God started for me as an experience of being submerged in the Caribbean sea at the age of four years, treading the turquoise, swishing around and around to see the island, and out there. I felt safe. No one had warned me about sharks (though by seven, I was well informed, thanks to a big brother who wanted to be an oceanographer, and by the spine-critching shock of seeing a barracuda flash out of nowhere and past my face -- a javelin of a fish. Just aims and fires). (Religious experience: animist; a sense of unity and immanence)
GOD became my mother, who suffered harrowing psychosis when she drank. There were times when I could only see her as a demon. During my therapy years I called her "the demon mother." I have drawings, done in soft chalk with my non-dominant hand, that frighten anyone who's seen them. (There was no religious behaviour in my family, except to be good Christmas and Easter offertory-plate-filling Anglicans. So I had very little idea of what "God" was, other than maybe the big "eye" [burl] in the maple tree outside my bedroom window. I could imagine angels, though. They were the saviours. One sat in the trunk of my maple tree and watched over me at night. She didn't move to our next house...my mother took to beating me in my bed in the middle of the night.)
I was confirmed with sudden and inexplicable pomp and circumstance, having been transfered to an Anglican school. Chapel every morning; must wear a veil and spend most of every service on your gangly adolescent knees. Ouch.
The confirmation stirred up a weird, saccharine gaiety in my mother for about a week. She was just thrilled to confirm me. Neither of my brothers were confirmed (though my older sister was).
Religious blank-slate state lasted 'til I was just turned 21. I went to one of those yearly Easter services with my mother and sister, who spent much of the service whispering and nattering to each other.
I fell in love with the vicar.
He was a fiery fellow, though contained. Gorgeous, sonorous voice (he directed the choir, which was laughable -- most everyone in the choir knew it was laughable too, so choir practice could be fun unless our rector -- one of the central movers and shakers involved in a major overhaul of our denomination's hymn book. I came to notice, over time, that the good reverend had a habit of looking at my chest, not my eyes, when we were in our "counseling" sessions. (Religion: blind, naive faith; then Ick.) I tried hard to maintain my "good-Christian" visage while working towards my undergrad degree. No go -- as often happens when one moves away from home, the sheer variety of humans and all our cultures tossed me into a spiritual tailspin.
I've called myself a few "ists" over the years -- existentialist, humanist, Buddhist, Taoist; I've checked out Wicca, Paganism, Sufism, monasticism, a whole mess of New Age stuff. Psychotherapy -- with all its attendent workshops, theories, modalities, and experiences was as close as I got to "religion" for about a decade. I have felt sincere reverence for aspects of just about every wisdom tradition, and my home base for the last 27 years (and for the rest of my life) is the I Ching.
I simply can't stomach most of organized religion ... and I recoil at how much insane behaviour can be evident in its extreme expressions. I also seem constitutionally incapable of sensing or imaging a human "God" or "Goddess" -- perhaps because my first "God" was that demon mother.
I think there's some kind of Intelligence, some Force, that creates everything ... and I think it's waaay beyond our comprehension. That's explanation enough for me ... I just know it in my bones, and it doesn't have a Name.
