Higher Power: An Intimate Cosmology

Enjoy this 13-minute read or have me read it to you via the recording at the top of my webpage!

 

One day, as a child in Lutheran Sunday School, we were each given black and white drawing of children in a tree. One was just starting to climb. One was at the top and still looking up. One was lying on the ground with stars around his head, and others were gathered around to make sure he was alright.

We were asked to color in the picture and think about which child was most like us. I could see parts of me in each of them, and even at that young age, I could feel the tug toward who I thought I should be: the ambitious one, the caring one. But I was most drawn to one little girl, with pigtails like mine, sitting contentedly on a branch about halfway up, swinging her legs and watching everyone.

Much of the suffering in my life has been about what to do with the messages I received that I should be more like those other children: doing more, dreaming bigger or better, tweaking how I relate. I was often punished for being me, and the more I mimicked others, the more I forgot myself. The place that used to hold that little girl, contented and confident in herself, became a deep, dark emptiness I tried alternately to fill and escape in whatever way I could. The seeds within her of the woman I could have become yielded only a few straggly, yet determined shoots.

This, for me, is why recovery is a spiritual journey. Being able to encounter the darkness of my emptiness takes a deep faith that what I lost lies inside of it, and that something is there to help me withstand what overwhelmed me as a child. I have every reason not to trust. I have felt committed to and betrayed by three spiritual communities; by their leaders and teachings, and more profoundly by the way they caused me to doubt my own intuition and truth rooted in my life-long reverence for the animate world. I have gone through periods of being an atheist because the teachings I was given just didn’t make logical sense, but I have also felt a profoundly metaphysical presence permeating my world travels, studies of human origins, wanderings in nature, ecstatic music and poetry, and mother’s untimely death.

I have found that what is sacred and true endures and presses always towards the surface of consciousness – no matter the betrayal, grief, doubt, or sense of separation. Despite the accompanying trauma, each teaching and practice I let into my heart provided me its own unique perspective and direct experience: the discipline of eastern meditation, the study of Kabbalah, lucid dreaming, shamanic journeying, soulcraft in the wilderness. Each one has interwoven over time into a conviction that there is something out there beyond me that permeates my life in various and unexpected ways and that is constantly regenerating itself in a realm that is ultimately beyond my knowing.

In order to maintain faith in something I cannot understand, I have to have a story about it. And in order for that story to hold up against the stark and painful realities of my life, I have to really feel in a deep place that it’s true. So many stories about God just don’t line up for me, and I know how invested organized religion has been throughout human history (and my personal experience) in sedation and control. And yet what makes them so compelling – and me so vulnerable to what they offer – is that they all toch on a core truth related to my insatiable hunger: that I ultimately belong to something beyond this world that I am straining to connect with.

I choose to believe – based on personal experience, study, and what stirs a sense of resonance and basic goodness in my core – that the universe is ultimately intelligent and benevolent. It is constantly unfolding via cosmic laws of physics, and experimenting infinitely with energy and consciousness. It is beyond morality, it is vast in its scope, and it is awe-some in its creative, destructive capacity. This brings me a welcome sense of perspective when my life is overwhelming, when I feel lost, when I am consumed by anger and despair over our world. Each of us is just one small part of this vast movement, so why get worked up? But if this is all God is, it doesn’t bring me the comfort and clarity I need, because my life doesn’t really matter. I don’t matter.

The beauty of fractals is that patterns repeat themselves on infinitely smaller scales. Just as this vast presence permeates the universe, a smaller, more concentrated presence permeates me. This presence is also intelligent and benevolent, and as deeply attentive to and concerned with my well-being as its cosmic counterpart is with the entire Universe. It knows me more fully and intimately than anyone else, even myself. And its love and patience are inexhaustible. It never forces its will, but is always available when invited. It never punishes, but always comforts in times of pain.

The reason I don’t always get what I pray is because this presence, while able to see more broadly than I can and act for my benefit in realms beyond my awareness, is also navigating the laws of the Universe and the self-will of others around me. Things may take time to align. Things I want may counter what is best for others… at least for now. Trusting this presence doesn’t mean my life will be easier, but it does keep me from making things worse for myself by how I respond. I won’t always feel rewarded or confident or content, but I will feel more… of everything. And with practice, this feeds my capacity for forgiveness and compassion (for myself and others) and leaves less room for resentment, despair, and paralysis.

This is how the term “higher power” is becoming beloved to me. “Higher” simply means the presence operates at a level closer to the universal than I do. It’s higher than me, but not the highest. And “power” means it can influence things I cannot control with resources far more infinite than my own. It can bring opportunities out of the blue, serenity in moments that used to terrify and overwhelm me, creative solutions that my anxious mind would never have thought of, and a sense of belonging to myself that enables me to let go of my obsession with needing to orchestrate my life. Aligning with it brings me the personal power of clarity, honesty, and courage regardless of circumstance. In this way, the outer threats diminish not because I have over-powered them, but because they have less power over me.

In between this personal, intimate Higher Power and the Universe are legions of beings: angels, demons, ghosts, deities, totems, archetypes. I feel the benevolence in and around me, but I refuse to believe those who say only goodness and light are real, because I have been touched by evil and it has terrified, sobered, and humbled me to my core. I accept that demons exist, alongside generosity and benevolence, as part of the universal law of duality. For anything to exist, there must be movement, a vibration, a wave with peaks and troughs, light and dark, sound and silence, good and evil. On our third dimension of existence they are so intertwined as to create a full spectrum in all things. We walk our days in grief and gratitude, with deep respect for our limitations and awe in the beauty we are gifted.

I also refuse to believe, as some spiritual teachers encourage, that everything happens for a reason. The loving Higher Power I need would never allow the abuses I’ve personally endured or that proliferate in our world through child abuse, human trafficking, species extinction. The Higher Power I know would intervene in an instant if it could. The Universe is simply more vast and more powerful. It tends cosmic movements, which contain chaos and cruelty. I can no more hope to avoid random, impersonal misfortune than I can hope to defeat the demons of the world. I simply pray for discernment, exercise caution, and trust that no matter what comes – I am not alone.

Anyone who tells me life isn’t a battlefield is just trying to sell me something, woo me as a convert, or is simply delusional. But that doesn’t mean there is no God. Mine is like a comrade who wades with me through the wreckage with ready comfort, wisdom and often levity. I don’t need to know what God is. I just need to know it is here, reach out through feeling, word, gesture, or intention, and remain open to how it reveals itself to me through people, nature, a dream, a physical sensation, a shift of mood, an inspired idea. But being ultimately formless, any image, sensation, insight, or theory I receive always recedes back beyond my awareness before my mind can bottle it into something smaller than it is.

This is the kernel of wisdom in my addiction, in the endless longing and seeking. Just as my Higher Power is part of the Universe, I am a part of it. While it knows and loves me completely, I can only ever glimpse its reflection, never wrap my arms around it fully. That is the deepest sadness in my human heart, a sweet sorrow the mystics have sung for ages. It is also the reason I have come to love the addict in me for being the one who cannot forget, who will never stop searching, who will burn this life down a thousand times through divine longing.

But that desperate search is no longer all I am, no longer the only one calling the shots. I know that spiritual practice often leads to peak experiences like the ones that built my faith and inspired my discipline. But spiritual practice can become just like an addiction if we expect to maintain the highs – making us delusional, negligent, and even abusive. Real relationships grow and deepen through the steadfast sharing of daily life, and the willingness to let go of the drama of abandonment and reconciliation. As I practice watching, listening, and feelings for how this presence will appear, and being willing to trust what it reveals to me, I nurture the most important relationship in my life; the only one I will take with me, even when I die.

After chasing so many false comforts, I am blessed to know, even in my times of longing, what I am really longing for. This enables me to let go of who I think I am, what I think my life is for, and what it means to be “spiritual” and focus instead on living a good, responsible life, being a solid friend, and enjoying what’s here right now. What I am searching for is also seeking me: regenerating and ready to appear if I am attuned. I have come full circle, becoming again the little girl in pig-tails, swinging her legs contentedly up in the tree, and watching life unfold around her.

Nancy

 

Prayers:

“HP – I know you are doing all you can for me. Help me find my way back to you when I forget. Help me feel your love right now. Show me the next right thing to do. I know you will reveal yourself to me in the form I most need.”

“HP – I’m frightened. I don’t know how to do this. Help me discern your voice. Help me know and trust your presence.”

“HP – I give you all my shame, all my best ideas, everything I do to feel secure, to be a good person, and everything I think I know about you and about how to live my life. Show me how to receive your guidance, how to enjoy today in the midst of everything, how to love and care for myself, how to embrace my growing capacity for wholeness and leave the rest to you.”