What the Spirit Knows

What the mind thinks,
The spirit knows.
The questions may continue
But the door is never closed.
Stephen Revel


If God is God, he will understand. And if he doesn't, he isn't God and we needn't worry.
The Kingdom of Heaven (2005, directed by Ridley Scott)

I was raised to believe in God. But somewhere, lost in the midst of a dark wood, I stopped believing. It's taken me several decades to find my way out. And the irony of it all is that my skepticism resulted from an overdose of certitude.

As a child, I always wondered about things: the Vietnam War and how our involvement jibed (or not) with the official 1960s church position on "the right to life"; the question of what happened to babies who died before they could be "saved"; the puzzling fact that many of the people I personally knew and loved were not, according to my parents' church, among the elect...and that some truly mean-spirited people apparently were.

I left childhood behind almost half a century ago. And I've long realized that in many matters, the adults were wrong.

During my teens and early 20s, much of what I'd been taught simply felt wrong but the tide of tradition was so strong, I had a hard time rowing against it. These days I have no problem with this. What has made the difference? Personal experience.

All spiritual (or for some, religious) belief is experiential. If you believe what your parents taught you, it's because your experience has confirmed it. If, like me, you don't, it's because your experience refutes it. During my early teens, I tried really hard to believe in a god who required that we believe certain things about him (it was always a Him). But try as I might, I couldn't convince myself that a power worth all this adoration would be so petty that he'd send someone to eternal doom just for having an "incorrect" image of himself.

I still don't believe that Spirit limits herself or himself to our small local ideas about her/him. That's why, even though I officially belong to a church plus several eclectic women's spirituality circles, I'm wary of certainty. We all have our ideas of what Spirit wants from us, but those ideas are almost always reflections of what we want.

The only certainty is that we are all loved. All of us. And that's mind-boggling enough to keep us, with all our "shoulds", occupied for awhile.