Dear God of My Understanding,

Thank you for this body, this breath, and this heartbeat.

Thank you for the many blessings I have known, do know, and will yet know.

Walk with me today.

Help me to feel your Spirit as it loves and sustains me, as it loves and sustains the very world I live in.

Work in and through me, that I might be useful to the cause of brotherhood and unity among all people.

Help me to be open to ministering to others.

Help me to be open to being ministered to by others.

Help me to see you in everything and everyone.

Guide me to a place where I dwell less on what I lack and more on what I’ve been given.

May I see life through the eyes of gratitude and humility.

May I see every person as my brother, my sister, whom I am called to love.

Show me how to be a light in the darkness.

Give me special wisdom, that I might show love and grace to all, even to those who see themselves as opposed to what I believe to be true and right.

Thank you for my life.

Help me to see your face.

Amen

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This, with many variations, is what my prayers sound like these days.

I am a theist. I believe in God—most hours of most days. But the God of My Understanding likely doesn’t resemble yours, not exactly.

Like many of you, I was raised with a very specific God, from a very specific time and place, and with the teachings of one very specific sacred text. I have immense respect for that Way, that tradition of belief. I have an affection for its people. I love many of them deeply, and strive to love all of them conceptually, even when I am alarmed by some of the positions they take—as, I imagine, they may well be alarmed by some of mine.

I have a great respect for all beliefs. A great respect, even, for non-belief. I know some very awesome atheists, who are living more loving, moral lives (in my opinion) than many who claim specific religious faith. I believe the God of My Understanding has their souls, their eternities, firmly in hand … and I believe they have nothing to fear. Perfect love, after all, casts out fear. A being who is light, in whom there is no darkness, is not a being anyone should ever fear.

I am a perennialist, panpsychist, theist who suffers occasional bouts of agnosticism (when I wander into the quicksand of Think-Too-Much).

Prayer and my own lazy brand of meditation are my primary spiritual practices. And trying to live the values I pray about.

We are the same, you and I. Made up of invisible particles. Born of flawed human parents, raised to believe this way or that way by our families, churches, schools, and cultures. Most of us are pretty sure we have the right belief and everyone else is wrong. How lucky for us.

We believe our God will save us and condemn everyone else.  “I command you to love, worship, and obey me. If you don’t, it’s everlasting torture (or, at the least, alienation, at best, obliteration) for you.” This, it would seem, is how love and justice operate in many religions.

That is no longer my religion. It can’t be. This idea I was raised with has completely crumbled for me. It is not comprehensible. It is not coherent. It is not loving. It’s a celestial dictatorship.

Yet, here I am, with my praying and meditating and believing in the God of My Understanding.

Weird, huh?

My faith doesn’t look like yours, but it calls me to love and respect you just as you are.

It seems like it should be easy for the whole world to have this kind of inclusive, tolerant view. A world where the agreed-upon idea of “sin” or “crime” is simply “causing harm to another person.”

Would that be such a terrible place to arrive?

I ask you with sincerity.

Peace, friends.