I am not God--or Am I?

You have heard the saying, “All I need to know about God is that I’m not It.” It’s one of those newcomer “keep it simple things”, and we often hear it told as in, “When I asked my first sponsor about God he told me, “All you need to know is…”

And fair enough. Before recovery and in early recovery we acted like bad gods—ruining our lives, trying to run other people’s lives, so we needed that jerk to the back of our collar.

But then we enter a spiritual path and begin the long, long journey to a personal Higher Power and there are some surprises along the way. We start to discover the still, small voice within—and realize it is, in fact, within us. We re-read the literature and there is Dr. Bob and Bill W. talking about meditation to hear our Higher Power by listening inside ourselves.

Then maybe we join a faith community or we begin to read and learn that ancient spiritual teachers like Saint Augustine in his autobiography says that he searched everywhere for God only to realize that, “You were more inward than my inmost self, and superior to my highest being.”

And the Franciscan theologian, Saint Bonaventure, wrote in his Soliloquy, “God is the One who is closer to you than you are to yourself.”

Or you discover a modern theologian like Ilia Delio who writes, “If the will of God is God’s love for us, then we would have to admit that the will of God is not outside us but first and foremost within us.”  She also writes, “We do not have to search high and low to find God’s love. We we simply have to look in a mirror to see who we are, because in who we are God also is.”

And so you begin to ask again, “What about God?” And now, in later recovery the answer may truly be, “All you need to know about God is that you are (in)  Him.”