HI there and welcome to my new blog, What Next, God? God has been leading me down a very crooked path over the last few years, and this is where I’m going to share some of my insights, lessons, questions, and so on. I’m also hoping to start either a podcast or videoblog here, where I can discuss on a monthly basis importance questions concerning our quest for God and the further quest for a godly life.
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
My story? Another Catholic church drop out. After 12 years in their schools, and parents who converted to Born Again Christianity which they used to terrify me about boys and sex, I ran screaming from religion – but not from God. Internally, I felt that a lot of things Christianity and the Bible had taught went against my very nature, and truths that were at my own inner core. By age 27, I was so lost and confused that I made a prayer to God. I sent a request to the one true Divine and Good Creator – that if He existed, to let me know and let me learn about Him in a way I could understand. Until then, I would erase everything I’d ever learned in this life from other people, and be more or less an atheist.
About 2 or 3 INCREDIBLY painful and lonely weeks followed. Some people say that Hell is absence from God’s presence – and if you think that doesn’t sound so bad, you don’t know yourself or God very well. It was two weeks of Hell. And then a friend of a friend started talking about the “Path to Perfection“. I went to learn more. A group was giving meeting on the upper east side, and all you had to do was buy the book and read it – it was the study guide for this unstructured spiritual university.
And there I found God. Not someone else’s God, not the definition of God, but a real intimate personal experience – a God I could touch and test, a God who was definite and definitive, even while being omnipotent and all powerful. A real living Being God, too, not one of these new age definitions where God is more like the Force.
So I went to meetings regularly, and they had regular school years too – for about 5 years. In that time, I stopped due to laziness – guess how many times? What’s that magical Biblical number? How many times did Peter deny Jesus? Yes, three times – which is the charm and after that the Path was never open to me again.
Seek and Ye Shall Find
But anyone who has a close relationship with God knows that the only way to continue that relationship is with study, prayer, and community. So I went back to church – 4 days after the Twin Towers fell. That church was a fluke, a test case, and when the married pastor impregnated the assistant pastor, it fell apart. Then we moved out of New York and I had a baby with Mosaic Down Syndrome. I knew after another year or two passed that I needed that connection, and I asked. Yes, ask and ye shall receive is a truth – my husband pointed to a church that was the very same one my neighbor recommended the next day. So I started attending a conversative Wesleyan church (Stroudsburg Wesleyan) – me, a liberal lefty Dem. Somehow, I got closer with God and a lot of my prejudices about the right wing began to melt when I found how dear and loving people can be.
So that’s where I’m at. I’m struggling, as I probably always will, with Christianity and I still believe in the Path and my benevolent, loving God. The story, however, is far from over. There is so much more to learn, and I truly want to learn about other monotheistic religions and Buddhism. Much of God is in other practices too.
Join me on my journey, and then follow your own spiritual path by asking:
What Next, God?