Sometimes, I have a warped view of God.
This is not anybody’s fault. I do not blame my devoted Baptist Sunday school teachers or pastors or youth workers who taught me Bible stories and helped me memorize the books of the Bible by the end of first grade. All of them loved me and were doing their best.
Somehow, though, an image of God snuck into my head that has been hard to shake. First, He is a He. Definitely masculine. Also, although this male God is good, loving and just (that’s what I was taught anyway), he also has standards and expectations that I am not living up to. He has lists of what I should and should not do. I try, but I never measure up.
My recent most glaring, guilt-inducing failure in my relationship with this false God has been my inability to get out of bed for my daily quiet time. My morning prayer time is on my calendar from 5:15 am to 5:50 am daily. In the last few months, I have rarely been up before 6 am. I have just been so tired lately. When I miss that window, I feel like I have ruined any chance I might have had for spiritual connection and communion that day. Before the day even starts, I am all wrong. False God has moved on. I imagine him sitting at the kitchen table where I usually write and pray. He checks his watch as 6 am nears, sighs, and shakes his head sadly before leaving to meet with someone who actually gets up when the alarm goes off.
Of course, this is not true. One of my spiritual director friends even ventured that God may be encouraging me to sleep more. Also, here is another big truth: there is nothing I can do that would make God approve of me more. I am already loved, just as I am. Richard Rohr writes in one of his beautiful daily meditations, “God already loves you, and you cannot make God love you any more or any less by any technique whatsoever (“The Purpose of the Law,” May 22, 2017 daily meditation). I guess that means that God doesn’t love me less on the days when I stay in bed until the last possible moment. Also, possibly God doesn’t care if I successfully cross items off my endless daily to-do lists, important things like eating green leafy vegetables, vacuuming, fixing nutritional lunches for my children, walking 10,000 steps a day, writing intelligent notes to my Republican congressman about his idiotic voting, and fixing all the broken relationships in my life and the world.
Nothing I do makes God love me.
I do my best, because those are good things. And really, I would like to be up in the morning to pray and write. But in the end? God loves me. God will not love me any less if I never get up for another morning prayer time again. And God is not disappointed in me. It seems a little sacrilegious to write that. I confess I doubt it a little. But it’s true. I think.
My Centering Prayer practice has helped me identify that old image of God that hangs around in my head. He seems so real, though– so aware of my faults and disapproving of them. False God is a life coach with a clipboard, constantly monitoring my successes and failures. Real God doesn’t own a clipboard, but is just there, ready to enfold me in a warm embrace. In winter, true God has a big woolen coat where I go to hide. In summer, she wears a straw hat and a wild shirt and cuts me off before I can even begin my habitual apologies. “Well, dear heart, would you look at that,” she says. “See the flowers and the birds at the feeder? See how much I love you all?”
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