Soul
Recovery
“Lacking
a rebellious streak, I've concluded that the point of spirituality is
to deliver a kind of medicine to the soul, a recovery program that
invests life with 'light.'”
Deepak
Chopra (“Making God Necessary,” Parabola, Winter 2018-2019, p.17)
In Deepak Chopra's
article in Parabola cited above, he writes that making God necessary
is a journey “from belief to faith, and from faith to
knowledge.” We can remain in the subjective realm of “I
believe” forever, but will find that it has no legs to stand on, no
solid core, when times are truly rough. For weathering the inevitable
storms of life, we need to fill in with food for the soul and
first-hand knowledge.
It is my honest
conviction that God exists. My definition of God may be different
from yours, may in fact have almost no basis for comparison to yours,
and it isn't a matter of one being right and one being wrong. For me,
direct experience has formed my beliefs, and a perception that God is
in everything has filled in the gaps. Belief that there is a
possibility that a Higher Power exists comes first. Once we step over
that threshold, we begin to experience that power objectively through events
in our lives, which brings us to faith.
Our childhood image of
God as a generous and kindly old man in the sky, at least kindly when
he's not mad and punishing us, is replaced by God as a particular set
of ethics and morality rules. We have, for instance, in the Holy
Bible, first the dietary and cleanliness laws of the Old Testament,
then the Ten Commandments, and finally, the simplified version that
Jesus taught—love God, love your neighbor as yourself. These are
foundational, but it is only when we put them into practice—in
other words, when we give them life—that they become more than just
an exercise in memorization.
We move from belief, to
faith, to personal experience, and thus, to knowledge. God is no
longer subjective but has now become an objective reality to us. We
begin to find meaning in events that happen, and people who come into
our lives, which brings us full circle to belief and faith, but at a
very different and personal level. Now we are part of a bigger
picture—part of an expanding perception of God in all things,
including God in us. The light dawns at different stages of life for
each of us, but for all of us, it is a journey that we either
undertake or not. For me, it has made life richer and more miraculous
everyday. I have faith in that. It is medicine for my soul.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment