What is God to Me?

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A friend recently told me that as long as I believed in Christ, I was welcome in Mormonism. When I said I wasn’t sure I believed in Christ the way that she meant (a literal Christ who was the son of God whose atonement and death mean that we will be freed from sin and resurrected), she said that as long as I believed in God, then, I was fine. I also wasn’t sure I believed in the God she believes in, who can and will alter the plan of the universe because of our prayers, who performs miracles for the righteous, who demands our worship and requires us to perform certain tasks in order to get rewards. So what kind of a God do I believe in?

Quite simply, a god of love.

I don’t know that I believe that God is a man—or a woman. Though I do find it useful sometimes to picture God as a woman, who puts her hands on mine as we both turn clay into pottery and she whispers in my ear that the reason we’re making this vessel is because it needs to be filled with something very valuable, something spiritual, that only I can pour into it. Other times, I find God appearing in my prayer as two parents, male and female. Rarely, God appears to me as a gay man or a black woman or an indigenous person. Sometimes God speaks to me in the form of a tree, a river, a bridge, or a beautiful piece of art.

Growing up Mormon, I was taught that the Catholic idea of God as an unformed spirit was just wrong and even ridiculous. How could we be children of God if God wasn’t even human? But there are just so many problems with the Mormon conception of God for me now. Why is God always depicted as white? Why do we never talk about or pray to Heavenly Mother, if one exists? Do we still believe in a heaven filled with multiple polygamous mothers of spiritual children? And what about the idea that we will also have our own planets to one day rule? I love the way in which Mormonism taught me as a child to look for the divine within myself. As an adult, I’m less comfortable with the Mormon insistence that God is male and heterosexual, and that the celestial kingdom will be a place much like the temple here on earth. Call me a heretic, but the temple, with its reiterated rituals and focus on genealogical records, is not my idea of a great way to spend eternity.

And I rejected the idea of God for a number of years, only coming back when I accepted the idea that I could choose the kind of God I worshipped, and I could live with the possibility that I had invented this God purely to make myself happier and a better person in the future. God is goodness. God is all-encompassing love. God is growth and change. God is the future. God is within me.

Comments

  1. Michael AustinAugust 10, 2018 at 6:01 PM

    As far as I am concerned, you are welcome as long as you believe in bacon.

    ReplyDelete

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