I Found My Path to God by Leaving Religion

I believe in God. I know how polarizing this statement is. For years, I repressed, ignored, or avoided this truth in my life. I feared there was little room for this belief in the circles I moved in – many of my friends and peers experienced traumatizing religious experiences in the name of “god”. While those I knew who believed in God conceived the Divine so differently from me, I feared rejection or dismissal of my experiences. Without religion, I felt no right to God or spirituality. So, I weaved in and out of a relationship with my belief. At times, I delved in, thanking God for every sunflower I passed on my drive, every finch’s chirp at dawn, every laughing child. Other times, I lived without any connection to the Divine and my world felt slightly void of magic. I tried to negate my need and rely entirely on myself or reason. Yet time and time again, my epiphanies and suffering alike culminated with my head thrown back in prayer, speaking to a Higher Power. I am learning my unavoidable need for God.

My relationship with God, not unlike all relationships, comes with complexity. Born and raised in a religious household, my early spiritual experiences were funneled through the lens of my religion of origin. This colored my childhood in goodness, faith, and family. I learned to love others. I learned to pray. I learned connection to the Divine came from many sources. I learned to tune into intuition through the spirit. Then came adolescence. Beginning at age 14, I took a course to learn about the history and doctrine of my church. Some of the doctrine troubled and dismayed me. Predominantly, teachings about women and same-sex relationships/marriages. I am fortunate to be raised with the example of same-sex marriage from my aunts, whose partnership began before my birth. Their relationship, and subsequent family, engrained within me from childhood the knowledge that all love is good. The spirit I felt when nestled in the stillness of the mountains or enraptured by the lyrics of a song, was a spirit of pure love. How could that same spirit disavow the love of my aunts and their family? This doctrine, coupled with historical teachings of polygamy, which I felt dehumanized and betrayed women, left me feeling abandoned by God. Where once I felt peace, I felt a consuming dissonance. Grim nights were spent pleading with God to offer discernment or remove the pit of dread in my stomach. Nights filled with an acidic loneliness. My confusion obscured my connection to God. So, for a time I abandoned spirituality altogether. I renounced religion wholesale. I turned away from the Divine. I believed all I would find within it was turmoil.

But with a steadfast persistence God appeared to me. Subtly, in small manifestations, the Divine reentered my life. While lying beneath the jagged lace of barren tree branches or holding the warmth of a sleeping baby to my chest I felt connected to something essential. Tentatively, I inched towards it. I began listening to the podcast, Oprah’s Super Soul. From the mouths of Buddhist Monks, Catholic Nuns, nondenominational spiritual teachers, poets, and social workers, I heard a message of love and humanity. Always the same offering, often in different wrapping. Then on a brisk afternoon weaving through red-brick buildings on my college campus, I listened to an episode with Dr. Maya Angelou. A poet by trade and Christian in practice, she described the piercing realization that God, which she described as All, loved her. It was a flood. My body tingled with the breathless, drowning love. With a love that is All. The finch, and the babe, the wind, and the branches. Me and my God. She declared, “There are as many gates to Heaven as there are people”. She knew whatever led someone to knowingness was right, holy, divine. A knowingness of our connection to each other, to the Earth, to All. Recognition of truth leapt from my stomach. There are as many paths to God as there are people. I found my path to God by leaving religion. While for many of my loved ones, religion remains their path. They can straddle the tension between belief, and disagreement or confusion with certain teachings. Other loved ones hold no belief in a higher power, instead believing in a duty to care for their fellow human and our shared home. I honor all the paths to knowing of the compassionate and kind people in my life. From their varied wisdom I learn and grow.

Being in relation to the Divine gives me peace unlike anything else. Usually this takes place through nature. When I hear the rustle of wind through leaves or watch the ocean’s lapsing waves, these natural things convey something beyond themselves to me. The God of my understanding speaks in the poems of Mary Oliver or on the pages of The Book of Joy. I cannot manage to surrender control in a hostile, meaningless Universe. But to God, who speaks tenderly in a rippling blade of grass? I can surrender to God. I am trying to embrace this truth and implement daily spiritual practice. Pray out loud, meditate, read poetry like scripture, speak openly about my beliefs, continually declare gratitude, search for new spiritual teachers and revisit old ones. I look for God in nature, in relationships, in music, in art, in animals, in the faces of strangers. I find Divinity in All. God opens a wellspring of hope in me. Frankly, I am too exhausted with the world to fret over others’ opinions on the things granting my joy. Let them judge me, if I am at peace, I will not mind. I read this poem and of course Mary Oliver distills my thoughts better than I can:

The World I Live In

I have refused to live

locked in the orderly house of

reasons and proofs.

The world I live in and believe in

is wider than that. And anyway,

what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or

twice I have seen. I’ll just

tell you this:

only if there are angels in your head will you

ever, possibly, see one.