After all of these months, though, I'm feeling a bit baffled by something. When I first began this blog, I expected these meanderings to take me/us through some of my spirituality...my deepest hope had been that God's light would find a home here, that His Love and Light would meander with me and through me and ripple into the words that poured out through my keyboard.
It hasn't happened, at least on a regular basis, even though my spirituality is profound and central to my entire existence. Any gratitude that I express for anything or anyone is grounded in a profound gratitude for how richly God has loved and nourished me along each and every path I find myself following. So it's baffling that I mention gratitude without mentioning Him by Name.
I love God. Yes, I've wrestled with Him, I've raged at Him, I've walked away from Him out of inexpressible hurt and sense of betrayal. But from within those wrestlings and those ragings, His Light, and especially His Mercy, have shone into my lostness and anger, bringing me to my knees in awe of the tender - and very intimate - expressions of His compassion and patient understanding of all that I crawl through to stay alive and connected to life and Him.
We've been through a lifetime of muck and mire, He and I...we've shared the entire gambit of human life - fun and failures, joys and sorrow, laughter and crippling agony, dancing and debilitation at death's doorstep...He has been my most constant companion-along-the-way, and I could write a book - a big book - of all that He has done, been, said and shown me every inch and step of my entire life.
So why do I barely mention Him in my bloggings? I wonder. I know that I pray before starting to write, asking for guidance and inspiration. And when the words begin to flow, I just flow with them, following them where they seem to want to go. If at the end of that flow, there is no mention of God, well, I don't force it, I can only leave it as is and pray that it's enough just the way it is.
But I've been pondering this lately. I admit that I'm very weary of religious controversy, very heartsick at the proliferation of violence and hatred that rages in the world in the name of "god" (I refuse to capitalize "god" in this context because I don't believe that anyone could possibly be killing and hating in the name of the God I've come to know and love...whatever god they're using to justify their actions isn't one that deserves that capital "g", IMO). Anyway, I'm tired of religiosity, of people using scripture and dogma to repress, judge, hate, exclude, punish and kill any other human being. Even within Christian denominations I see Christians fighting against other Christians, actually professing to hate "this sector" or "those people" within their own Church. I've had to walk away from the institutional church for awhile while I figure out how to find the least toxic and most inclusive community possible. Any place that excludes others for any reason just isn't the place for me anymore.
For now, I'm content to just live and let live.
But even that has been a challenge...just in the past few months, I've been drawn into some fairly heated - and uncomfortable - religious discussions...I didn't want to be there in those situations, and found myself begging God for a way out, a distraction or change of subject. I felt trapped in a toxicity I wanted no part of partaking in. I'm tired of this. I just love God. And I love, treasure, adamantly uphold and pray for every human being on the face of the earth to enjoy the same freedom that I have, to simply love God, using whatever name He allows them to call Him, and wearing whatever face He chooses to use to reveal Himself to them.
I don't want my faith, my profoundly beautiful nourishing relationship with my God, to ever offend, upset, challenge, annoy or in any way toxify anyone else...I admit that perhaps that above all else is why my spirituality doesn't leak too much into my writings...I could not and will not ever ask or even imply that anyone else "should" believe what I believe - I firmly believe that each person's journey to and/or with God is uniquely theirs and that we're not all meant to follow the exact same spiritual path. Perhaps my sensitivity is flawed and could be misinterpreted as cowardice, but I just don't feel like deliberately flaunting my spirituality every time I speak or blog. I don't want to forcibly inject it into subjects and meanderings where it doesn't really fit.
My spirituality is the essence of me...it doesn't need special words or scriptural references to make it so, it just is. I live in God, He lives in me, we are bound together by 57 years of intimate relationship, 57 years of crawling together through muddy trenches, sitting together in deep dark holes that I didn't know how to escape...57 years of constant struggling just to survive long enough to reach this wonderful plateau of peace that is my here-and-now.
There is no "me" without Him. All that I am is fueled and nurtured by His love and constant Presence in my life and heart and soul. And there, nestled deep in His arms, is where I establish the base assumptions, my starting point for all of my writing, here and elsewhere.
There is a big part of me that admittedly would love to write more about my relationship with God. But I'm wary of doing so, because I'm not interested, at this point, in making that the sole purpose of this blog, or in getting into any kind of awkward and uncomfortable discussions about doctrine and dogma...I would just want to write about Love and Grace and how they have saved my life and brought me to the understandings and perhaps even wisdoms that have helped me find peace and stability. Not to proselytize, but perhaps to help others who also struggle to find their way through to more stable ground.
Sometimes my spirituality does weave itself naturally into the subject of the day; sometimes my meanderings brush past His love and compassion and ripple into the message...I love it when that happens. But at the root of my passion for writing is an adamant premise that I must leave myself free to just follow the flow, to let the words create the message that wants to speak.
That's why I blog. Simply to meander through words...to meander the journey wherever it takes me and follow through whatever doors open along the way, trusting with profound faith that all pathways and all open doors and all plateaus and horizons are at His bidding anyway.
Peace to all who enter here....I believe that wherever we find ourselves standing, at any and every given moment, is sacred ground.
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