My Concept of God
God is and I cease to speak.I would stop right there, but my ego mind can’t just shut up and let God BE.
The God of my understanding is a work-in-progress. As a child I viewed God as a person, not unlike Santa Claus, white beard and all. This God gave you presents and loved you if you were good, but if you were bad he was not happy and might punish you. I later learned this was called “conditional love,” and it was much like the love of my parents.
I stayed with this idea about God most of my adult life, even though it never rang true for me.Then I read Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsh, and found a God who seemed much more loving. This was a God who got bored with being One and created us to experience the universe. We were co-creators with this God. However, I could not understand why God created a world with death, natural disasters, disease and suffering. And like an answer to a prayer, A Course in Miracles came into my life.
The Course says God did not create this world of duality. We did it to ourselves when our One mind, peacefully at home with God, had the crazy, impossible dream that it could be separate from God, and forgot to laugh. So this universe of time and space, a dreamlike world of duality, seemed to arise from this mad idea.
So God is, outside of time and space, in perfect Oneness for us to all come home to by forgiving this world of duality. And we can go home by looking without judgment at the ego’s thought system — the mad idea of separation — and smiling.The hard part is we have to forgive everyone and everything, without exception (including ourselves). And we don’t get to go home to God alone, as our individual separate personal selves. We go home together, as One, back home to the Oneness we dreamt that we left.I love this God of formless, perfect Oneness, totally loving without exception. This God doesn’t have a personality, with wants, desires, wishes and expectations.
This is a God that just is.
PS: This is my current concept of God. I would never expect it to be yours. And I am free to change my mind at any time about my God. My hope is that each of you can imagine a God that is most helpful to you. I am sure that a loving God would not mind being seen in any loving form you could dream up.
By Bob Michell
