Thoughts on God

I wrote this four years ago, and just rediscovered it. This still expresses my thoughts.

“When the word God is used on these pages, you may substitute the thought good orderly direction or flow. What we are talking about is a creative energy. God is useful shorthand for many of us, but so is Goddess, Mind, Universe, Source, and Higher Power…. The point is not what you name it. The point is that you try using it. For many of us, thinking of it as a form for spiritual electricity has been a very useful jumping off place.”
---Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Hmmm. God as a useful reference, one of many terms in the thesaurus for creativity, innovation, creative force. Let me ponder that. It’s heavy stuff.
God isn’t found easily in my thesaurus, or my dictionary for that matter. Those places are too dull, too lifeless for such a word. Something else I was reading this morning was an essay on thrift. The writer was arguing that thrift should be a verb as well as a noun.

I feel that way about God. God is a verb, not a noun. God is action, is doing, is being, and is creating. Isn’t that the essence of God – creation? What I see God doing in this world certainly isn’t passive, and certainly isn’t just a thing, or an object. Instead God is the doing, the acting, the growing, the changing that is around us -- if we choose to look.

As I sit down with pen and paper seeking to write, or pick up the guitar, or break out m camera and take a look at a vase of Japanese iris on a rainy day, I experience God. I experience God in the rolling of the thunder and flashing of lightning awakening me from sleep in the night, or the purring of the cat as I pet his belly and scratch his ears, or in the flickering of the silver screen as I lose myself at the local cinema. These actions, doings, creations are God, around me.

I experienced God as a verb at a funeral a few days ago. People spoke of Kate as a person of action, her beauty and love expressed in her actions, her love and embracing of others. IT was not a sad service, but instead a slide show of countless actions of love and kindnesses. It was a rich kaleidoscope of her love energy, of God-action. Rather than grief, the room was filled with amazement and vibrancy.

“The point is that you try using it.” Ah, but can I simply study it from afar? Can I intellectualize it, analyze it, look it up in books, and create footnotes for my essay? No, that’s not the point. The point is that one needs to get off one’s butt, and tap into this energy, this God, and then go out and God. Let it flow, let it vibrate; let it out, in one form or another. Just do it. Just God.

-Neal Lemery, January, 2006