I allowed myself to be abused and treated very poorly because of my fear and belief that God wanted me to stay in the relationship. At the same time I didnt lose my connection to a voice inside me, that I knew was full of love and which in the end got me out of the psychological trap I was in. I just couldnt match that voice I felt inside of me to my concept of God, and that caused a whole lot of confusion and inner turmoil.
After my divorce I was often still scared and completely terrorized that God wanted me to return. And I always had to remind myself that God would never want me to do something I didn't want to do. But I think I am still struggling with this.
Just a couple months ago I had this realization that I was always was upset and angry at God for causing all my suffering... but that it wasn't God who was cheating me, but myself, and that God was always with me. Always there.
I am even scared to come back at this thread and read your responses...
Hoping this won't be scary :).
When anyone else uses beliefs about God to make themselves better than others, or to deny their experience or try to make themselves into others' gods... they are making two mistakes from my point of view. First they are mistaking themselves for God. Second they are mistaking themselves for someone else by trying to make another person's moral judgments for them. Not to say there aren't moral rules. There are. But how to apply them out of our own response-abilities is a decision that can only be made by the actor.
My best friend got divorced (legitimately so IMHO) and felt much as you described. Her mother got a whole new view of her newly-ex H, and, despite having discouraged the divorce, within two months said "I can't imagine how you stayed married to him for so long!" Her mother is a difficult and sometimes unreasonably rigid person. So when BF and I were talking about whether God would want her to go back to her marriage, I started out by saying "Could we begin by assuming that God is at least as reasonable and compassionate as your mother?" (Which, in context, seemed like an absurdly low bar for God to clear.)
My BF was firmly in the grip of a nominally Christian ideology - but it was awfully strong on the letter of the law, and pretty weak when it came to the spirit of the law. There seems to be a lot of that going around.
There was a Buddhist teacher (whose name I can't spell) who talked about something he named "spiritual materialism" .... I was going to write a bunch of stuff - but in the meantime I saw this, and I think this guy wrote it much better than I was going to.
[DLMURL]http://www.danoah.com/2011/11/im-christian-unless-youre-gay.html[/DLMURL]
If I haven't worn you out yet: Here is some theological thinking...
When I was pretty young - less than 14 for sure - I remember sitting in church and looking at the cross and thinking how totally perverse it was that we were all sitting inside (it was an absolutely glorious spring day in MA) staring at an instrument of torture and calling that praising God. I kind of get it now (although I stall can't quite see staying in a man-made "cathedral", when God's is all around us.) Here is what I figured out.
I start with the observation that "sacrifice" means to trade the lesser good for a greater good. (Other wise it is just being imprudent and or stupid.)
A lot of Christians start with Christ on the cross. The sacrifice. But what is the lesser good? and What is the greater? The lesser good being traded is apparently the balance of the human life of a perfectly virtuous man (who could be expected to have the best life possible given the circumstances) and his pain in being tortured to death. What is the greater good? As best I can understand it, what Jesus was "buying" on the cross was the possibility of changing the course of your life for all of humankind, for the rest of time. This is a controversial interpretation (they all are) but it is the one that makes the most sense for me. Heck of a trade, really, if that's what it was. I think of it as a kind of "loosening" of causation, maybe even of "karma". So after the Cross, the universe is a more forgiving and encouraging place. Still harsh, still painful, still difficult, still full of risk and suffering - but with more potential for good.
Coming from there (and lots of people who espouse Christianity don't, I know, and I wouldn't presume to say who is correct here) it seems to me that the "good news" of Christianity is that each of us are individually as worthy of this sacrifice as we all are collectively. This is a bit paradoxical at first - but there is a kind of logic based in the claim that "When we save one life, we save an entire world" that leads us to the conclusion that the individual is more than just a fraction of the whole. The individual has infinite worth in herself, and so, even if the rest of the world were not at stake, still the sacrifice would be justified for her. But it is a kind of sacrifice that only a perfectly virtuous man or a god could knowingly make. For creatures like us, our abilities are best suited for developing our own virtues and caring as best we may for the development and flourishing of others. So that is what we should focus on doing.
Way way way too long a post. That's what I get for trying to write anything about faith with a five year old in the house!
