Loving God

I spent the day caring for my mother who is recovering from a knee replacement.  Walking into the room in my parents house where I store most of my books, I automatically moved to the shelf on Christian mysticism and pulled out the Cloud of Unknowing and Gregory of Nyssa's The Life of Moses.  I find myself, this week, drawn more to the language in these books than to Buddhist language. My practice has been shallow recently, existing more as dull cerebral activity than as something I feel in the body.  I think this is due to discussing Buddhism in an unskilled way -so perhaps I should turn my attention to precepts on right speech.  However, at this moment my mind is not with the language of Buddhism but the language of Cristian mysticism, which I very much feel in my body.  

Last week a dear friend expressed her love of God to me.  We were simply catching up, and then there was a short pause on the phone before she said, "and... I have been loving God very much."  As she said this, because of the way she said this, I felt her love of God, and I felt myself loving her for loving God.  After our conversation, I lit candles and incense and sat on the zafu, becoming more present to that feeling of loving God.  I began to love God myself and to recall that feeling, which I first experienced through bhakti yoga, of letting go of the self, opening the body and heart, and allowing Gods love and presence to enter.  There is that saying, "if you want to believe in God, pray."  But even if there is no belief in God, it is possible to profoundly open ones heart to God - belief is not a precondition.  Through contemplation and meditation on God, regardless of belief, a feeling of being present to something and being filled with something arises.  So belief in God, especially belief in a certain concept of God, has never seemed to me the most important thing - unworried about belief, just find a way to open the heart to God.   

Sitting like this I spontaneously imagined myself praying with this woman, and the feeling I had was that I was married to her in God.  She was my dharma sister in God.  Loving God is like marrying Being and loving God with others can have the depth of connection that a romantic marriage has.  Now, this woman is incredibly beautiful and I love her but there is no romantic attachment or desire coming from either of us.  However as I felt all this my mind shifted to romance and I felt/thought, "the woman I marry, the energy between us will be one of loving God together."  Sometimes it is difficult for me to distinguish between a thought and a feeling - although this appears to be a thought, it was more a feeling in my body, a wordless knowledge in my body that unless I die I will marry a woman and we will deeply pursue the dharma together, we will pursue the dharma together in a profoundly loving way, and this to me is essentially indistinguishable from loving God and being filled with His love.  Considering this, another feeling arose which I have not had for quite some time: I felt keenly this mixture of a romance mixed with the love of God was what made me want to have children with a woman.  I hope my children are born out of two people loving God together or lovingly walking the path together.  

Some people might be surprised to hear me using this language of God, so I feel I should say something about that.  The words "believer", "agnostic" and "atheist" appear shallow to me.  These words all reduce religion to a matter of belief, which is something I am essentially unconcerned with.  I cannot use these words to describe myself because so many other religious experiences are, for me, more important than belief. 

Likewise, I am unconcerned with having any particular notion of God.  I have no notion of God as a being, as a force, as some mysterious thing that is present in being.  However, I will say that when I live well, I feel present and close to something infinitely deep and beautiful, and at times God is the best word for that.  I don't try to pin down exactly what this is because there is a time and a place to be unconcerned with pinning things down, with defining things, with saying such obvious things as, "well, this is probably just a feeling inside of yourself".  I am concerned, not with defining, but with having the feeling, and with spiritual exercises that serve to cultivate that feeling, that experience of loving and being loved by God.  If we feel the impulse to continuously define, we should examine where that comes from and why we need that. 

All that said there have been times in my life where I believed in God more than I believed in the sky above me or in my own breath.  I don't know quite how to express what I mean by believing in this way. The word is obviously rather tricky. 

People tend to choose me when they want to express their belief in God to someone.  Sometimes it happens at school.  I have had a number of students come into class after school, wanting to discuss their spiritual feelings with an adult who is capable of truly hearing them.  Their spiritual feelings often involve God.  It even happens at parties, people who have never met me will sense my openness to this topic, which so many people have difficulty discussing.  What I notice over and over again is that people who tell me they believe in God tend to have feelings similar to my own - God as something more mysterious or abstract than a being or a force or a whatever, God as something to feel in the heart more than to know in the mind.  So God seems to me, most importantly, to be a powerful human experience.  God is some kind of beautiful human experience that evades naming.  We should care for that experience, and part of that caring may be letting go of the concern for naming.  

Bodhisattvas, to care for others often means to care for God, to care for that mysterious feeling so many human beings carry in their hearts.