A Writing Exercise
I have been working and playing through Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. One of the exercises/ writing prompts is to: Write about the God you do believe in and the god you would like to believe in. The idea, it seems to me, is to begin to see the discrepancies...the lack we can see in God and in our trust in God. I am sharing what came up when I wrote about that:
The god I believe in is not an “entity”...it is not separate from life...it is not separate from my own experience.
The god I believe in is the source of everything. The god I believe in is “is-ness”...Being...Awareness. It is life itself...the fountain of possibility...an emptiness from which everything arises and into which everything flows back.
The god I believe in is pure potential. It lives and breathes in everything...through everything...as everything...equally. It is not more “this” than “that”.
It is a blank page...or a blank canvas...or a blank screen and makes no judgements about what is written...or printed...or seen. It is the creator and the created and that which observes all of it.
This sometimes scares me...it scares what I think of as “myself” in a personal, psychological sense, because it can seem dispassionate. It can seem to allow all things, all circumstances, all appearances, all experiences. This appears evident in the wide variety of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, ideas and experiences that play out on the earth...in the kindness and violence...in the joy and the suffering. This god can feel capricious, and wild, and chaotic. This god can feel untrustworthy. It can feel as if such a god “doesn’t care”. It can feel unsafe from the point of view of the “me”...the small and limited ideas of “me”.
I would like to believe in a god who guides me...who is “for” me. I would like to believe in a god that knows intimately what is felt in this body and heart and is love itself. I would like to believe in a god that supports my creativity...is my creativity...just as it is all creativity.
I would like to believe that the experience of this life matters to God, somehow...that God enjoys it, somehow. I would like to believe in God’s desire to live this life.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in any of that...but at times it gets sketchy and vague, and I would like to go deeper. I would like to feel secure in it...rooted in it. I would like to live in awe and wonderment and bewilderment and what Rumi calls love’s confusing joy.
If you are so moved, tell me...what God do you believe in? Do you see any discrepancies between that God and the God you might like to believe in?