organizing in relationship to God

July 8, 2007

I went to Poland about 2 months ago. It was my first visit there since I left, about 6 years ago. It was great, terrible, intense, fantastic and awful. The most impactful moment of this trip was saying good by to my father. It took a moment, we hugged, said good by … and I crushed, collapsed and broke into little tiny simpering pieces. It took me over 5 weeks to feel like me again. It took about 2 months for me to see the full significance of what had happened in those short two minutes. It wasn’t me being broken-hearted because I was leaving my family again, probably for another few years. My family and I have, shall I say, a complicated sort of relationship. What happened in this moment was a crack in a structure I’ve created to deal with those complications. My father acted the way I did not expect, he didn’t follow the script, he ruined the routine, and all my protections went crushing down. Now here is where this is relevant to God Psychology – as I was dealing with my meltdown I started recognizing that my relationship to my father, the way it is right now, makes it impossible for me to be myself. I always, however unconsciously, run everything by my father, like a 5 year old who knows that she is good when her daddy likes her, and not good when her daddy doesn’t. I feel guilty when daddy is mad, I’m afraid when daddy is about to leave. And it reaches farther – I have my father’s values and moral code, my believes about what reality is and how one deals with it comes chiefly from my beliefs about my father and how one deals with him. As a child I organized myself in relationship to my parents, I’ve decided who I am in relationship to my parents, my ego and personality have been organized in relationship to my parents. What else could I do after all, they were the world. They told me what the world is, what is up, what is down. The whole of society seemed to agree with them. And so I took it for the truth and became a person fitted to deal with the kind of reality they presented me with. I was thinking about this the other day while walking my dog in the evening, and I thought – what if, instead of organizing in relationship to my parents and their version of reality, I organized in relationship to God? I would never be wrong then – cause in God’s eyes nothing is wrong. I would never be guilty – cause in God’s eyes there is no guilt. I would never be scared – cause in God there is no danger. No need to be defensive, no need to fight, no need to protect myself. No bad decisions to be made, no bad choices available. I believe I was the happiest human on the face of the Earth when I realized the implications and possibilities that opened before me by deciding to organize myself in relationship to God. So who was I, in relationship to God, I asked myself. And realized that there was no need for any defined “me” there, I didn’t have to set up structures, separate myself from anything in any way. In relationship to God I was absolutely free to be completely and only who I really am, to be God.

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