Who is Your God?

Today, I want to quote extensively from Holy Hunger: One Woman's Journey from Food Addiction to Spiritual Fulfillment by Margaret Bullit-Jonas.  I have been writing about finding our God on the journey, knowing that He is with us, and for us, and in that discovery discovering Who He Is.  We know God only by revelation, as all the Old Testament and New Testament people and all the saints (cannonized or not) have discovered.  God wants to reveal Himself to us, to each one of us, if we will only allow Him to do so.  He is not limited to any one time or place or circumstance, but is able to 'break through' all of our circumstances to say "I am here; I am with you."  But it often takes something rather dramatic for us to receive that revelation, that moment of discovery.  As long as God remains abstract, and not personal, to us, our "theology"-- that is, our idea of Who He Is will not be true, and therefore, will keep us from relating to Him on a personal level.

"Which brings me to the question of faith.  Coming into Overeaters Anonymous, I wondered who this God was whom I could neither see nor touch but whom I yearned to know.  This God that members of the 12-step program referred to --vaguely, it seemed to me -- as a Higher Power.  In what sort of deity was I supposed to believe?  In what sort of deity would I want or be able to believe?

"These were hardly frivolous questions.  There's an old joke that makes the rounds in 12-step programs, a saying about the difference between religion and spirituality:  "Religion is for people who are afraid of going to to hell.  Spirituality is for people who've been there."  I was definitely in the latter camp.  The externals of religion --adherence to custom, tradition, rituals, and laws -- could have little meaning for me unless they spring from a deep seriousness of purpose, unless they were connected to an awareness that the captive who needed to be set free, the patient who needed healing, the sinner who needed saving, was not someplace else or someone else.  She was here and she was me.  I'd been to hell already, I was trapped in hell right now, and I wanted out.  I wanted help. I wanted God.

"I don't think anyone enters a 12-step program without being desperate.  For most of us, it's the method of last resort, the place we turn to only after we've tried and failed at every other conceivable way of changing our lives.  The spirituality of the 12-step program is a spirituality for people who've known anguish, for people who've daily confronted the choice between life and death and discovered, time and again, how very difficult it is to make the choice for life.  It begins with the faltering admission that our lives are out of control.  We've tasted hell, and left to our own devices, we are more likely than not to stay there. 

The author goes on to write about her discovery that the program did not require her to adopt any particular religious doctrine or worldview.  All it asked was for her to remain open and keep coming to the meetings.  One of the women there offered her particular view of her Higher Power:

"People generally think of God as some kind of enormous, impersonal force. You know, the omnipotent giant there in the cosmos who makes the planets turn.  I can't relate to a God like that.  So I made up one of my own.  Her name is Donna.  She's divorced.  She's got two kids.  She's got her own home.  When I go shopping for groceries, it's Donna that I talk to as I walk down the aisles.  And let me tell you, it's Donna who's keeping me abstinent."

Bullit-Jonas continues her observations that she was free to imagine God in more intimate, even playful, ways than she'd ever dared.  But here's the point (and the reason I'm quoting her so extensively):  Whoever God is to us, He wants to help us stop our compulsive eating.  In God, we had an ally, a Power that could save us. Whether we met our Creator on a pew or a prayer bench, on a zafu or a prayer rug, in a church, temple, zendo, or synagogue, in nature, in 12-step meetings, or anywhere else, the Power that was higher than we were---greater, deeper, larger than ourselves--offered us the strength to stop eating compulsively.  OA challenged us to begin to put our trust in that Power; to depend on that Power's capacity to care for us, to protect us, and to set us free in all the daily choices of our lives, but especially when we were beset by the deadly urge to overeat.

Jesus said, "the kingdom of heaven is among you (or within you)."  He brought God to us in the flesh, with "skin on," so to speak, so that hiding His divinity, He could look us in the eye, take our hand, put an arm around our shoulder, and weep with us.  "I am here; I am here. I am not "up there;" I am with you!"

Tomorrow, I'll give more of the story -- about how the author learned to relate to this God Who is For Her and With her.  And that is my point about our theology:  if our God is not "with us," and "for us," and if He is not powerful enough to save us from ourselves, then our faith is in vain.  Or more properly, we have no faith at all, except in our own resources.  And when those resources fail us (as they always do), we begin to strike out at others who we think should save us, should help us.  And when those resources fail us (as they always do), we find ourselves in hell.

Going back to my dear neighbor whose theology holds God as a judge, watching to see if we're good enough to go to heaven, I want to say, "You are right when you say no one is good enough to go to heaven.  But never mind, I'm bringing heaven to you!"