Fighting with the All-Powerful
Sometimes I imagine I am in an empty field like a warrior of old riding to meet his opponent. Except this is the place I do battle with the one I call God. I ready myself for the fight with my Creator. I summon everything I’ve got: this is more than an argument we have got coming, it’s a big fight and I know I am up against the All-Powerful.
I start in: Your world is so vicious, mean and cruel. Oh don’t tell me about the lovey-dovey all is beautiful bit, not now. Who created the Zika babies who cry in torment from birth to death? And all the panoply of infinitely cruel and mind-blowingly painful diseases? Who allows the imprinting of patterns of molestation, abuse and addiction on children or on their parents or their parents’ parents? In your great plan for humanity where did it all begin? Why so much hypocrisy, vengeance and sheer brutality in your evolutionary design? If You are all-knowing why did You create so many religions that perpetuate endless bigotry and war? Why do You allow your most vulnerable human beings to starve to death, and for innocents to be so cruelly persecuted by warmongers and terrorists? Why have you created a species so blind and ignorant that You will allow it to destroy this Earth paradise that You created?
God interrupts: Ranting at me will not create one iota of change in the world. And what have you done to really embody the transformation that is needed? When have you really moved out of your private comfort zone to be part of the whole organism of collective change?
Me: I don’t think You really share your Power for that to happen. Your world is out of control and You are not doing enough Power-sharing with those of us who want to heal the world!
God: Instead of Power-sharing practice Sharing-power. Share everything. That’s what I do.
Then God starts laughing….that transcendent laughter that knows how perfectly the story will end. For a moment I hate it and shout out, “None of your tricks!!” But my resistance begins to fade and the Truth that is being transmitted reaches inside me and slowly, begrudgingly I accept it …. we do have the power, it is the power of we. Every day a great collective power is unfolding for humanity awakening and evolving. I remind myself to give my best energy to this collective transformation and not hang out so much in the bog of outrage…even when so much food for outrage rises up everywhere to tempt us.
But we will have to keep vigorously wrestling with God until we get real answers. In the meantime I tell God: This is not over, accountability goes both ways.
James O’Dea