Loving God

When I see the natural world, it’s extreme beauty that fills my heart with joy, the immaculate design of all the creatures great and small, I am filled with awe and wonder. Logic says that just like all things manmade require a designer, a creator of those things to bring them into existence, so must the natural world and the universe it belongs to, be a manifestation of a Creator. This is simply an indisputable fact, for we all know that nothing, eg. a house or a computer, can just magically appear and requires for someone to have had the idea, intention and desire to create it and bring it into existence.

So there is no doubt in the logical mind that a Creator of all the things we did not create must exist. I feel completely fascinated by the beauty, perfection and intelligence, as well as the interconnectedness in the relationships between all life forms and the elements of the Earth. In fact, this fascination and wonder in me are the foundation upon which I began to desire to have a relationship with God. I feel God’s Love in God’s creation as it clearly feels to be designed for our pleasure, to bring us joy. The very fact that the beauty of flora and fauna is so pleasing to the eye and the sounds of nature make our own hearts sing, testifies to the purpose of creation being not only to support our very lives, but to give us intense pleasure if we care to notice and feel the effects it has on us.

Yet the Bible and the religions based upon it, teach that God is wrathful and punishing and sacrificed His only good and obedient child, Jesus, supposedly to save the rest of His unlawful and disobedient children from sin. I have been frightened of this scary character that God is portrayed to be, I have felt that I could never please this being no matter how much I tried. If He has so brutally sacrificed his only good son, what will he do with me, a vile sinner?

I could never reconcile within me the wrathful God of religion, for me personally that of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Love of God I see in nature. Sadly, for majority of my adult life I decided to reject God altogether, “throwing the baby out with the bath water” so to speak, turning to science as my new religion, which also failed to satisfy my inquisitive and curious soul.

Thankfully, my curious and inquisitive nature is opening my heart to the reality of God and God’s Goodness, in creating such a marvellously  mathematically and scientifically wonderful world for us to enjoy. Based on my experience, I really believe that if we stop and contemplate with a childlike wonder, not only the beauty but the scientific reality of the natural world, the phenomena within it, the exquisite design, patterns, colours, functions, interdependent relationships, we will recognise that God is revealing Herself to us in Her creation as a Loving Parent. God tells us a lot about His Character and Nature in the presentation of His universe and the Earth experience that we all get to enjoy.

However, I must say that it is not very easy to recognise God’s Goodness in providing us with life on Earth to experience and learn about ourselves and about God, while we are filled with fear of a punishing God. I had no idea how much damage my Catholic upbringing has caused to my potential of learning about and having a relationship with the actual God.

Recently I have been praying each day for the humility to work through the feelings associated with the cruel lies I have been emotionally indoctrinated with since early childhood, which have been deeply embedded within my soul. I’m finding that the only way to begin to recognise and learn about God is to intentionally and passionately desire to emotionally remove the lies which prevent us from learning about God from God. I am learning that there is no other way, but to allow ourselves to grieve the painful feelings that we have about God and the painful false beliefs, the lies which we have been indoctrinated with, as to what God feels about us.

To be honest, if you have had no religious upbringing, you are an atheist or agnostic, to some extent you have also been indoctrinated with the same lies about God, as those of us who have been raised in a religion. The religious domination of humanity for millennia, has pervaded and infiltrated every single person, because at some point in the history of your lineage, there would have been a religious person, someone who believed in a wrathful God. Your ancestors have passed on the lies, fears and false beliefs about God to their progeny and these lies are now a part of our DNA,  emotionally imprinted within our hearts and souls. The evidence for this is in the way we treat each other, the violence, the wars, the hunger and the complete destruction of the environment.

If we knew in our hearts that God is good, that God loves us, that God wants us to have the best life possible, filled with joy, love and happiness, we would be living in paradise, the entire Earth would be a peaceful, perfect Garden of Eden. The very reason why life on Earth is hellish (whether we choose to acknowledge this fact or ignore it), why we have turned paradise into a living hell for a large portion of humanity, is because in one way or another, we believe in a wrathful, punishing God. Alternatively we believe there is no God but we fear the evil of others and believe that we must fend for ourselves, defend ourselves and get what we can out of this life, because there is no love, everyone is out to get us and we must fight to survive. The latter is taught through the doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the religion of science. This is the sad reality of our earthly existence and the only way to change that, is to let ourselves grieve those lies, those false teachings that drive our lives, the lives of others and the environment to destruction.

God is a Loving, Caring, Perfect Parent (our Father and our Mother), who desires our happiness, but to feel and experience this as reality, there is a lot of emotional work that has to happen on our part. A lot of sincerity and truth seeking is required of us to work through the painful lies and this requires humility, a passionate desire to experience all of our feelings, our emotional beliefs. As we allow ourselves to grieve the lies, they will leave us and to replace them, we must desire for God’s Truth to enter our hearts. God is patiently waiting and wholeheartedly desiring to give to us the Greatest Gift of Her Love. If we seek, we shall find, if we desire, we will receive. My prayer for all of us is that every single human soul receives this Great Gift that is God’s Love to the fullest capacity possible. The wonderful effect of receiving God’s Love, is that when it fills our hearts, it compels us to love others and to repair the Earth back into the paradise it was designed to be for the children of a Loving God.