Your God is Too Small

Years ago I read a wonderful book called, “Your God is Too Small” by J.B. Phillips. In that book he wrote about how most of us struggle with God or faith because we keep making God too small. We have a tendency to imagine God being like us or maybe like a human being with super powers. But even with the powers of the entire Justice League of America, that is still a human construct and hence, according to Phillips, too small.

I thought about that this week when I was meeting with some students and we were discussing new ideas in Christian theology and how there continue to be new ideas about God, and evolution, and how God may intersect physics, and about how God and Love may be a primary construct of evolutionary direction. Yeah, heady talk like that.

At one point I said, “But what about a personal God?” and I got the look, and someone said, “Well, I used to believe in a personal God but then I studied…” The message was basically that believing in a personal God was kind of juvenile or “early” in terms of spiritual formation. 

I have picked up that slight judgment in other places as well. That look or comment that suggests that those who (still) believe in a personal God have not matured in their spiritual development. There’s a kind of spiritual condescension, “Oh, I’m past the personal God

thing.” “My God is now a cosmic force or a New Physics God”…blah, blah.

 So me, doing my daily—very personal—prayer starts to feel small—or worse—I feel unsophisticated in my faith.

But then, after confessing to my very personal God that I feel small cause I’m not making Him/Her big enough, I start to think, “Whoa, isn’t making (perceiving) God as a distant, cosmic, force of the universe just another way to make God too small?” (Yes, irony: in making God so big and fancy we make him small again.)

Can’t God be galaxies-wide, loving, an impersonal cosmic force and a personal shepherd at the same time? Why can’t God (we are talking GOD after all) be BIG and small at once?

I thought that Hillary Clinton could be the president of the United States and Chelsea’s mother at the same time. So why can’t God be both (and more) simultaneously?

Think about this: If we really grasp the Trinity, and if we swear that we believe in this three-in-one business, then why not a God who is all: all forms, all types, all sizes, all styles, all dimensions simultaneously?

And by the way—isn’t disdaining a personal God rather mean spirited? That can’t possibly be very Christian.

Take Your Vitamins and Don't Forget to Pray

You want to live long and look good so you do everything the experts suggest: You eat salmon, wear sunscreen, lift weights and jog. You floss, eat five fruits a day; take your Vitamin D and you pray. Pray? Yes, God is now part of a healthy lifestyle.

It turns out that God can save your life as well as your soul. According to the newest research on aging and health we need to hit both the treadmill and our knees on a regular basis. This new push for God isn’t coming, as you might expect, from the church folks, but rather from doctors, specifically neurologists.

The timing is perfect because we are a pretty nervous bunch right now.  The world is tilting; economy struggling and our fears about it are multiplying. Dr. Andrew Newberg is the spokesperson for the new field of neurotheology and his focus; “How God Changes Your Brain” is also the title of his new book. In it he details extensive research showing the impact of prayer, faith, meditation and yes, exercise on longevity and health.  

In a key section of the book they rank the ways that we can improve our brain function—the overall key to long life--and while aerobic exercise is number three, it turns out that the very best thing you can do for your brain is to have faith.

Can’t you just hear this at the gym, “What’s your workout?” “Oh I do 20 minutes on the elliptical, 20 minutes of weights and a couple of rosaries.”

But there is something else. The selling of belief as self-improvement strikes me as another kind of materialism, albeit a spiritual one. We typically recognize consumerism in the race to bigger houses, cooler cars or the latest techno-gadget. But maybe in a recession we drop those in favor of other kinds of consumption, like using God for your own good.  In most faith systems the goal or end point is about turning away from self and toward others: Love your neighbor. Mend the world.

So there’s a paradox here: trying to be more spiritual for selfish ends knocks you right off the spiritual path. It’s like humility; just when you think you’ve got it, you don’t. But maybe God doesn’t care; maybe he’s OK with being the bait to catch himself.

So if you’re getting in shape for spring, think of “Him” as Vitamin G.

Letting Go

There is so much letting go to practice. Cancer Land brings letting go of John, his health, his doctors, the outcomes--many little outcomes (tests, appointments, complaints)  and the big one--death. But there is so much more letting go I have to practice and so much of it is about other people.

I've read more than a dozen books about letting go and I can't count the hours and dollars of therapy. I don't discount any of that. It's helped and it's moved me forward and it's also made me more aware of how much more I need to let go. Melody Beatty is my favorite writer on this topic. She writes about addiction and recovery and codependency but "letting go" is the theme.

To be able to let go I have to be able to let go to something else or into something else. For me that something else is God, so I realize how much I need that relationship, and to have that relationship I need spiritual practices in my life.

I'm grateful that I have friends who I can talk to about God and faith and prayer and meditation. Last night I had one of those conversations with a good friend. We talked about our relationships, the ones with real live men and the ones we have with God. That's intimacy.

But this morning I come to letting go again. Maybe letting go of other people and what they think  is a spiritual practice. I can say the words. I can pray for help. But my behavior tells me where I really am.

What You Believe In...

A quote that I love goes like this: "What you believe in must be bigger than what you are afraid of." I heard a woman named Kim Klein say that in a conference on fund raising many years ago. She was telling a story about how she overcame her fear of solicitation--asking powerful people for money. She said that one day in a fit of terror, about to approach a big CEO, it hit her that she really did believe in the women she was trying to help at her DV shelter, so that had to be bigger than her fear. And her fear decreased that day.

I have applied that quote in my life many times: at work, in relationships, in social settings and now I'm thinking about health and wellness and cancer. Do I believe in God? Goodness? the power of the body? the balance of the universe? Ok, can I remember that when I am afraid?

This week a friend who knows I love that quote pointed it out to me again. I have been wrestling with my passion about caregiving and this cancer advocacy work--do I dare put myself out there? really step up to the plate, and the microphone, with Love in the Time of Cancer? And my friend Martha said, "Diane, what you believe in has to be bigger than what you are afraid of."

My own advice to others hiding in plain sight. That makes me believe in God. And his sense of humor.

Where is God in Cancer?

This has been on my mind this week. How do you find God in cancer? Yes, we die and cancer is one of the mechanisms, but living in between the diagnosis and the death there are a lot of choices. It seems that there is a continuum with “offer it up” and long-suffering on one end and “there is a no God and fatalism (and a different kind of suffering maybe) on the other end. But maybe there is a surrender --with action --in the middle. That would not look the same for two patients or two caregivers.

Where, for each of us, is how we treat cancer, accept treatment, refuse treatments, or fight it? If God’s will is what is then is fighting cancer fighting God’s will? How do we practice acceptance when it means accepting cancer and death?

Oh God!

The downside to being an atheist is that you have no one to cry out to in the throes of an orgasm.

Spiral Worries

Ugh..the worries spiral. Work, relationships, work, relationships. When I’m sad I don’t want to work, when I don’t feel like I’m working well, I worry about losing my job, when I think I could lose my job I worry about what will happen to the relationship if I lost my job. The spiral goes faster until I cry or get so mad at him and me, mostly me.

I know that prayer and faith is the answer but I fight to trust God.

That feels like my task today: slow down and trust God. Even though it seems like the most counter-productive thing to do.

I don’t know where else to put this but in God’s hands. And when it gets—I get—like this it’s the most impossible thing to do.

Christopher Hitchens

...is dying from esophageal cancer that has metastasized. He is chronicling this in Esquire Magazine and NPR is also interviewing him weekly. What else does a writer do than take his own experience and turn it into words, hopefully mining the experience for others but also for himself? That’s what we do.

Hitchens, you may recall, has written and spoken extensively about God, religion, and belief and his non-belief in each of those. Now cancer. Soon death and I must say that I do admire him for the integrity of his beliefs about belief.

Yesterday he spoke about the many people who are praying for him and he makes a distinction between those whose prayers are good wishes for his health or comfort versus those whose prayers are more along the lines of, “God, maybe now that this bastard is dying he’ll finally believe in you.”

God is Love is Sex is God

Church, passion, kneeling at communion. Our shoulders and hips touch but our prayers are private and intimate. God forgive me, change me, heal me, bless him, show me. Bread in wine, flesh and blood and we eat it kneeling. Devour a man’s body and juices on our knees. We drink blood. Absolute carnality, absolute intimacy, absolute love.

Rising we are healed, saved, restored.

We reenter our pew and he grips my hand so hard. There are tears in his eyes. He chokes, “I love you.”

We come home to the New York Times, mocha coffee and Italian pasties from Bella Napoli. I’m reading about palliative care and he is in front of me, tears again, kissing me, tugging at clothes.

“Is there any greater compliment than a man who wants to f*** you?”asks Helen Gurley Brown.

And he does. And we do. Laughing, grunting, crying all over each other’s bodies, mouths, hands, fingers, legs.

Finally tired and hungry.

God is love. Sex is love. He is risen today. Amen

Letters from the Land of Cancer

A new book adds perspective to the thing I have often challenged: the idea that cancer is a war. Obituaries say, “After a valiant battle with cancer”, “He/she lost a heroic fight with cancer.”

In his last book, “Letters from the Land of Cancer”, Walter Wangerin writes that it is not cancer we fight but mortality. And in that we all are engaged no matter the disease or even those who are blessed with the gift f long life. We die, we die, we will die. Sooner, later, easier or hard. We will die.

What he adds to this discussion—even as he writes during his experience with terminal lymphoma—is that if our battle is really with mortality then—for those of us who have faith—we are engaged in battle with God.

Dare the obituaries say, “After years of fighting God on mortality she finally surrendered.” Or how about this: “After a lengthy battle with God—in the land of cancer—God won.”

Beyond Faith. Where is God in Cancer?

Does God cause cancer? Prevent it? Choose who gets it? Will he cure it? Cure it for some people? Our view of God is revealed in our prayers: God as punisher, as father, as parent or as Santa. In prayer do we ask for magic? Special consideration? Or do we ask for strength to cope with what is? Perhaps we petition for someone else’s cure? Do we believe that some people should have --or not have --difficult things, like cancer, to deal with?

A common first response to a diagnosis of cancer is, “Why Me?” Some people stay there and others move on to, “Why not me?” Implied in this is a sense of God or Higher Being or Mover in our lives or the universe.

Cancer often leads to these big questions. And that sends us looking for resources, experts, and theology. Now, a new book “Beyond Faith” looks at an intelligent person’s belief in God. The book by former trial lawyer, William Penick, deposes God in a thoughtfully imagined interview—yes, with God, and shows with humor and insight into human nature, how we create God.

Roll Away the Stone

Big stuff today. Talking to my therapist about this relationship and about John’s cancer. Trying to sort out what is my over-the-top fear and what is diagnostic and statistically probable in colon cancer. We were talking about that and my sense of urgency to make some peace with all of this when I felt an idea or a realization move from the center of my body to my mouth and become words.

This is what I said to her: “I am afraid that if the cancer comes back, and if he dies, it is because I allowed this relationship to be, and I’m afraid that if the cancer comes back and he dies that it is my punishment; I will lose him and I will be humiliated.”

Even as I said those words I was amazed that it was coming out of me and I knew that was the true fear. Fear not just of cancer --that will hurt him or kill him—awful all by itself—but that in some way it is a punishment of me—and that the punishment takes the form of abandonment and humiliation.

Yes, of course these are my “issues” fear of abandonment and pervasive shame. But Holy Cow---the way the fear was coming to me was absolutely Biblical.

I could see her reaction as I spoke and we both got it that this is not just a psychological issue but a spiritual and even theological issue.

But here is what is both troubling and baffling me. I did not grow up in a fire and brimstone family; no one taught me to fear a punishing God; all of my spiritual practice and professed belief is in a loving God. But these fears belong to another belief system that I have not had any awareness was operating inside me.

Have I channeled my father’s early Catholic God? Is this cultural? Past life echoes? The collective unconscious? Really, it makes me wonder and it makes me pray.

This deeply held and silently operating belief is in my way. I knew it and my therapist knew it. I said to her, “This is in the way; this is why I cannot decide and why I cannot think clearly.” She had the exact image as I spoke this fear: There is a large boulder in my path.

I knew at once that even the image was Biblical. There is a stone blocking awareness, clarity and peace. The stone is blocking my belief in a loving God and in God’s will.

Who will roll away the stone?

Can I see Clearly now?

Our deepest wounds are the lens through which we see the world.

--from my journal June 5 1994

I sing along with the radio: “I can see clearly now, the pain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way. All of the dark clouds have passed me by. I can see bright, bright sunshiny day.”

It is a song that can bring tears to my eyes. It is a song that is –for me—about recovery and healing. I am so aware this week of my own wounds and how they distort how I see John and how I see myself in this relationship. I know that anyone would be afraid of cancer and that any caregiver fears the person they love will get sick, sicker, or die. This is not about turning a molehill into a mountain. This is not about turning a stomach ache into cancer. It’s about cancer being cancer and being life threatening. But still, but even with that, how much do I lose my --and our --good life to my old beliefs that I will be abandoned and left? How much do I assume that will happen because I am not enough? How often do I set me aside and wait for pain and grief to descend and when they don’t I go and shake the fear tree to bring it faster, bring it now, so that I can have the familiar terror?

Oh enough already. It’s about woundedness and beliefs. I am a woman of faith and I believe in God but these beliefs are something else. Maybe this is a kind of blasphemy—I have created Gods of Woundedness that I worship and serve before my God of love. Oh God, I am ready to relinquish this belief in false Gods and let you love me now.