have come to resent that entire scenario. It is a chore to sift through my mailbox, looking for friends who I think might appreciate receiving this message from me, assuming that I think it is actually worth passing on. And I distinctly resent the implication that I am not patriotic enough, or "religious" enough, and that is proven because I deleted the email instead of forwarding it on. In fact, since I don't feel I need to earn people's approval that way, I downright enjoy deleting their emails!

In this case, the person who sent it to me is a friend in treatment for brain cancer, and I did reply to her, thanking her for the lovely prayer. It was lovely. I copied it into a file I keep for that purpose. But I made no pretense of forwarding it. I hope she understands, because I have no desire to hurt her. She has enough to go through as it is.

I have just finished reading (for the second time) Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels. It has led me to a conclusion. For years I have felt more and more distanced from the Christian church because I had an experience which transformed me. As time went on, I felt less and less connected to what I heard in church, but more and more connected to the fallout of perceptions from that experience. I have finally come to realize, and admit to myself, that I lean toward mysticism. My beliefs, which stem from that transforming experience, are beliefs I share with mystics of all traditions. There has been conflict between orthodoxy and mysticism for centuries of Christian history. It is not a new argument.

All this time, I have felt . . . well . . . timid about it. Crouching behind half-truths that I uttered. Letting people think I believed what they do when that isn't so. But there is nothing wrong with what I believe or how I perceive our world. It is time for me to stop skulking furtively in the closet. It is time to come out into the daylight and challenge orthodoxy. It has its accomplishments and it does its good things. But it also teaches things that I believe should be challenged.

So today I am resolved to come out of my mystical closet and work to let people know that there is life and faith and growth beyond the orthodox. I explore that territory freely. Anyone who wants to join me in my journey is welcome to come along.

Is God a Servant or a Serve-ee?

Like most of us, I grew up believing that God requires us to serve Him. (Or Her, or It . . . ) And it made sense at the time. Well, after all, here is this Old Man in the Sky who can send disaster upon you if you fail to serve Him, right? Of course you are going to serve God!

Then I grew up. First physically, then (this part took a little longer) psychologically, and finally (this part took still a little longer) spiritually. But I still wanted to serve God. This time it wasn't a matter of self defense but a desire to give back to that fascinating Being for returning my life to me.

Then from somewhere - I don't remember now, it may have been something I read - I got the idea that maybe God wants to serve us, rather than to be served by us. What a concept! Can there be any truth to that? Is there a way to answer such a question?

Actually, there is. Despite my dispute with much of what Christianity teaches (well, most of it to be honest) there is one thing I still agree with. I still believe that Jesus shows us what God is like. And did Jesus sit back on his fanny, demanding that his disciples bring him meat and bread and drink? Or did Jesus travel all over the place on foot, teaching and preaching and healing the sick? The gospels reflect the traditions, the stories that people remembered about Jesus, and even if eyewitness accounts disagree with each other and stories get stretched in the retelling, the healing stories are pretty consistent. So I have to think there is truth in them.

Okay, if Jesus helped people, served people, and showed God to us, what does that make God? Is God a cosmic Servant?

I think that I would have to say God is both Servant and Serve-ee. Here's why.

I wrote in a recent post that I am a piece of God. Why would God make little ole me a piece of Himself? If I am not special (and I definitely am not!) then everyone would be the same as me, and each of us is a tiny piece of God.

That means that when I do something to serve you, I am serving God by serving the piece of God that you are. You receive that, so God is a Serve-ee. But as a piece of God myself, as I serve, then God becomes the Servant as well.

See what I mean?

Of course God is there to help us through our crises and give us good things and all that. But God often does that through other people, each of whom is a piece of God. So no matter how you look at it, God is both.

There isn't much I can do for that august Being Who built the cosmos. That Being is the Source of All Things, utterly beyond anything I can say or do, and surely He can make whatever He desires. But there is quite a bit that I can do for His pieces who live around me.

So every time I hear someone going on about how we must "serve God" when they mean that Old Man in the Sky, I smile on the inside. It seems much more cozy to see it the way I do.

Rediscovering "Nature"

In the city, I had little opportunity to notice the natural world. For most of the time that I lived there, I was in one apartment after another. Trees and grassy areas were little green dots scattered amidst concrete and bricks. If I went walking in the neighborhoods, I had opportunity sometimes to watch dogs or cats or even, briefly, peacocks. For a while, a horse grazed across the street from one of my apartments. Even when I lived in a house, the yard was small and bathed in summer sun, and the lone willow I planted did not thrive, and the only natural things I experienced were insects and weeds. Well, I did get addicted to the singing of mockingbirds, but that was about the limit of my enjoyment.

But my goodness! In my home town I have discovered another world! Or should I say I have rediscovered the original world? My backyard is large and shaded by maples. In the past year I have enjoyed the pageant that marches through this yard.

There are squirrels. I have always enjoyed watching squirrels chasing each other up, down, and around trees. How in the world can they dart along such narrow branches or even telephone and power cables? They never seem to fall.

There are rabbits. Small, brown, thin, quick rabbits. The nearby farms have been overrun by coyotes and deer, and the rabbits have come into town. I'm sure the gardeners hate to see them coming, but I haven't yet tired of watching them as, like the squirrels, they chase each other and dodge and just seem to enjoy the act of running.

Oh, yes, the deer. I haven't seen any of them in my backyard, of course, because they are out in the country. So is my sister. I don't remember the occasion now - maybe it was Christmas Eve - but I was driving over to my sister's home, and I got my first close look at deer. There were three of them heading through the field toward the road, and I knew they were going to cross in front of me. I hit the brakes and just sat there, fascinated, as they crossed the road; they would leap and hang frozen in the air for a second, then come down and leap again, and they were across the road in no time. I still see that picture of brown deer silhouetted against gray sky and white snow.

Not to mention the dash of color if a male cardinal happens to be sitting on a tree branch as you drive past.

Oh, yes, birds. Robins and starlings and wrens and woodpeckers and cardinals and I even saw a goldfinch once or twice. In fact, that is what made me want to write this post. We had a series of nasty storms blow through one day last week, dangerously high winds, lots of rain, you name it. A lot of sticks get blown off trees when that happens, and after the excitement was over I was outside starting to play my own version of Pick Up Sticks. I found a bird nest that had been blown out of a tree. I have watched the labor - the bird picking up a piece of grass, the wings straining to lift, the bird flying up to the nest site only to come back for another piece of grass . . . I stared at the little oval on the ground. I could see how the grasses and weeds had been stuck together with mud and formed into this oval. It was just a nest to the birds, but to me it was a marvel. How did the bird form such a neat and perfect shape? It must have sat on the branch and built the nest around itself. And there weren't any manuals; the bird just knew what to do. Isn't this world a marvel?

One of the things I've needed to do, this past year, was to slow down. Internally. Notice the small events of life again. It must be working. Our Creator is in everything, I believe, including that bird as well as the grasses it wove into that oval nest. And I can take the time to find Him (or Her, or It) there.

Mother Teresa

There is a new book coming out about Mother Teresa. Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the "Saint of Calcutta" is its name. It sounds like a book I would like to have.

Probably none of us guessed that this nun, tiny as she was, projecting a heart and a will as fierce as a lioness defending her cubs, was inwardly as weak and doubting as the rest of us can be. I certainly had no suspicion of it. Does it affect my opinion of Mother Teresa? In a way, yes, it does. It strengthens it.

Because I am a contemplative and interested in mysticism, I have read about some of the historical saints. In fact, most of their lives were tough. There was a lot of suffering going on - physical illnesses, spiritually dark periods, difficulties in their monastic houses or with church authorities, you name it. It isn't easy to be a saint.

Mother Teresa has really earned the right to be named with these others. Not only her through work, or her strength of will, but her strength of faith. Yes, strength of faith. You can't serve the way she did, with all the doubt and suffering she experienced, unless there is a bedrock of faith supporting the whole structure.

Apparently she had, when she was younger, some experience of contact with God, and then somehow lost that sense of contact. And never experienced it again. No wonder she had doubts! To have that, and watch it slip from you, and there is nothing you can do about it - that would hurt, big time. I can't imagine a worse hurt than that.

But in spite of all that, she went on, dedicating herself to work that she felt called to do, teaching us by her words and example, and that takes a degree of strength that most of us can only aspire to.

I used to respect Mother Teresa. Now I admire her.

I used to think she was a tower of strength. Now I know she was.

I used to think she was settled in a powerful faith. Now I know she had doubts and questions like I do.

We need heroes of our faith. We need examples of devotion and service. We need them from past centuries, and we need them from our own time as well. Mother Teresa is such a figure, and her humanity cannot stand in her way.

It Can Too Happen Here and It Just Might

I was watching a program on PBS last night, just before I went to bed, and I wished I hadn't. It consisted of various interviews with what we would call moderate Islamic imams, Muslims who oppose the conservative movement to form an Islamic state. (The Muslims who favor the formation of an Islamic state, as it turned out, think they themselves are the moderates.)

What I inferred from the program was this: The people interviewed were not Muslims living in the Middle East. One controversy over an Islamic state was in Canada, one in Denmark, and one in fact was in the United States. There are mosques in these countries, led by imams who are working for an Islamic state (that was never totally defined). Their idea of an Islamic state is that an area is converted to Islam and is under Islamic law, so that government and religion go hand in hand. It did not sound like these imams were going to be content with having their own little private areas of authority in the communities where they live. They sounded to me as though they were speaking of nations, not local areas.

I also concluded that the pro-Islamic state imams are nothing but petty tyrants. They suppress opposition, distort the truth, and one of them was caught on camera talking about killing the moderate who led the opposition to him. These imams are more interested in poolitical power than in their religion, from the looks of it.

That scares me. This is happening in the West! Maybe if I were a man it wouldn't be so upsetting, but as a woman I have no reason to be interested in the conservative versions of Islam. Who is it who stones women for marital unfaithfulness, imagined or real? Who is it who forbids a woman to be away from home unless a man is with her? And who makes women wear those uncomfortable-looking outfits? Not even in color, for pete's sake, but unrelieved black!


The thing that really hurts me the most is this: I think God is more concerned about how we treat each other than He (or She, or It) is about what we believe. And when we kill others over an issue like right beliefs, we are totally barking up the wrong tree. God is so far beyond all our efforts to understand and explain Him that it is downright ludicrous. We get so carried away with our doctrines and theologies, and they accomplish very little when all is said and done. It is good that we codify our beliefs; we need that foundation for how we live. But let's put it into perspective. They are only beliefs about God, and they cannot be taken as incontrovertible fact.

The Christian takes Jesus as the example, and Jesus never turned anyone away from him because of what the person believed. If Jesus didn't, then God doesn't, because Jesus shows God to us. That's proof enough for me.


I am perfectly content to let the Muslims believe as they wish, and worship as they wish, and honor God as they wish. (But I do wish they would stop killing innocent people in the name of the God of love!) All I ask from them is that they grant me the same freedom.