||| SUN DAYS ON ORCAS by EDEE KULPER |||
I love emotion. I love happy. I love love.
When you’re in a community of Christians, you sometimes hear that someone “heard” God speak to them. You often hear people say they “love” the Lord. And it’s common for people to talk of their “relationship” with God.
I’m here to disspell something. Not a wrong teaching, just a wrong feeling that could develop in someone’s mind after many years of hearing people say these things.
Over the past few decades of studying the bible and aligning myself with the things it says about how to live, I’ve never heard the audible voice of God. I’ve never “felt” love from God or for God, and I could never call what God and I have a “relationship.”
I’m very right-brained. I love when pragmatism is bowled over by exuberant emotion. I love communication and connection, so in the past I’ve figured that there’s something I’m still not “doing” to have the kind of closeness with God that other people talk about. I’ve consciously and unconsciously compared myself with them, and I’ve decided they must be closer to God than I am for some reason unbeknownst to me. Perhaps they are. I still can’t say I know. But what I do know is that perhaps our individual “thing” with God isn’t expressible in the same kinds of words we use for human relations.
I thought at some point things would turn and I’d “hear” guidance; I’d “feel” emotion; I’d “see” God and me as a partnership. Perhaps I’m dense, but God, who supposedly loves me incomprehensibly fiercely, is so quiet in daily life that he’s arguably indifferent; arguably imaginary. I don’t hear, feel, or see anything. It’s a pretty left-brained thing.
A few months ago, it dawned on me that what I experience about God may never be like what anyone else experiences. We may gather in churches that suit our ways, but even so, the way you or I experience him may never align with anyone else’s way.
There are 7.5 billion people in the world, each with a different fingerprint, a different face, and a different personality. I’m relieved that it finally dawned on me that each of us may have a completely different “relationship” with God.
Just as a teenager need not look to a magazine model to define her self-image, or a family need not keep up with the Joneses to define their happiness, or a woman need not get a facelift to define her beauty, so I need not look to someone else to define how I relate with God.
When people use everyday words like “love” and “relationship,” I tend to get all messed up in the head about what they are experiencing with God because I expect those words to have the same meaning with him as they do in earthly relations. To me, love is deeply emotional and covers a vastly broad area: Love is both the unbreakable bond and the fierce care you feel for your parents; love is both the emotional trust you have in your spouse and the physical passion you experience together; love is both the sweet tenderness and the ferocious protectiveness you feel for your children.
When it comes to God, I don’t “feel” any of those myriad earthly “love” feelings. What I experience in following God is strikingly feeling-less. It is unsettlingly pragmatic when I compare it with anything that falls under the usual umbrella of love. When I hear what sound to me like sappy Christian songs on the radio, I feel like a cynic. And I’m rarely ever a cynic about anything else! I mean, hey, I’ve taught bible classes to kids for years; why would I feel cynical about something I’m all for?
All along, I’ve thought I must be missing some important piece of the puzzle if I’m not able to call what I experience with God “love.” Have I been praying enough? Have I been asking God for help enough? Have I been reading the bible enough every day? Have I been missing the mark because my “doing” can’t be labeled as “every” or “enough.”
What I’ve read of the bible wouldn’t align with a reliance on “doing” or my performance. So is it then a lack of my asking? My seeking? My connecting? Maybe. But what I know from years of women’s studies is that we all drop out of connecting with God and then remember to reconnect. No one’s perfect.
I’ve grown accustomed to accepting that I don’t “feel” love, affection, or anything comfortingly cozy like that when I think about God. I believe in him, regardless of how it manifests in me or anyone else I observe. I’m not forcing anything, mimicking anything, or “trying for” anything. I’m simply being me, following him. Asking him to make me what he wants me to be.
If you look up scriptures about love in the bible, they’re usually tied to obedience based on trusting God, not emotion. That pretty much sums up my “relationship” with him. Some people hear his voice; I simply read his words in the bible and trust that he’ll speak to me through my gut instincts when I ask for his guidance. Some people say they love him. I would be disingenuous if I said that, but I’d be wholly genuine in saying that I love the idea of trusting him and obeying him, since what he tells us to do is love one another. Some people talk of their relationship with God. He’s no more evident in my daily “relationship” with him than an invisible thought. Except that I’ve been helped in times of deep sorrow and loneliness more times than I can count because I asked him to change me in ways I couldn’t change myself.
I have no earthly way of perceiving his relational connection with me other than the changes I’ve experienced inside of me that I attribute to him. Changes I couldn’t have made on my own or didn’t aim to make of my own accord.
On the other hand, I see God’s physical evidence everywhere – in seeds, trees, babies, etc. – those are some of the main reasons I believe in him.
Next time you walk in a church, you’ll see people sitting quietly. Or people raising their hands and singing emphatically. Or people blurting out praises and amens. Or choirs singing old hymns. Or bands blasting drums and guitars. You may feel like you belong or you may feel like an alien. Either way you feel, know that your own uniqueness belongs there even if you feel like a foreigner. Perhaps I’m not the only one who doesn’t fit in; maybe other people just don’t talk about it. But we’re not there for homogeneity.
God put each of us here on this earth to be so fully individual with the talents, skills, and interests we have. We were made to be unique, and then commune in our differences.
There’s an explicit passage about all of this:
12 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. 14 Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
15 Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. 19 If they were all one part, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” 22 On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, 24 while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. ::1 Corinthians 12:12-31
We’re all different – made to be that way. Complementary to each other. Never meant to be clones of one another. Yet all parts of one whole.
I guess my “different” also includes an emotional distance from God. I don’t get it, but there’s a lot I may never understand. Maybe that’s okay.
This is the title and basis of a book I’m writing, and also appears on my other blog, www.navigatingchristianity.com
Wow! That is really putting yourself out there. I actually spent the morning writing a mini dissertation in response. I always appreciate when someone gets me writing so thank you for the thinky-thoughts. And thank you for the attempt to normalize not going through the motions of what appears to be normal.
Thank you for your candor and your honesty. I agree that embracing our uniqueness is an important aspect of learning to live in the world with humility and grace. I would also like to propose that your love for your parents, your spouse, your children and the world itself, IS your love for the One. And that their love for you, IS the love of the One for that unique part of that Oneness that you are.
To me it has always seemed self evident that God/Spirit/Source/Oneness IS the world/universe/creation and that any sense of separation of the parts from the whole is merely an illusion. A metaphor that I find apt is that each being is a drop of water and that Oneness is the limitless ocean from which we all came and to which we all return.
While it is helpful to read wisdom literature and to listen to our elders (of all sorts) , I find that it is essential to trust our own hearts and our own experiences. Words, whether written or spoken, can only communicate so much. Every drop of rain travels a unique path back to the sea, some are eons long, and some are a brief fall from the clouds to the sea, but eventually we all return to our original Source. And just as gravity tugs gently but persistently at each drop of water, pulling it home, our longing for oneness, for wholeness, for limitless love, pulls us back to the One.
I see it like this: We are already One, the Separation is the illusion. The One is God. So we are all a part of God. “The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst.” “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” As you Let Go of the Dross. As you let go of the heaviness, the attachment, desire, you find the subtle levels of heaven that you already are. It is a choice. If you want to get to Heaven on Earth, you have to Totally Surrender. Like the Modern Buddha said: “Let that stuff go.”