I suddenly felt drawn to write about a new and tantalizing bud of a realization that has begun to sprout for me. A wonderful scholar of spirituality, Dr. Darleen Pryds (you can find her professional page on Facebook) wrote a pithy reaction after reading a collection of essays by C.S. Lewis called A Grief Observed. If you do not know who C.S. Lewis is, he is most famous as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he is also a poet, medievalist, theologian, and acclaimed Christian apologist to name a few of his professional roles. A Grief Observed is a collection of essays about grief after the death of the author’s wife.and his negative feelings toward God. Reading Dr. Pryds’ short remarks stirred in me a desire to write about my belief that while God, who for me is best described in four core states of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness, would of course understand the grief that we in our physical bodies feel, grief would neither make sense for God nor for any of us when we have left this physical existence. My choice of four attributes to the Divine Creator is my own personal shorthand, and I know that they cannot fully describe the Divine Essence and that I will discover more accurate ways of describing God as I evolve, just as I know that humankind has also evolved in our understanding of God. In the times when the Old Testament of The Bible were being written, to many, God was jealous, vengeful, and frightening, to name a few qualities. I do not think God was actually those things, but that was the closest the people writing then could come to understanding what God was trying to reveal about the Divine Self. They needed God to be that way to make sense of their experience. Then Jesus tried to get us to open ourselves to the understanding that God is Love. God did not change, but we were getting ready for an evolution in our perception. In a sense the saying that we have created God in our own image is correct in that we can only describe and understand God as far as our experience and understanding will allow. The mundane metaphor that came to my mind when thinking about God and grief was a parent who is with their child when the child is in anguish over the apparent loss of a favored toy. A loving parent would at once understand the child’s emotions and be to comfort him/her, but would also know the truth that the toy has simply slipped out of sight somewhere for example, behind the bed.
Dr. Pryds rightly reminded me that each of our experiences of the Divine One are different In a sense the saying that we have created God in our own image is correct in that we can only describe and understand God as far as our experience and understanding will allow. Each of us has our own personal understanding of God which differs from the next person’s. and also each of our understandings of God are variable dependent on our current experience. My experience of God may be as different from yours as my experience of the physical universe is different from yours. In addition, my experience of God for me at this moment is different from what it was when I was feeling beset by the world and its inhabitants. Our feelings and understandings about God metamorphose over time and with experiences. We can be filled with awe at one time and then filled with anguish a few days later after experiencing a loss or some other tragedy. Even a series of uninterrupted small setbacks could alter our experience of the Divine. This of course does not mean that God is essentially different. Have you noticed that we humans often misinterpret each other? Has anyone ever asked you what was wrong because they said you looked angry or upset when you were not feeling either of those emotions? Has anyone ever blamed you or even thanked you for something that you had nothing to do with? We are always interpreting what we observe and a striking number of our interpretations are either incorrect or more a reflection of our inner world than what is happening. I was pondering the significance of these variations in our experiences of God when I remembered the death of my father, and in remembering that experience, I had my new revelation.
My father’s death was a complete shock for two reasons. One was that I hadn’t known he had been sick for a long time, nor that he had had a stroke months before and had been slipping into dementia. Honestly, we had been estranged for years, so my lack of knowledge of his condition should not have been a surprise. The other thing that shocked me was my reaction. When people say that they feel like they had been hit by a truck, I had always thought of that as hyperbole. It was not. I physically collapsed and really had no ability to rise up. For hours I could do nothing but sob, and I’m not a person who cries. For days and weeks it was as if my mind were in a dense fog through which I could only see dimly. Of course my vision was fine, but the stimuli and thoughts were not making their way from where they were received in the brain to the areas where they are interpreted. There was a fog preventing me from fully integrating and interacting with what I perceived. The thing that strikes me as interesting now is that while I was feeling all of those things and barely getting through my days, I was also observing myself from another vantage point. It was most likely thanks to the meditation which I had been practicing for years before then, but as I watched myself in all of my pain, confusion, numbness, and grief, I also knew that my father hadn’t gone anywhere. I also felt a vague sense of compassion for myself in my pain, and I knew that as I had love and understanding for myself in those moments, God had even more love and understanding than I could imagine. God did not need to feel my grief but was instead loving me in my grief. This is not sympathy, nor perhaps even compassion, but rather a Joyful, Loving Knowing of my ultimate and essential Wellbeing. God knows that there is nothing ultimately wrong here. All is and will be well.
So, what is my budding thought? It is possible to hold more than one understanding, knowing, or experience of God at the same time, which can become more evident in times of great and sudden distress. Both feelings that God is distant and confusing and the belief that God cannot be separated from us and is always breathing love through us are valid and are dependent on the experiencer. The mind that is immersed in this world of form and endings is going to have a different experience than the Self that is undying and eternal. Again, both are valid. We wouldn’t be here in these bodies reading words on a computer screen if this experience were not part of our intentions. Mother Teresa in her book, In the Heart of the World: Thoughts, Stories, and Prayers, wrote, “Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time, and his hand in every happening; This is what it means to be contemplative in the heart of the world. Seeing and adoring the presence of Jesus, especially in the lowly appearance of bread, and in the distressing disguise of the poor.” I know that life is beautiful in all of its distressing disguises, to riff on what Mother Teresa wrote. The perceptions we form through the lens of our experiences of our current reality do not necessarily lead to correct conclusions. I know that the closest I can come to describing or understanding God at this time is as Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness. However, all of our emotions as well as the feelings of others are valid, and we do well to recognize and honor them. The thought that is growing within me is that it may be possible to hold both our current experience and, while hopefully recognizing the transience of the experience, particularly while we are feeling distracted in our pain and suffering, to retain our connection to the experience of our broader or less resistant Self though that experience may be obscured behind a veil of grief, anger, or some other pain filled resistant emotion. If so….with practice, we can access our broader or less resistant experience more easily, and perhaps even when we feel we have been knocked down by something that has happened to us or to a loved one, the flow of our intention and the God from which it and we emanate would be more available to us. And if we can also feel and know our indivisible unity with God and the flow of our intentions, the more fully we will be able to live the lives we intend.
