Defining my Higher Power

I have been having this dialogue about faith. The dialogue takes place in my mind, but is shared by many in my waking life. I have heard snippets in church, and work, in facebook, and from friends. Mostly what they say is the same. To quote al-anon and the twelve steps faith is “improving my conscious contact with God, as I understand him.” I find this answer fairly satisfying because it resonates with my personal spiritual growth. That is, I find that as I grow spiritually my awareness of the presence of God, however defined, grows. I worry thought that my definition of God is somehow tied to the idea of spiritual growth and that perhaps I am being redundant. It is hard for me to think of spiritual growth without God. I find myself asking the question can there be spiritual growth in the absence of God? The closest answer I can come to of an example of spiritual growth without God is in acts of charity or compassion. I say this because I think that a true act of charity or compassion is strongest when it is done without ulterior motive and that it is only a true act of charity when it is done without expectation of reward.

Interestingly the more I think about acts of compassion the more I realize that in practicing compassion I look to God for strength and direction. Perhaps this is why I began asking myself a deeper, more personal question that is dominating this inward dialogue of faith. It is hard to define exactly what this deeper question is exactly, or even how I struggle with it. I think it is safe to say that I am going through a transformation of belief and that I am unsure about exactly what this transformation is or how it will end.

I am, for example, deeply conflicted about various representations of the cycles of the life of the spirit. I grew up being taught that we are born, we live and we die. When we die, if we were good we went to Heaven and if we were bad we went to Hell. As I got older I began to dismiss this idea of an afterlife of duality and decided that heaven was one place, regardless of our actions and that it was our time on Earth, and what we did with it that defined our suffering. Hell was the torment that we put ourselves through on Earth. From there my beliefs took on many twists and turns. Gradually I began to accept the possibility that there was not one life but many. That we didn’t simply live and die, but that this was part of a greater cycle of birth and death. I began reading Eastern philosophies and eastern religions that shared these beliefs, and eventually I began to think that even heaven was part of this cycle of our spiritual lives, that is that we are born, we live and die, we go to heaven for a while, and then it starts all over again. Heaven is just part of the greater cycle of things.

This of course left the question of where God was in all of this and, more personally, what was my roll to be in this ever changing cycle of life. Many religions offer variations on this theme of cycles, and almost all agree that God both permeates and is outside of the circle of death and rebirth. My roll, as you might find in Buddhism or Christian Gnosticism, it to reunite myself with the divine God-head that is outside of this merry-go-round we call life. It is here that I have lived, in my spiritual growth, or perhaps more rightly defined as my spiritual belief. For what I am talking about is not really a way of living rightly with God, as much as it is a search for some definition of God that I can be comfortable with so that I can begin to live rightly with that definition.

Here, finally we come to the crux of the problem. The problem of the question that I asked in paragraph one. “Can there be spiritual growth without God?” The problem with this question being not so much that there is a right or wrong answer, yes there can or no there can’t, as the problem is with the question itself. The problem is not whether or not I can grow spiritually, but whether I can without a definition of God. Can I grow spiritually with my present definition of God? The answer for that question being yes, as long as I don’t define God too rigidly, because if my spiritual growth does not sync with my definition of God, I have, as you can see, conveniently altered my definition to better understand the nature of my growth. This has been useful because belief give me a touchstone upon which I can ground myself. The more I think this way the more I begin to distrust my definitions and begin to wonder if I shouldn’t just throw them all out, or if this isn’t the proverbial throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Still I can’t help but ask myself the question, another question. What if there were no definitions? What if there were just act of compassion and charity in and for themselves? Could I remain grounded in my faith, or would faith dissolve into ego and would I become selfish and self-centered without the presence of some definition of God showing me the way? Sadly I don’t think that I trust myself enough to try and go it alone without my dictionary close at hand. Too often have I been that selfish, self-centered person that I speak of. Still it gives me comfort, in moments of spiritual crisis when my definitions have become rigid and abut my sense of spiritual growth, that it is not God, but myself that I am struggling with, and that my higher power is waiting, patiently for me to come around.