On God and Prayer

For a variety of reasons, including because my barefoot blogger friend Sandra has posted on God, I've been thinking about what "God" is to me.

I admit I use the word often but then sometimes feels disingenuous because my version of "God" isn't the one most people think of when they hear the word "God."

My God isn't a strictly Christian or doctrinal God. My God is more like The Great Spirit, Wakan, the Transcendental notion of the creator, nature and humanity as one, the Oversoul, the Great Chain of Being, Brahman and Allah all wrapped into a mass of Spiritus Mundi which I call God.

When I pray, I pray from that place between the eyes and above the bridge of the nose, the spot where a Hindu woman might wear a Tilaka.

I have only recently started to pay attention to the place where my prayer comes from. I suppose I thought about it because I constantly have people around me talking about prayer. I know I "pray" but I also know that my version of prayer isn't usually the same as theirs.

When I was a child, I would look up when I prayed because to a child raised in Christianity (Catholicism, to be exact), the notion of heaven is part of heritage, and as everyone knows, "Heaven" is "up" and "Hell" is "down." Though most Christians will acknowledge that isn't cosmically accurate, the tradition stands. Jesus, after all, was said to ascend into Heaven. He didn't beat a horizontal pathway into the trees.

My mind's eye, however, does seem to wander amongst the trees when I pray. The words move from my mind's eye to the forest to the fields, to the streets (if that is where I am) and back into myself, a succession of pleases and thank yous and "Let me call you God for lack of a better word." I am speaking to someone personal, yet I know that the omniscience of that spirituality I believe in is more than I can hold in one thought or a million words. And so I just call it "God" and talk to "God" the same way I did when I was a child--like I am talking to myself almost, but another part of myself that is both external and internal.

I've come to accept that my prayers are simple as are my beliefs about what constitutes a "message from God." Deer that stop long enough for me to whisper to them are messages and parts of God. Trees decorating me with fall leaves are God. Tears of joy are God, my daughters' eyelashes are God, my dogs' kisses are God, my husband's cowlick is God. The sound of wind is God, the good works people do is God, learning and compassion are God. When I pray, it is to all of these things I wrap up into that one convenient word that means love, creation, goodness, acceptance, meaning--God.

And I believe we come back to these things again and again, that death is not death, that our bodies and spirits are recycled here on Earth and when Earth is no more, we return to the cosmic bodies we might have once called the heavens. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, matter is neither created nor destroyed, so there must be something after we die, and I have my own beliefs about what those might be. I intend to come back as a purple lilac and then as a Canadian Goose.

Whenever I panic about my aging dog and companion Shiba dying, I comfort myself in knowing she will return to me in a different form, and that what she has left as a mark is permanent on this Earth. No one and nothing entirely disappear, ever. Bodies and spirits and minds and the things they leave behind live on, sometimes in different places, but still here. And I think we, as spiritual beings, want it that way. We send ourselves here to learn and only when we reach a higher spiritual level will we be able to move on to a higher life and spiritual form. Where we go and when is a mystery to us that we don't want ourselves to see while we are alive on this Earth. Else, how would we grow?

Only goodness will get us there, to that evolved spiritual place we should be--the goodness we find in the great teachers and philosophers who all hold God within them just as we do. It's a matter of getting more in touch with that God we all have and letting it out, just as Jesus and Buddha did, as Gandhi did, as Mohammad did, as Martin Luther King Jr. did. Some people are better at it than others, some are more spiritually evolved, and these are those who should be our spiritual role models. And the natural world--it should be our role model and we should respect it as part of ourselves.

And so, I see God everywhere, and I see the opposite of God everywhere. And I can't say why we sometimes can't evolve the way we should or the way we want to or why some of us have had so many lives we have lost count (I'm one of those people, and I know for sure I will be back again).

I can only say we have more to learn and more to do, and that it doesn't end at death. I can ask the great teachers and read what they said, and maybe someday, I will evolve like they did, but for now, I am just who I am--this little part of God, this one person who talks to squirrels, maunders and hopes to pay the mortgage on time.