Small gods

My mom said something interesting recently. She said, "As I get older, my God gets bigger and bigger. But for so many, it seems like their God gets smaller and smaller." She held her hands up, moving them closer together to underscore the point.

From the context of the conversation I understood her to mean that she felt less certain of long-held dogma, more curious, more open to new understandings. In making fewer assumptions about the divine, she has opened to new possibilities in herself. I've watched her transform from a single-issue voter to a sophisticated consumer of information, often correcting me on the latest legislative debate or policy prescription. Her religious beliefs no longer require a blind obedience. Rather, she takes responsibility for being informed and for deciding for herself. It's very impressive.

I often find myself thinking about this dynamic, how some people close down hard on opinions even in the face of evidence to the contrary, how others open to new experiences and insights. People who go through incredibly difficult periods of time often chose one of these two approaches, allowing themselves to be transformed, or shutting out the world.

I personally don't use the word "God" very often anymore. It doesn't feel right as a description of the divine presence I experience as I go about my life. But when I have been in significant periods of grief I definitely felt the presence draw near, as the Good Book (AKA Bible) promises, and I've certainly been corrected before, sometimes gently, sometimes ferociously. It was this violence of the divine that startled me, until I watched an incredible National Geographic documentary about Mother Nature, and I recognized in the fierceness of our beloved planet the same force with which I sometimes have the honor to commune.

What has interested me in this most recent period of political life in this country is how I feel that ferocious energy well up and demand expression. A younger version of me would silence that voice, would try to be nice. But the person I am now knows that to silence that voice would be to dim my own spirit. Sometimes the disastrous policy choices we are seeing all around us piss me off, and sometimes they seem to call forth some other energy, a fierceness that feels not entirely my own, the anger of a force beyond me.

I certainly wouldn't presume to speak for the divine, but if in fact the living presence does animate our existence, and has called us through various traditions to lives of integrity, then it's not too far of a stretch to imagine that that same presence is fucking furious right now.

We all know that expressing that fury is often unhelpful in our daily interactions. People believe what they believe and our anger is not going to change that. But it does feel like there should be some sort of acknowledgement that our society has become so bigoted, so indifferent to the poor, so obsessed with one man, that what love looks like in this moment is anger. White, hot, anger.

Under these circumstances, emotional maturity requires holding that anger and alchemizing it into something productive. Don't push it down, or deny it. But don't spew it out either (I'm begging myself here).

Transform it, before it transforms you, and your God.