Feeling sad. Ask God for help. My brother Jack talked about asking god about everything. He talked about keeping doing it until it starts to work. AA’s Big Book talked about “God” as an inner resource, a completely different way of seeing god for me. I really appreciated how Jack took responsibility for every statement. Often by adding “for me.”
Here comes fear, a squeezed heart, a coldness. God please help me with this, give me strength to bear it, if that is your will. Please let me know if this working with fear is what you want me to do. I’m having trouble with language here, god. Please take away my fear and let me know what you want me to do instead. I looked through the book and couldn’t find the exact prayer. I think it’s the word “god” that’s triggering the fear. I ask “god” for help and within me is the fear that He will make me wrong for asking. That’s not God at all, it’s mom & dad. It’s also true that I’m imagining “God” as “up there.” Well of course that’s a parent. If I think of “God” as inside me, I have a different experience. Then “God” becomes a kind of upwelling, deep inside me, of the creative power of the Universe — or maybe the Power that creates the Universe. And it created me — “You are just what God had in mind when God made you” — “God don’t make no junk.” O gosh what a different experience and understanding of who I am.
I have always been totally willing to hand my life over to god — “I have made such a mess of it, please help me to do your will” — and have been disappointed because no clear instructions have ever come. Except for when I hear the Voice say “You’re doing fine.” Is it possible that just as I am I am doing god’s will? I think of my new knowing of all the lives I have impacted positively without intending to. I expect “god” to tell me to “do good for others,” to go to the slums or the prisons … I think that’s Mom again. If I move the Voice inside me, right inside my heart, it says “Your healing work on yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself and the planet.”
The commandment “to love the Lord your God with all your might…” is one I’ve always had trouble with. No matter how much I work on this, the word “God” especially combined with the word “Lord,” holds inside itself the image of that capricious, malicious, and willful parent that I am trying to escape, or transform, or … But when I think of the Creative Power of the Universe, that is always creating the stars and planets, the redwood trees and mice, and me — that amazingly beautiful, extraordinarily complex, completely interconnected, beyond human understanding, living, loving, growing, creating beauty Being — I do love that Being with all my heart, soul, and might. That upwelling of creativity and love, from deep inside me, not me, but what is creating me at this very moment — I sit here, and feel filled with it, filled with warmth and energy and power, and feel enormously grateful and deeply honored, and totally humble —
Back comes the cold when I think about things I need to do — especially the stuff around changing my plane ticket — well I thought about it, imagined talking to someone, and the cold faded. Please, inner resource, remove my fear and help me do the things you want me to do.
I realize that I am so grateful to God for guiding me to Wellesley — where I found Bible study, Astronomy and Miss Hill, and Claflin. From Miss Hill and Astronomy I got the picture of the amazing universe we live in, and an explanation of the scientific method that has been very helpful to me as I struggle with my dysfunctional behavior. I want to qualify my statement that the Power created the Universe, because what I really think (it’s harder to believe because that would mean that “god” is me) is that the Power became the Universe, not creating it from outside.