Deconstructing God: Guest Madzub Sister Melanie

There comes a time in our spiritual adolescence when it will dawn on us that everything we think we know about God is just someone else's ideas, which was someone else's dogma, which was someone else's doctrine, which was someone else's agenda, which maybe, at one distant time, may have been someone's brief and incomplete meeting with a face of God. The trail of influence seems to go something like that.

Suffice to say, our most complex and nuanced notions of God - spiritual or religious -- are so ridiculously removed from a direct experience of God, that the rational skepticism of atheism begins to look reasonable. The God of our churches and books is a convoluted personality: wrathful but unconditionally loving, here but not there, eternal and infinite yet fully comprehensible to the finite mind of a preacher, a God above all gods who curiously possesses more than just a few traits of human ego-psychology.

The churches and holy books are giving God a bad name and don't even know it. Is it any wonder that atheists, agnostics and other non-believers have turned their back on God? Disavowed him? Thrown him out, laughing or sneering?

I too threw God out, but not for good. I knew that these sorry human portraits of God were not evidence of his inexistence. They are just the artifacts of religionists who are too lazy to go looking for God themselves and therefore remain content to worship the dead, fossilized remains of a God notion that was shaped and promulgated far more for political and economic ends than a sincere longing to know God as God, through direct experience.

I threw God out of my mind and then found God in my heart. What a glorious discovery, that the silent, still expanse of my heart is the meeting place for God and I. When I leave the concrete pavement of my thinking mind and roam the infinite space of my heart, I can touch God and know God and befriend God. On God's terms, not mine or anyone else's. Every cherished, foolish, borrowed idea of God is dissolved there and instead God is made real in my experience.

So, I dare you. Throw God out. Let go the ideas. Roam your heart. You will find endless wonders there. - Sister Melanie