Featured in the June 2021 Issue of Liveology Yoga Magazine
It's not, I've learned.
One of the things that really contributed to my experience of "waking up" was questioning and contemplating the idea of blasphemy.
I was raised southern Baptist Christian and in that school of thought, blasphemy is the highest sin. It's also the only sin that God doesn't forgive. So as a child, who was naturally afraid of Hell, blasphemy was the one thing I wouldn't even entertain. Whenever a TV show would come on mocking Jesus or God, I'd immediately turn my head or change the channel. I was so afraid of offending God and this fear continued into my early twenties. Don't get me wrong, I "sinned" proudly in a lot of other ways growing up but blasphemy was always something that shook me to my core so I avoided joking about God or questioning the reality of God's power.
And then, when I was 24, my mom got diagnosed with Cancer.
The worst Cancer.
The "91% will die within five years of diagnosis", flavor of cancer.
I got so angry with who I knew to be God. Livid. To the point that I no longer cared about eternal damnation. Damnation would be a small price to pay for the opportunity to confront the being that made my mom sick. It was the first time in my life that I questioned God's existence -- and thank God I did.
The questioning, the doubting, the frustration, and anger towards my supposedly loving Creator continued for days and weeks. So called "blasphemy" became a daily practice of mine. And then, one day, I noticed the strangest thing... in spite of all my blasphemous rage, I hadn't been struck down by lightning. Demons didn't visit me, nor did a plague of locusts. In fact, it felt like something was inviting me to question. It almost felt excited that I was questioning. It felt like it was encouraging me to search for a second opinion on what God may be.
I wondered to myself, "why is God so insecure"?
Why is God, a supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing, infinite and eternal being so concerned with what lowly humans think or say about him?
"How do you offend God?", I kept asking myself.
And the answer I kept arriving at is that you can't. Because in order to be offended, you have to be insecure. You have to be uncertain about yourself for someone else's ideas about you to bother you.
Why would a supposedly loving Creator blame his creations for behaving in a way they are created to behave?
As an artist, I've certainly created things I thought were inadequate but I've never blamed the creation itself for lacking because it was ME who created it. I am the source. So if there is a problem with my creation, I am to blame, not the manifestation itself.
As a creator I realize that everything that I create is a reflection of myself. Therefore, if God is the creator of everything, then everything is a reflection of God.
To me, persecuting your creations for being flawed didn't sound like something a loving God would do but it definitely sounded like something an insecure human would do. And I began to notice that a lot of the attributes the church taught me God has are actually just traits humans have.
I realized, as Zora Neale Hurston so elegantly put it, "Gods always behave like the people who make them."
I decided I was no longer interested in anyone else's idea of God. If God did exist, I was going to search and meet him myself. And we were going to have some words about my mama.
And I'm happy to say that one day, I did meet God. Not in a book, not in nature, not in a temple, & not in dream.
No, I met God in the one place I never expected to find him.
In a mirror.
And nothing has looked the same since.
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