Who Will Your God Be?

Who will your God be? Will your God be a God of love, or a God of fear? Will your God truly want to see what's best for you happen, or will your God be a force of manipulation and control in your life who seems to be most happy when you are least happy? Will your religious institution claim to serve God while really representing God's wrath and judgment? Will your God be a force for unification in the world, or a source of division? Will your God be a God of Peace or a God of War? Will your God be a force from which you often feel compelled to hide in fear, or a source of comfort you can turn to when you struggle? Will your God be a God of abuse or a God of healing? Will your God be a God of the living, or a God of the dead and their primitive superstitions?

There are many more questions we could ask ourselves about who our God will be, but the point is that we have to make some decisions about the nature of the God of our experience before we begin to interpret things allegedly written about God.

I met a man over the weekend who told me that his church "only teaches the Bible, nothing else." Had it been socially appropriate to our context, I would have had several questions. The first would have been, "how is that possible?" In fact, unless someone in his church just stands up and reads Bible passages and then sits back down, they do much more than "teach the Bible." You see, when you preach a homily or sermon you are by definition interpreting the Bible. Even the inflections we add in just reading the scriptures add meaning. Perhaps more importantly, what we believe about God will determine how we interpret the Bible and everything else about God. If I believe that God is wrathful and judgmental, then the stories in the Bible that share that perspective will resonate with me and I will interpret those that don't share that perspective as if they did. More practically perhaps, if I don't realize that Jesus was Jewish but rather believe he was a white Anglo-saxon Protestant then I understand him in a very distorted way. If I don't realize that God has never belonged to any religion, I can easily become very arrogant in my religion.

The good news is that the perspective of humanity is changing during our life time. We see the evidence of that in the now five decades long decline in church attendance and in the rise of popularity of spiritualites that portray God and loving and accepting of humanity. We see the evidence in the people who will no longer tolerate mistreatment, much less abuse, from their religious leaders and who no longer blindly accept their attempts to characterize their felonies as misunderstandings rather than the crimes they are. We see the growing number of former victims of spiritual abuse who now refuse to listen to so called "authorities" who attempt to manipulate and control them through mischaracterizations of God as an abusive parent. Finally, we see this transformation in the anger of those who are heavily invested in the status quo, those who would characterize the transformations described above as coming from a fictional character in red pajamas and carrying a pitch fork.

We live in exciting times. Don't let fear keep you from enjoying them! Trust yourself to ask the tough questions, don't stop until you arrive at answers, and never feel you have to surrender your power to discover truth! The Universe is big enough to endure your questions!