Meg wrote this week, asking me
“I wondered if you may write about the big picture of God in light of the innocent that are being slaughtered in all manner of horrific wars around the world. I’ve heard a lot of people express that their faith is really shaken because why would a God of love allow such horrors to be inflicted?”…’How can God let this happen?’ surfaces whenever world events cause such distress……… During the years when my faith was based on an ‘outer God” I felt I could respond to such comments with arguments like, “God doesn’t create wars, man does” and, ” it’s not for us to question why God chooses to intervene for the innocent or not”. But now, for me, I have never in my life walked closer to God within, yet my ability to understand let alone express an opinion in such worldly matters seems to have diminished in direct proportion……..
Dear Meg,
Many people believe that God (the Divine Presence) works in mysterious ways and is beyond our understanding……others believe that what people suffer is the result of their karma…..and still others believe that our times are the precursor to Armageddon and the end of the world.
Some say that the Devil is in charge and doing what he does best and that God can’t stop him.
Rabbi Kushner, puzzled over the holocaust inflicted upon “God’s chosen people”, wrote a book explaining that God must be ‘all loving but not all powerful’ and that He surely wept with us every time the world went crazy.
I believe differently.
For me, God (not an extraordinary superhero or a vengeful Old Man but the Divine Presence of Love in our lives) is all powerful, all loving, all compassionate, all caring – and all peace-full.
In fact, for me, this Divine Presence is SO utterly in charge that NOTHING which is real can EVER be damaged, hurt, lost or destroyed.
In other words, EVERYTHING happens to us SAFELY.
Am I suggesting it’s okay to slaughter innocent children and adults and destroy their homes and societies?
Certainly NOT!
But I AM suggesting that every child and every adult is really and truly a SOUL.
And that SOUL is a limitless and boundless aspect of the Divine and NEVER gets hurt or damaged.
Our bodies are simply the tools we use – in the moment – to express our selves (rather like shadow puppets are used to express the desires of the puppeteer. We see the moving shadows and follow the story but there’s nothing really there…….the play is just the moving shadow of a created puppet being worked by its owner/maker).
What you and I and every fanatic and idiot and fool and unthinking person on this planet does to one another is, metaphysically, the safe expression of our individual awareness – whatever that might be….love, care, support, joyfulness, selflessness………or, sometimes, when we are asleep and unaware of our true state of Divine Being – pain, fear, distress, hurt and terror of finding ourselves seemingly alone and at the mercy of our own wits on this spinning life-orb we call Earth.
ONLY HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE.
All the grief and hurt we witness across the planet is our dysfunctional response to our distorted and mistaken sense of hurt inside. That sense of hurt, of separation from All That Is, is the root cause of our anger and selfishness.
Life seems to be “me/us versus the rest”.
Our subsequent violent actions become a societal problem.
The bigger our dysfunction, the bigger the problem we create.
ONLY LOVING PEOPLE ARE LOVING PEOPLE.
When we wake up and are en-lighten-ed with the reality that ALL ARE ONE AND ONE IS ALL….
and embrace the okayness and fulfillment and joyfulness and satisfaction and bliss and appreciation and gratitude that this understanding brings…… then we have a deep realization: that all is safe and this world is here so the Real ‘Us’ (from deep within) can express that sense of love and peace and One-ness that arises out of our awakened state of Divine being.
Our actions become the solution to the problems we had previously.
The answer to the world’s problems is, of course, to WAKE UP.
Nothing else will solve the tragedies we impose upon one another in the name of every conceivable ignorance. Nothing else will return this beautiful planet to the Garden of Eden it always was and truly is if we but had the eyes and sight to see it.
Luckily, in the meantime, nothing can REALLY get hurt (even ‘though it seems to our limited vision that it does)…….and at the end of the day no crazed fanatic or power hungry madman can destroy one iota, one speck of Divine creation.
Life goes on…..indeed, what we sense as death is really a new birth when seen from a wider perspective.
After 10,000 years of ignorance, greed, selfishness, violence and unthinking slaughter of the innocent in their hundreds of millions the scoreboard still stands at 100% Success God – 0% Success The Idiots.
C’mon folk! Isn’t it time for us ALL to wake up and smell the eternal daffodils, huh?!!
Hugs,
Love
Les