I am honest about identifying as agnostic, which is a radical departure from my fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian upbringing. Though I consider myself spiritual in a vague, can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it way, I prefer not to use “God” when talking about my spirituality. That word brings up memories of an angry, highly critical, micro-managing, stalker figure with all of the power to take me out with little warning and no recourse. “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.”
Today I rethought my avoidance of the word God when I read this quote on Twitter:
Love is so…massive.
Love is so massive that it is, in fact, God.
God is Love.
~ John Shore, “I’m OK–You’re Not”
I am an intensely loving person, which may come as a surprise to people who perceive me as complicated, sometimes bristly, and sometimes defensive. (It isn’t a surprise to my tribe. I feel safe enough with them that I can let that side of me show with very little fear.) My love feels expansive and sometimes makes no sense to me. I feel it towards people, both specific people and humankind in general. I feel it towards animals, towards Earth. I feel it when I am deep in my creative zone. It is a feeling that is much bigger than me. The best word I can find to describe it is “love”.
When I read the above quote I began to wonder what if that massive feeling I call “love” is, in fact, God? What if instead of God being a person or some form of sentience or a figment of people’s imagination, God really is Love?
That would mean God is in and can flow through any of us who opens ourselves to It, regardless of religious affiliation/independence, including (especially? am I allowed to say that?) a healthily skeptical agnostic like me.
A little while ago I tweeted, “The God in me looks different than you expected, huh?” My tweet seems to have struck a nerve; several people have retweeted and favorited my words. I needed to publicly say that for my own benefit. My past conditioning sometimes leaves me feeling as though being authentically agnostic leaves me operating in a spiritual void. Recognizing the God in me reminds me I am not in a void after all. It’s just that my current modus operandi looks very different than how I was led to believe it should look.
That is a good thing.