Tuesday, January 17, 2012

An essay for a change: Loving God, with or without belief




GOD:Loving God for the hell of it; oh, wait, the heaven of it

God is good. We’ve heard that. But then again, we don’t have to believe that.
We don’t have to believe in God.
I don’t have to care about or think about God.
And we like to love God, sometimes and those times are in indication of the deeper callings in Life.

Remember when you were small and looked up at the stars and it seems so amazing, that they were so many and so perfect and so brilliant and you were down here and they were up there and it was all just amazing.
That’s what loving God can be like.

Or when you sat by a stream one time, or many, and rested your back against a tree or a rock, and just did “nothing.” Just watched the water flow by and delighted in the sparkling, rippling, reflecting light bouncing from the sun off the water and into your eyes and into your brain and into your heart and your breathing and you and the stream seemed as if they were one.
All is one. All is One.
Some people say things like that. What do you think?
What do you feel?
What do you experience?
What do you love?

Say you love flowers. Is that a way to love God? Sure.
Say you love sunsets and walks on the beach. What if loving that is loving God is loving yourself in your expanding form?
Say God is something like the Whole Tamale, and so anything you love is loving God.

That makes it easy to love God. Later we’ll roam around in the scary world of God is everything, even the “bad stuff,” but let’s start easy.
Loving sunsets and puppies frolicking in the mud and babies laughing and birds singing and rainbows rainbowing these are all easy.
And that’s good, you know. We tend to forget the easy, the simple. We want God to be something fancy we have to pray hard for, or go to India to join the ashram.
We think God is some strict father, and we don’t get the goodies, the love and okay to get into heaven and whatnot, if we don’t toe some line, shape up, be good.
We don’t’ have to be good.
We might want to be kind and loving and useful to others and the Earth, and when you really feel those urges they are from that complicated and simple all at once place of All is One. The being kind to you is being kind to another part of me. The helping the Earth along is being useful to another part of me.

We appear to be apart from others and from Nature. And we appear to be a part of others and a part of Nature.
We are a part of love.
Love is a part of us.

We spend our days often, way often, forgetting that we are love.
That’s okay. God is love, some say, so that God, She or He can but us some slack when we forget to love.
Cutting us slack is called mercy.
Someone once said two things are infinite: human stupidity and God’s mercy. One kind of calls forth the other, and maybe humans are less stupid that confused and cut off from their natural intelligence.
And how do we get back to God, get back to our true selves, get back to days of more and more Love.

Start now, course. We always start now.

The love we want is in us now.
When we come to the Now, everything slows down, and we have this great swoosh of peace. Why? Because all those things lined up ahead of us don’t exist in the present.
Because all those things we remember and have told ourselves about our past, they don’t exist in the Now either.
In the now, the Now, the NOW, not much is left.
Except a peace.
A happiness.
A friend.
A sense of having come home to our true selves.

Is coming home to our true selves, our True Selves, coming home to God?

Maybe.
You don’t have to believe in any God, or anything, to feel very peaceful, happy, free by coming back to your true self, your true Self, in the Now.

And does that make the Now another name for God?

I’m not sure. I don’t think so.

I think God might be the vastness, the beauty, the ALL OF IT, that we can see and feel and merge with from the now.

But that’s just my story.

What’s your feeling when you come to the now, really now?

Does that feel like God, or a path to God, or just a great relief from all the regular ordinary everyday suffering and hurry and worry and contention and bother?

It’s your life.
It’s your feelings.
It’s you now to love and live in or not.

Try loving God, with or without believing in God. And then just coast there, without thoughts, in the Now, and see what happens.
Feel what happens.
Love what happens.
Love yourself.
Love It ALL.

Enjoy.

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