The Divine

...tell me about how you perceive the Divine.  Is there a Divine?

I know people who truly FEEL God in their hearts and in their lives. And I believe they really do. For them, God is as real as my cat is to me...And truth be told, I envy their faith. To be so certain, convinced there is a guiding and loving entity who formed this amazing world and everything in it, is a wonderful gift I wasn't given (not to worry, though, I know I've been blessed with other amazing gifts...I bake a MEAN snickerdoodle for starters!). This is one of the reasons I love the movie "Contact" so much...Palmer believes in Ellie's travels and testimony at the end. He's undergone a similarly transformational experience with God. Each are equally unprovable as they are powerful. He doesn't dismiss her experience because it's never something that has happened to him, he embraces it because he can relate to it so well on another level.

My lack of belief in God, however, doesn't mean I don't feel there are forces much more powerful than me around at all times. I often refer to it as the Universe...but I think that's more just to give it an easy name. And I can tap into this energy if I pay attention, focus and not let myself become sidelined with comfortable trivialities. It's rarely an easy task and I often look back and think I could have handled a given situation better if I'd trusted myself and the forces at work. These lyrics from the Indigo Girls song "World Falls" seem to describe my difficult relationship with the Universe:

this world falls on me
hopes of immortality
everywhere i turn
all the beauty just keeps shaking me

now i woke up in the middle of a dream
scared the world was too much for me...

Even now, I'm struggling against the momentum of those forces...there's directions I'm supposed to go and lessons I'm supposed to learn, but it's hard to quell the fear the uncertainties bring. I need to be still, focus and let the opportunities present themselves in their own time. And that is probably the first lesson.