The God Thing: Finding a Higher Power

When I was a kid, growing up in my family, I was taught to believe there was One God, The Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven And Earth.

One God. That’s it.

I remember asking my mother, “What about the other people in the world who don’t believe in our God?” I thought I did know some Protestants, and theoretically (because I read the Bible) I knew Jewish people existed, though our deep suburb seemed not to have any. I had no clue about Muslims, much less Buddhists or Hindus.

We respect them, is basically what my mother said—we respect them, they may be good people, but they can’t get to Heaven.

My parents had some atheist friends. Helen and Clay. I always wondered how the hell folks like my parents, super-religious people who had wanted to go into the convent/priesthood before they met each other, had cottoned to these VW-bus-traveling hippie atheists. It was my dad, I’m sure. Clay played the guitar, drank beer, taught physics, and secretly (or not-so-secretly) wanted to be a cowboy. My dad was capable of discussing atheism without the idea of There Being No God rocking his world. Unlike my mother.

“Helen and Clay Don’t Believe There’s Any God,” she told us, wide-eyed in all seriousness, and I remember my stomach sinking through the pine bottom of the kitchen chair. I was about 10 and my naïveté was entrenched. If there was no God, how could you get to Heaven? If you couldn’t get to Heaven, where would your soul go after you were dead? Because that was all that mattered—where your soul went after you were dead. As far as I could tell, what happened here on earth didn’t matter. (After all, every day we ate Twinkies, drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and yelled at each other.)

I strongly suspected that We Believed that if You Didn’t Believe In God, your soul would wind up in The Other Place. H-E-Double-L.

“If you’re an atheist,” my mother said, “it becomes even more important what you do on earth, and how you spend your time here, because you don’t believe there’s anything that comes afterward. This Is All You Have.” And she waved her hand around our smoke-stained house.

For a lot of people, spirituality is about a God “out there” who’s doing things for them. I hear things like,

• I believe God has a plan for me
• I turn everything over to God and I believe God will fix/heal it
• I believe God is out there watching over me
• When I pray to God I know He listens

I’ve had to admit to myself recently that I DON’T believe or know any of this. I’ve tried praying and believing that God listens. It was the way I was taught to pray when I was a little girl, on my knees, eyes closed, hands folded, but I no longer believe in it—if I ever really did. (Maybe I will someday. And if it works for you—I’m really glad, and I’m pulling for you, because I’ve put in my time and it sure doesn’t work for me.) When I pray this way, I don’t know who I’m praying to, and I don’t have the sense that anyBODY is listening.

I still pray, though. I have a clear sense that there is more to us human beans than our physical bodies. I believe that, if God/Spirit is “out there,” it is also “in here.” Prayer and meditation, as regular practices, align my will and my consciousness with the great flows of life—time, gravity, healing, love, and others that I don’t even know about yet. And Spirit.

When the prayer says, “Let not my will but thy will be done,” I don’t imagine a person. I imagine time’s will, or love’s natural orientation, or the healing body’s natural courses. Usually I perceive Spirit’s will. (Or even gravity’s will: I have more and more wrinkles and sags today than I had last year, talk about humility.)

There are some simple prayers I’ve been encouraged to say in recovery:

• Let me be relieved of the bondage of self, so I can better serve Spirit’s will
• Let me be relieved of fear and my attention be directed toward what Spirit would allow me to be
• Let me give my strengths and weaknesses in the service of Spirit, and may those weaknesses be removed which no longer serve others
• Let Spirit (not money, not social insecurity, not fear, in other words not self-will) direct my thinking, separating my thinking from self-pity and deceit.
• My favorite: I ask for an “intuitive thought” when I’m confused. I love this. Because this is another of my higher powers—the Intuitive Thought. It’s beyond me, bigger than me, and very powerful.

Higher power for me is not about belief. It’s about exercise. It’s about waking up. The 12 steps keep me sober, and they also wake me up.

All this takes discipline. Takes work. I can’t just sit back (though some days, I’d really rather—and some days I do). I gotta practice, I gotta make rubber meet road, I gotta get my butt on the meditation cushion every day without expecting any results. More on that in another post.