god Archives - Judith Johnson

Do you experience God? Or, is God a concept to you? Or, perhaps God is not something that matters to you.

Some people worship very small gods like the god of opinion or the god of money, power, status, and success. Some relate to God as a concept. Others experience God. And some deny the existence of God.

As a mentor and grief counselor, I hear a lot about people’s deepest beliefs and fears. I am particularly fascinated by how a belief in God is expressed in how people live their lives.

What does it mean to believe in God? In its broadest sense, it means having a worldview that includes the existence of God.

Here are three attempts to define God in words:

Oxford Dictionary: “In Christianity and other monotheistic religions, the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:“The supreme or ultimate reality: such as the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped (as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) as creator and ruler of the universe.”

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Much of western thought about God has fallen within some broad form of theism. Theism is the view that there is a God which is the creator and sustainer of the universe and is unlimited with regard to knowledge (omniscience), power (omnipotence), extension (omnipresence), and moral perfection. Though regarded as sexless, God has traditionally been referred to by the masculine pronoun.”

I find it interesting that we define God in human terms and with human attributes and aspirations. It is difficult to formulate ideas about God without imagining God to exist in within space and time. We are likely to get caught up in a “Where’s Waldo?” kind of speculation about the placement of God. Is God outside of us and/or within us? When God is perceived in man’s image and attributed a pronoun, we limit God by our cognitive capabilities and imagination. This line of thinking omits the possibility of a formless and unfathomable God.

Whatever our conception of God may be, it is important to recognize that God is not validated into existence by our belief.

There are many things that we do not or cannot know. This is the territory of faith, trust, and surrender. Some people lose faith in God when things happen that they do not understand or are unable to comprehend. For example, when a child dies. Some people lose their faith saying, “What kind of a god would let a child die?” Others give up on God because they cannot abide by the hard knocks they have encountered in their lives. They stop believing in God because they have a stronger belief that God has failed them. So, they fire God and declare themselves the god of their life. These gods are way too small.

When someone finds little or no interest in spiritual matters, that does not mean that these dimensions do not exist. As professed by the Delphic Oracle, expressed in the teachings of Dutch Renaissance humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, and carved over the front door of the eminent psychologist Carl Jung —

“Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”

For Jung this statement served to remind those entering that awe of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom (Psalms 111.10).

Many do not believe in the existence of a creator of this world and all who exist in it. Others recognize a mystical quality to life that awakens and inspires a sense of spiritual mystery and an aspiration to goodness.

My awareness of God is constantly evolving and God remains fundamental to my worldview. My understanding of myself as a spiritual being has evolved from conceptual to experiential.

As a child, I thought of God as a fatherly man in a white robe. He lived on a cloud and ran the whole world. That god, conceived by man, in the image of man, became too small for me. The God I speak of now is not limited by human vocabulary, form, or imagination. I no longer try to conceptualize God, I experience God to be something greater than us that has us. I live with an awareness of God’s presence.

As I awakened spiritually, I came to know myself as a soul among other souls having human experiences. In the higher levels of consciousness above my ego, I came to know myself to be an individuated aspect or expression of the divine that cannot be created or destroyed.

It is interesting to note that in both Greek and Hebrew soul means breath or life.

Now, even my perceived identity as a soul is giving way into the divine as a pervading oneness. I have come to know God as the source of my life, my breath, and my multi-dimensional existence as a soul, body, and consciousness. I experience God as oneness and a creative, purposeful force of all we experience.

The Hebraic name for God, hu, is said to express the vibrational frequency of God in such a way that it causes the soul to yearn to go home to the heart of God.

While I believe that we all are essentially divine beings, it is apparent that we have varying degrees of awareness of that reality. And, when we are not aware of something––it is as though it does not exist for us. And, we function accordingly.

In his book, The Idea of the Holy, German theologian Rudolph Otto ponders how we are to stand in relationship to God. He concludes that we should stand before God in drop jaw awe – beyond words and concepts. When we realize that God is beyond our comprehension, we stand at the edge of our unknowing either in fear or trust, depending on whether we imagine a wrathful or a loving God.

Unique perspectives of spiritual awareness are activated in different individuals. I believe that one’s level of awareness is perfect for whatever that individual is doing in this lifetime. It is not better or worse than the level of awakening of another person.

I remember two weeks before my mother’s death when she had a profound spiritual awakening. Her relationship to God was upgraded from a conceptual belief in God to knowing experientially that God was breathing her. She urgently wanted everyone in the world to know because, as she explained:

“People will want to live their lives differently.”

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Until 1997, I had a strong belief in god. When I was a child, my god was the god of The Ten Commandments movie — much like Charlton Heston on a cloud. As I matured, so did my concept of god. My god became less imaginable in the image of a person and more of an invisible force. I always imagined god to be benevolent and capable of awareness of each and every one of us simultaneously. The closest I could come to defining god was love – the experience of two or more gathered in goodness.

Then, one day in March, 1997, I was driving south on the Taconic parkway in New York on my way to work. I hit black ice going 60 mph. I no longer had any control over the direction or speed of the car — I was suddenly a passenger and not the driver.

My car crisscrossed the road four times, and when it was clear I was about to go down a ravine into a swamp, a voice cried out from my belly saying, “I’m not ready to go yet, so you’ve got to take care of me. Please take good care of me.” In that moment, my car did what a mechanic later told my friend was mechanically impossible — it went into reverse. I hung on to the steering wheel while the car made a complete circle going rear first down the ravine and into the swamp. The trunk of the car was sliced all the way through by the tree that stopped the car. The rear window broke into a million pieces. My earrings and glasses flew off my head, landing in the foot area of the front passenger seat. My seat broke, and I was lying face up under the broken rear window, yet I didn’t have a scratch on me, nor was there any glass in my loose-weave wool coat.

I remember my euphoria when I realized the car had stopped. I touched myself and marveled, “I’m alive!” I sat up, retrieved my glasses, earrings, and briefcase and stepped out of the car into the swampy ground. Each step made a loud, moist, suctioning sound as I lifted each foot. I was in total shock, operating on auto pilot. I walked up to the road where the car that had been traveling behind me had pulled over, and this very nice woman beckoned me into her car to wait for the police and ambulance she had called.

I was taken to the hospital. It was as though everyone else I encountered was somehow different from me. They were all worried about me and making a medical fuss. Meanwhile, inside of me my euphoria grew and grew and grew. I was totally blissed out. I had had a spiritual conversion experience that I will never be able to translate in a meaningful way to another human being. I know that now, but at the time I just kept telling people that god is real. The doctors responded by wanting to treat me for post-traumatic stress. I wouldn’t let them. Through this accident I came to know that god is real beyond a shadow of a doubt. I no longer believe in god as an intellectual concept. I know god through personal experience. My knowledge was and remains irrefutable.

Nothing else has ever mattered so much to me as that wonderful gift I was given in a car accident that totaled my car to such a degree that the mechanic automatically offered his condolences to my friend who came to retrieve my belongings. He was incredulous when she told him I was home eating a turkey sandwich. To this day I recall the euphoria and the sense of a glass dome covering my body as the car crashed.

My mother and I were very close, and she shared my deep belief in god, but it wasn’t until two weeks before her death in 2012 that she also was given the gift of knowing god through personal experience. For her, it happened during a breathing treatment. She could barely speak at the time, but told me that she realized that god was breathing her. Like me, she was totally euphoric. That whole day she kept telling everyone who came into her room that god is real. Unfortunately, they all responded to what they thought was an elderly woman on morphine. I guess if you haven’t had the experience yourself, you have no frame of reference. All day, my mom kept asking me when they were going to make the announcement. “Who? What announcement?” I asked. The three most important people in the world she told me. I only remember two of them – the president and the pope. She was urgent about the need for them to let the world know that god is real. “People will want to live their lives differently.” she said.

Have you had an experience like this? If so, I would love to hear about it.

Posts

Is Your God Too Small?

The Day I Stopped Believing in God

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