illuminating what you might secretly believe

To illuminate what you might secretly believe about your Higher Power, work backwards from how you feel (and what you fear) about what God's will is for you.

If you view "God's will" with trepidation, or suspicion, or alarm, if you're afraid that God's will might be hard, or boring, or painful, or unrewarding, then I believe the trick is not to work on letting go of the fear -- the trick is to change your belief about what God is; to re-examine how you understand God.

There can be a pretty vast difference between what I understand (that is, what I think I know), what I hope and what I believe.  And for me, before I can actually come to believe something (about God) I have to pull my deep down doubts up into the light and give them their day in court.

For years I had beliefs about God and the way the universe worked that I didn't even know I had.  I talked a great game about a loving Higher Power, but I was just parroting what others said -- I was actually disconnected from what I truly believed.  It was almost as if what I wanted to believe distracted me from what I actually believed.

The freedom that AA's philosophy offers, the "choose your own conception of a Higher Power" allowed me to stay, but it also baffled me for a while.  And in the vacuum of no particular dogma, my old ideas, the old fears and almost superstitious belief system I had about how the universe works, began to seep into the foundation of the new faith I was trying to build.

I was so busy working on the new super structure of a "God as I understood God" that  I didn't even notice the plumbing problem I was having under the foundation.

I've written here before about the stunning insight I had once, while praying the 3rd Step Prayer (which, for the new kids, is a beautiful request to God to "build with me and do with me as You will), that half way through the prayer I looked like I was bracing for a blow.

In a kind of wild, third person perspective I saw myself praying in that moment, and my body language betrayed a buried belief I didn't even know I had:  That God's will was going to hurt.

That was when I learned:  To illuminate what you secretly believe about your Higher Power, work backwards from how you feel (and what you fear) about what God's will is for you.

For me it turns out that I cannot change what I believe, in any substantive way, until I discover and confront what it is I actually believe -- not just focus harder on what I want to believe.  Without doing that, trying to change the nature of my faith is like being very busy decorating the top floors of my house with happy colors while the foundation slowly erodes.

Comments

[VicariousRising]

Really interesting perspective. When I first came to AA, I feared an HP that was going to have to take something away from me if I was going to ask for help. What it really was was me fearing a reprise of my childhood -- I was imagining god to be an authority like my parents. But my real belief, once I recognized that this was what I was afraid of, is that God is not like that. I had to separate what I had learned from what my bones said was real (not an easy task).

Of course, my idea of god is not really what most people seem to see as their HP, but that's ok because the one that sticks with me brings me a lot more comfort and peace than I've ever known, even if it's not a singular entity on a throne in the sky.