Who or What is God?

I have been contemplating this question now for a long time. It seems to be an odd question in this day of polarity. There is everywhere a right and a wrong. We are confronted with it all the time. We live in a world of polarity. Where there is an an up there must be a down.

So how do we deal with the idea that there must be a way to navigate between these two worlds that seems opposing? In Unity there is a little booklet that has been a  favourite of many, myself included, and it’s called The Golden Key, written by Emmet Fox. Basically what it says is that when you’re confronted with a problem don’t think about the problem think about God instead.

What does it mean to think about God. In the 12-step programs one of the first steps is to surrender to the God of your own understanding. So what is the God of my understanding? For many years it was a faraway God who viewed everything I did and judged it. I didn’t like this God very much at all. Truth be told I was rather scared because much of my life I was doing things that I didn’t like very much so the thought of some supreme being judging me, too, was terrifying.

So I did what I think a number of people do and I rejected the whole notion that there was any such thing as God. I declared myself agnostic or atheist I’m not sure now what the correct term is but basically I turned my back on any idea of a supreme being and just got on with my life which actually turned out to be a bit of nightmare because I  didn’t do a very good job of it.

Over a period of time I got terribly fat, got into awful debt, into a rotten relationship and into very stressful work. I was doing it my way. Well as it turned out it wasn’t a very  good way. I began to look for answers when I was experiencing so much anger toward my little girl that I was scared that I would seriously hurt her. One day I even imagined throwing her through a window. I knew I needed help. I started to look for answers. And I found them.

I was introduced to an idea of God as Absolute Good. When I was struggling with the word God one of my teachers said just put another “o” in there and it becomes “good.” That helped. God is absolute good. Then what about all the things we see in the outer that don’t look like good? How are we supposed to deal with them?

Byron Katie has a book called Loving What Is. Maybe that is what we are supposed to do. Love what is. What if that is the way to approach everything. It just is. No judgement, no labelling it right or wrong, it just is. Does that change anything? Well it certainly started to change the way I looked at the world. Instead of railing against all the things that I thought were wrong with my life, and there were a lot of them, could I just be with them? Later I came across Raymond Holliwell’s book Working with the Law (in other words, working with God) and one of those laws is the Law of Non-Resistance.

I came to understand that our work, my work was to stop trying to change things in the outer. It was an inner job. That was where I needed to change. It’s the old good news, bad news.

For things to change first I must change.

The good news is that everything can be changed the bad news is that I have to do the changing. It meant I couldn’t continue to live the way I had been living.

I had to start living as if there was a greater power even if I didn’t really believe it. I had to start wrapping my head around the idea that God is Principle. Just like the principle of mathematics. In working out a mathematical problem one has to follow certain laws. You cannot insist that two and two make five and be able to solve the problem. It just won’t work. Well life is like that. When I insisted on trying to make life work on my terms it just didn’t work.

So what are the laws that govern life? If God is Absolute Good, the principle that incorporates all laws then it became my mission to find out what they were and to start living them. At a very rudimentary level it meant starting to train myself to always look for the good. At first that was hard. There were so many things that looked wrong in my world and most of them had to do with how I felt I was being treated by others, my partner, my boss, the government, life in general. I just wasn’t having a good time of it.

But you know the more I focused on looking for the good the more I found it. One phrase really helped me in this process and that was “only good can come from this.” That was especially helpful when things look pretty grim.
Here’s an affirmation from one of Charles Fillmore’s Prosperity lessons:

I am a child of the Absolute Good. God is Good and I am Good. Everything that comes into my life is Good.
And I am going to have only the Good.

Charles Fillmore