I grew up in a religion which shall remain nameless, since I don’t want to argue over religion or attack any faith. Once those religious precepts were installed onto my hard drive (probably by age 8), they became difficult to wipe no matter how hard I tried in later years.

Before I could pursue a spiritual path of my own choosing, the old house of my religious upbringing needed to be torn down. Yet the programming proved so thorough that I found myself unable to erase it. I developed a resentment against my religious upbringing.

I sat parked in front of the church I attended as a boy, crying tears of anger when I realized I wasn’t angry at an institution, at a bunch of men and women who passed on to me their own fears, their own prejudices. I wasn’t mad at the edifice across the street. I was at war with a set of beliefs between my ears. There was no one, no ‘out there’ to be angry at. Those who conditioned me in their beliefs? In their well-meaning ignorance, they taught me form over content. Most religious systems are designed to do that: impart dogma over experience and state of being. They’re designed for mass consumption. How could it be otherwise? And yet, the true spiritual path was highly individualized, born of inner guidance rather than outer instruction, a road that begins and ends in experience rather than precept.

To make peace with the installation of received wisdom, I chose to use one of the rituals of my childhood faith. The ritual had damaged me because of the personal vulnerabilities I’d brought to it at age 8. I was too young for it at that age, for one thing. I spoke with a man of the clothe. I cried as I poured out my stale guilt and twisted grievances against these old ways. He explained that the path I needed to take was self-forgiveness. He assigned me a movie to watch – The Mission, and I did. Hey, it had Robert De Niro.

I’ve come to realize that all the people who’d ever lived a religious life in the faith I was born to couldn’t have been wrong. Their lives weren’t in vain. I can now walk into a church of the faith I was born into, recite the prayers of my youth and translate them into my own understanding. I can venture into any house of worship and interpret the words of that particular faith according to my own experience. I grasp them at the level of the soul, in which I believe, and make those words true for me.

The last battle is my war with God. The introject drilled into me from boyhood never fully goes away. I’ll always wrestle with a concept of God, believing there’s a God ‘out there,’ a heaven ‘after this.’ This God, this paradise, is always there and not here, then and not now. It’s purchased through good deeds and suffering. And this God is so easy to blame. It’s the ultimate scapegoat when things go wrong, when I don’t get my own way. Most people ask why. They cast aspersion for the vicissitudes of the world upon the great and silent It, who never offers any reply.

I believe there is Something, a What Is, uncreated, unborn. The name we often put on it is God. Some won’t spell it. To others it has 99 names. To still others, it’s unnamable. But this something isn’t amenable to intellectual treatment. Beyond understanding, it’s truly beyond name. ‘God’ is the attribution we place upon that which is beyond attribution. It’s the collection of collective definitions projected onto the inexplicable somethingness which others call nothingness. It’s the unanswerable question.

The other night, as I gain reached the end of my wick of despair, I started to blame God, and along with God, I ascribed culpability to the pantheon of others, the human and institutional, indirectly responsible for my suffering. I’d been reading a book on Buddhism, one of the better short tomes: The Buddha’s Dream of Liberation, by James William Coleman.

As I walked along the Animas River before the sun dropped over the La Platas, it dawned on me that God wasn’t responsible for my plight. There was a God, but It was so far beyond the boyhood projections and strawmen I ‘d assembled since my youth to appease and to blame, that there might as well not even be a God. This was a desolate conclusion, but as I stopped crucifying the idea of God that I’d made up between my ears, I stopped blaming everyone else (including myself) as well.

A sharp, Godless clarity filled my mind. I had a meeting with some people awhile later and I found a focus I seldom possessed, born of a mind empty of illusions. As I made the long, night drive over the mountains toward home, I felt forgiveness, but it wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was an odd, empty feeling, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to feel it.

I’d wasted my whole life blaming everyone and everything around me. I felt as if I’d cheated myself of time. And the delusion which had done the cheating? It was my childish notions of God, which hadn’t moved much beyond Santa Claus. My ideas about God drastically distorted my experience of It. God wasn’t a heavenly Being as It was the experience of what I was, beneath all the want and fantasy. It was unfamiliar and disquieting not to believe in a Big Brother waiting for me in heaven, so I buried this deeper aloneness sometime during my long sleep of life. That unease, and the grievance I had against myself for depriving myself of peace for so many years, sent serenity on its way by next morning.

Yet its memory remains. To experience truth, I need to let go of my ideas about what truth is.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within