so
a friend of mine named Eli
sent me an essay he wrote on God for a friend’s contest
on writing about God
i wrote him a lengthy response
and then wrote my own essay
and sent it in
i didn’t “win”
but i was the first runner up!
so i’m including it here
as well as the link to her site
http://www.surgeryofmodernwarfare.com/
She (amy) has published a few things
and really likes writers
so if any of you are writers
or like writers
you might enjoy checking it out.
til then
here’s my essay on
God.
(seems timely, eh?)
Runner-up #1:
Letter from
Dominic Sowinsky
Parts Uknown
God isn’t something I knew from an early age
I think I was scared into not knowing god
I feel we’re all born knowing everything about god
and part of the fun of living is forgetting about god
it is this distance and confusion that leads us to such creative
endeavors
— pretending to be god… trying to get back to god… trying to
create a god… [because] life is kinda dead without it.
I grew up Catholic
and the general style of christian religions is to make you believe
that you can’t touch god
you have to eat him in these special little wafers
he’s some dove always flying away
and you have to talk to some guy who’s special who talks to him
— like a game of telephone, your message never gets through
As a child
I went to church every Sunday
and was constantly told everything I thought that wasn’t rote
was “satan”
I believed that everything that happened in church was Theater
and it wasn’t until I was well into puberty
that it dawned on me with utter terror
that all the people gathered there Believed this shit to be true
It was then I weaned my mom off of making me go
and I spent a few years of being a functional Athiest
Which I found exccedingly desperate and lonely
I found god through Acid
Mushrooms
Yoga.
God was very Talkative
and pretty bitchy
kinda a control freak
trying to make me do things all the time
riddling me with guilt for ignoring him
or doing the wrong things all the time
I began to understand that this God
was just another god
just another pagan god, like Zeus or Athena
He was made to unify all the scatter and make up for everything
I became a solopsist
and believed everyone was me and I was god and god was not my ego but .
. .
long and tedious, I won’t go into it, if you know the term, you know
the story
Anyway
I lived for many years thinking everything was just me
which made relationships difficult
I hardly believed my partners existed
they got quite upset
Eventually I learned about the Love thing
Yoga brought me there
When I realized that EVERYTHING was God
and GOD wasn’t a pesonality
it was just everything
I neutered it and often called it “the universe”
or “great spirit”
or “god”
whatever, to get the point across
One of my early trips had taught me that if you ask WHY? enough
you’ll always get to a point where you cannot come up with a definitive
answer:
and that is always a great place to put God.
God is the answer to any unanswerable question
So god can be really complex
or really simple
depending on how many times you want to ask WHY
and when you’ll be satisfyed just resting on “God”
Faith.
This requires a belief
I believed that god was not really a separate sentient being
god was once one thing
and split itself into an infinite amount of creations
and until WE, as god, chose to come back together into one,
god would always be degraded and confused
But I recently realized that god is more infinite than that
but only as long as we, as god, are creating and loving
not if we’re being lazy and dying all the time
I’ve learned a lot of new things lately
Maybe this is always happening.
I started hanging out with a Hasidic jewish man
and realized that he believed in a God even more fucked up than the
Catholic one I was raised under
more judemental
and a fashion freak to boot
Wouldn’t let him into heaven if he cut his beards and payots? Had to
shave his head to show off his payots?
And all that black all the time?
Not a fun god.
I went to Brazil to escort my mother [who was] visiting a spiritual healer
who runs his operation out of a Jesuit chapel
but it’s voodoo mediumism
all these spirits possess him and [through him] do surgeries on people
pretty amazing and powerful
While I was sitting in meditation
all these beings were talking to me
It was nice
I was talking about god
kinda sad that I didn’t believe that god was a person I could sit and
hang out with
talk with
but some un-caring force that moved things around like the tide
and I felt like I couldn’t believe in an unconditionally loving god
because i didn’t understand how it was possible
so it couldn’t exist for me
One of the voices said
“it doesn’t matter if you believe in me or not: i love you anyway”
and it felt really nice
and it moved me back to thinking of my Hasidic jewish friend
the whole point of the “jesus” story
was “love”
that it was all about love
“whatever”
god said
“I’ll show you I’m just like you. I’ll be a person. I walk around and
do the things you do. then I’ll show you that you can do anything. and
I’ll show you that I don’t hate you and don’t hold you to stringent
rights and wrongs. You can do whatever you want. I don’t mind: I’ll
love you anyway. You can ALWAYS come back home again”
etc…
But more and more I think about what god wants from us
that is
really
what we want from us
and I know that god is infinite and can do whatever
and I also know there are a million other gods that aren’t so loving
because they were created by fears
and I know one of the greatest things about being human as opposed to
being a tree or a seal (they are barking out the window right now among
the roaring waves)
is that we get to be aware of it
aware of god
aware of being seperate from god
aware of creating, Like god
aware of creating
with god.
The power to be able to walk with god
as if it were two friends out for a walk on a country road in the sun
bodies becoming translucent
and merging
whittling a stick with a pen-knife
or looking out over the hills and re-shaping them with imagination
and thirst: desire for a stream
Or creating a cross roads
where you’ll meet a car-crash
dead chickens everywhere and a young girl crying over her dead father
while a drunk lolls in his beat-up bronco…
Just to see how you’d feel about that
and then what could you do?
and where will it go from there?
I fundamentally believe that God doesn’t really have a master plan
that God is Everything
and we’re allowed to do whatever we want
because it’s God experiencing itself
and there isn’t a right or wrong
just time to play
to love
or kill
or sleep
or waste the days away in any way we see fit
It’s all an act of worship
and self-awareness
depending on what we identify with more
our individual egos, our national egos, our racial egos, or our divine
egos
there isn’t any real Truth
but what we make of it
Which is why it’s fun to have friends who want to create a reality with
you
and shitty to be stuck in someone else’s story
until you remember
that you’re always free to walk out
and create your own
What is made of love
accepts all that dies
and everything gets boring eventually
so there’s always time for something else
Dinosaurs or super-models
And on&on&on
Though I realize this outs me from much of society
I feel best with this belief of god right now
and it will change and grow more over time
… I think that’s happening now.
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