This Little Light of Mine

Gearing up to write for Black Magpie this morning, I was troubled.  I think the post (High Time) is timely and political and serious which is what it's supposed to be, I guess. Or maybe we're just in some serious shit in this country right now, so it's timely and appropriate to be serious.

Whatever.  The trouble is that I don't feel Political at all right now.  I feel Spiritual. Somehow, there doesn't seem to be any place for Spirituality when you're sitting at the table with the cool kids in the high school cafeteria.

I fully appreciate that God and Jesus have caused a lot of trouble in this world, but I would argue that neither God nor Jesus had anything to do with that shit.  People caused that shit.  Maybe God is a loaded gun, but it takes a person to fire the gun.  Further, God doesn't necessarily have anything to do with anything at all. Maybe in the beginning, God created Evolution.  Who the fuck cares?  We're here now, and whether or not there's a God has absolutely nothing to do with how we treat each other.

Even if there has never, ever been any God at all  there is still Beauty in the world.  And Inner Peace.  It's difficult to talk about experiencing that Beauty and Peace without referencing Energy or The Source.  The trouble is that tons of people - even militant atheists - are so stuck on God as Grandpa in the Sky that you can't even be grateful for beer without somebody making fun of you.  Or worse, they're afraid you're going to shove grandpa up their ass the minute you mention something that sounds remotely similar to God, when all you're really saying is that there's something more to this existence than meets the eye, and it's Beautiful.

Believing in something that resembles The Force doesn't make me as stupid as Christine O'Donnell.



"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter," says Master Yoda.   Maybe all God ever has been and ever will be is a luminous spirit inside of us that connects us to Life and to each other - but isn't that enough?  God as a judgmental old bastard is patriarchal bullshit designed to keep power in the hands of antebellum dicks like Newt and Rush.  The Church, as a money making institution, needs the bullshit most of all.

The power of the patriarchy runs deep.It ran in me this morning while I was writing for BMT.  I'd be more mad at myself for hiding my light under a bushel, except for it's probably okay to let that light shine brightest over here in my own space.  Max, the Magic of Life Coach, sent me this video about a month or so ago.  It's a passage from Marianne Williamson's book, A Return to Love.  I shared it with a couple of friends, but I hesitated to share it more broadly because the word "God" is so connected to The Patriarchy that merely hearing the word can make your blood boil and run cold at the same time. All she's really talking about, though, is that energy we also call Life and Love. We also hear the same ideas about inner peace and energy in Yoga class, and from Earth based, Goddess oriented theology - so it's not like Jesus cornered the market on this stuff.  The folks at Unity have been saying that the Christ energy is available to all of us all the time it for years and years.  It's basic New Age Hippie Spirituality.

I can't help it that a bunch of patriarchal assholes commandeered God for their own purposes and perpetrated atrocities in the name of God around the globe for generations.  There is a light in all of us - and maybe if more people would let it shine, we could break free from a way of life that commits all our resources to war and start dedicating our resources to each other and our planet.