Woods

It was a sunny summer morning in the Piney Woods. There were one hundred of us alcoholics listening to each other share our experiences with God - how it used to be and how it is. For the first time, I heard someone put the whole "fear God" concept to the test. I heard someone else throw the "sinners go to hell" idea out the window. But most importantly, I heard my story for the first time. It wasn't the drunkalogue story, or the hard life story, or the checklist of all the negative things that have happened in my life story either. I heard my God story. For the first time, from the lips of someone else, I heard how someone feared God and learned how to discard the idea altogether. 

That day changed the rest of my life.

I haven't looked back, and I hope I never have to. 

In the Piney Woods of Texas, I recovered from a trembling, joyless, shameful concept of God that was helping fuel my desires to drink. 

Why did I fear God so badly?

I can't blame anybody else but me. I used to blame religion, the church, family, preachers, conservatives, etc., but today I see how I'm responsible for my own conception of God. 

I took the Bible literally. For some reason, although I'd find truth in all other fictional realms, I couldn't seem to drop the idea the Bible was this infallible, red-hot ember that would burn me if I took it the wrong way. In reality, it was burning me the whole time because I was holding it so tightly. 

Now here was the real dilemma for an alcoholic who had a conception of God like I did: both the drinking and my concept of God - matched together - produced enough shame to kill me. 

Can fear of God kill? I believe so. It nearly did me. 

My life was a wrecking ball of scared worship, service under the false pretense of compassion, and a prayer life that seemed way more interested in saving me from a hell that I thought was surely waiting for me. Never mind the hell on earth I was experiencing 24/7. I was a living testimony to the fact that beliefs in the intangible and abstract will absolutely drive me to do insane things. They'll also drive me to do good things, but when my concept of God is centered around fear, it's impossible to love or receive love. 

I didn't think the Bible could be touched in the same way a literature class touches on Shakespeare. I didn't think the words attributed to the God of Israel were actually written by a human being. I thought things like the ground swallowing up and God smiting cities and talking donkeys were real, although I'd never considered that I hadn't ever seen anything like that happen. Okay, the ground swallowing up people is closer to a reality, but you get the point. 

I read the Bible like an instruction manual that my life depended on. I held onto its commands as if there was no source of truth anywhere else in the world. And that's how I developed concepts like God hates divorce and homosexuality is a sin and all the rich people are going to hell. It wasn't that the concepts weren't there, because they were there black and white. The problem is, I was too ignorant to realize that these concepts were coming from the minds of prejudice-filled human beings just like me. Just like you. Just like us. 

And so all these commands and instructions and morals were starting to direct my life. I didn't have to think anymore because I could just let the bible think for me. I could let God (who obviously wrote the Bible) direct every bit of my life. 

And I did. And because I took it literally and held onto it so tightly, I hit a spiritual bottom that I hope to never hit again. The way I read the Bible actually pointed me towards hopelessness. Even some of the red letters of the New Testament pointed me to despair. The same worked with Jesus. Jesus wasn't present to write his own words. They were written by prejudice-filled men and women just like me. Just like you. Just like us. 

Is there truth in the Bible? Absolutely. But can I find that truth by taking everything I read literally? Absolutely not. 

I think there's a ton of people just like me who are holding on dearly for their spiritual lives to one day get better, but at the same time they're believing in an infallible, timeless, God-written Bible. They're dying on the inside because they know they have a brain and a heart but can't seem to use it. They've replaced the ability to think with becoming a bible robot. 

That day in the woods, I had a falling out. It wasn't with another person. It wasn't with God. It wasn't with myself. I killed the fear of God that was inside me. I killed it and cursed it. I slit its throat, let the blood pour out on the ground before me, and sacrificed it right there on the forest floor. I said goodbye to the fear of God and gave it a proper burial - a complete eradication. 

It's amazing what it did for me and to me. I gradually developed a profound sense that something was moving inside my soul. Something started filling me with a sense of divine presence and joy. Salvation started taking on a completely different meaning than I'd believed in before. It was no longer about praying a certain prayer or doing certain rituals or believing certain things. It was about killing my fear of God. 

No longer did I have to pray dishonestly. No longer did I have to lie to my fellow Christians. No longer did I have to skip over the parts in the Bible that were once hard to swallow. No longer did I have to wonder if certain people really were going to hell, because hell was just a projection of the human desire to know what happens in the afterlife. And so with heaven. And so with resurrection. And so with Sheol. And so with Hades. And so with Purgatory. And so with the mansions and the streets of gold and the pearly gates. 

Scripture began taking on new meaning. I received a new pair of glasses. No longer was I reading a non-fiction "manual," but I was reading flesh-and-blood reality of ancient thought and action. I was reading memoir and allusion and poetry and prose and historical fact and historical metaphor and simile and hyperbole and all the other forms of literature that create the world of communication. 

For the first time in my life, I could disagree with something I read in the Bible because I was disagreeing with the author's viewpoints on life and God and culture. I could develop my own conception of God just as the authors created their own conceptions of God (which is why if you read the bible straight through, you'll get a bizarre, dysfunctional, bipolar portrait of God).

God is no longer this divine being in the skies that is eager to punish the world. God is force, energy, the drive to create good things in the world, the still, small, voice inside that drives me to find an alternative to my selfish and self-seeking desires. God isn't human, just as gravity isn't human. 

God is the force behind love. The creator of love. The essence of love. And love is sometimes peaceful and sometimes chaotic, just like the ever-expanding universe or the microscopic cross-section of a square inch of forest floor.