“Much easier to not speak God’s name than to say it aloud and risk finding out that it’s Clarence.”

Much easier to not speak God’s name

than to say it aloud

and risk finding out

that it’s Clarence.

Since childhood, I’ve struggled long and hard over the nature of God. As a little girl, I thought of him like most of us probably did, as a man who watched over me. Later he seemed to suffer some lapses in attention. I remember when I was twelve and in the clutches of some rather sicko nuns, I decided there probably was a God, but I didn’t much like him.

I’ve always been attracted to spirituality, and as a kid went to many different churches. Eventually, through experiences with Paganism and five years as a practicing Hindu, I came to think of God as “Mother.”

But there was something of a stretch about it. I tried, but never truly achieved that personal relationship of which so many speak. During my Hindu years, I did daily pujas to Durga, but deep down, I didn’t feel like there was a cosmic consciousness keeping an eye on my little world. I didn’t know who or what God really was.

It never clicked until I met my Native American teacher who shared that the word in his language that is usually translated as “Great Spirit” would be more accurately translated with the English word “WOW!”

I was aware of the Hebrew notion of Tetragrammaton and the Hindu concept of “The Formless and Absolute,” but they’d been intellectual concepts. I suddenly “got it.”

What else can you say about a force that is the creator of such an abundance of life forms and is the essence of unconditional love, yet rife with the paradox that allows such suffering; which is omnipresent and omnipotent and apprehended by so many in such different ways, yet remains unchangeable?

WOW!