I Need a Parental God

I used to call God ‘The Universe’ but it just wasn’t enough…

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

There was a time that I was allergic to the word ‘God’. I’d recoil from it. I don’t think I was religiously wounded (not apparently so, at least) when I was a kid. I guess I was told some things about the nature of God as a fatherly being that I didn’t really like. These qualities made me identify God with the more toxic parts of fatherhood that I resented in my own human father…

Namely, bigotry. Anger. Judgment. Violence. Conditionalism. Inconsistency. Emotional distance. All the parts of my dad that I resented were also assigned to this deity. Those were the qualities that stuck like Velcro while the qualities that I loved about my dad (like love, empathy, mercy, kindness, humor, perseverance, joy, understanding) slipped off of the surface of my mind like Teflon.

So, for a couple of decades, I went with switching God’s name to The Universe.

This suited me for a long time. I saw God as a cosmic energy of sorts that I could mold and shape to my own desires. The Universe had my back. The Universe was there like a genie in a bottle to grant any wish I had if I could only ‘align’ with it. At least that’s what the bestselling books told me.