Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome (Notes)

A Memoir of Humor and Healing by Reba Riley

It is possible to honor God of one religion through the rituals of another.

Religion is simply a tool to put God’s love into words and symbols. Doctrine is only useful to the extent it enhances your understanding of that love. God doesn’t care about your religion, cares about your heart. The only true religion is love.

God will meet you wherever you are or aren’t. I used to think my doubts and questions were what kept me from God but now I know that they brought me closer. Sometimes the greatest miracle happens when you are willing to say I don’t believe. Help me.

There is nowhere God isn’t. Even when you thought you were running away you were always running toward. God will never let you go, not for a single moment, nothing you can do or not do can keep you from God.

Meditation

Be still and know that I am God requires stilling as a prerequisite to knowing.

Meditation is where God separates truth from illusion.

Meditation means stilling your mind enough to let light in.  The discipline of doing nothing and thinking nothing, we reach a state of peace that surpasses our worldly understanding.  And in the silence, we allow God’s deepest work: redemption of our mind.  How do we meditate?  We close our eyes, begin to breathe slowly and deeply, remain silent, or use a mantra.

We do not seek a feeling in meditation; we seek redemption of our minds and union with our Creator.

This is prayer, this is meditation. Make your life a prayer. Live your meditation.

You pray, I pray, this all same.

Meditative water, slipped under the surface tension, floating underwater, breathed in and out without thinking about it. I wasn’t conscious or unconscious, I simply was. I was part of the Godiverse, and I was the Godiverse. I was floating in the current of energy I always felt from the monk and others, the same Energy that often tingled my scalp. peaceful weightlessness. Buoyant meditation.

Fasting

Yom Kippur is a day of fasting where you repent of the old and promise to be better.  It’s about making peace with God and others, but it’s also about staking a claim of the generations of people who came before you, to the religion of your people.

All your loss is actually gain. This is the meaning of fasting. Your meditation and mantra will help you see. May God take charge of your schedule and give you the time you need to practice meditation.

Where I stop, an unfathomable Source of strength begins. Never again do I have to fear coming to the end of myself, because there is no end; there is only ever a continual, beautiful, beginning.

My mantra was always inside my untidy life, hidden amidst all my daily cares. All I’d had to do to find it was sit down, be at rest within the mess, and listen. Jesus Rama Krishna Christo Abba Allah-lleluia

Forgiveness

Life’s real victories happen when we embrace forgiveness, when we set aside hate in favor of life, when we choose to look for God even if it hurts.

True healing always begins with forgiveness.
Sometimes God must break us down to break us through.

Lord have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Idea of mercy made me think of God as a harsh judge sentencing a criminal, then knocking a few years off for good behavior, and the name Christ unnerved me.

Why do so many people believe that if I seek the truth with an open mind I’ll end up thinking exactly as they do?

God is like a Disco Ball

I think my faith is a lot like your Sunday sandwich.  To outsiders, it’s a sandwich with an identity crisis, but to your family it’s a mishmash of deliciousness.  I’ve taken a lot of faiths and jammed them together in a way that may look confusing to others but makes perfect sense to me.  My new faith embodied opposing forces, but felt mysteriously in balance.  As for God, I think God is a lot like a disco ball.  Like a round diamond with millions of facets.  You have a facet; I have a facet, everyone has a facet.  God spins in the space between us, reflecting the light in each of our perspectives.

I think a diamond is such a beautiful way to explain God, but what’s even more beautiful is how your face shines when you talk about it, like you’re lit up from within.

Divine light is in all of us, we are all part of the I AM, all part of the Universe’s vibrating energy. Sink into the Light within and embody all that is.

Every soul was a mirror: each reflecting light and dark; each joined with others to form this beautiful picture of Truth that is too large for any one of us to understand alone.

Faith

The Amish minister preached on the same passage as the virtual minister in Second Life, and the intersection of the two belief systems struck me.  An ocean apart in practice but similar in core beliefs, they were probably closer on the Divine Disco ball than either would realize.  The Amish represented the faith of the past, shunning of technology in exchange for a peaceful way of life.  Second Life represented faith of the future:  pushing the bounds of technology in exchange for a global community.  The Amish existed without technology; Second Life existed only because of it, and I existed somewhere between the two.  The two acts – loving God and loving each other – are connected by faith.  If we love God, we will love one another.  In our devotion to God, we should be devoted to each other.

“Every man should respect command respect in the moment when he bows before his god. We may believe his conception of the Divine lacks valuable even quintessential elements. His forms of worship may appear to us bizarre, sometimes repellent. But in that moment of prayer, every man is at his best; if we are as wise as we like to think ourselves, it is then we will try to understand him.”

Being Broken

Just because we do not feel it immediately does not mean we have not been healed. Time is an illusion; your healing already exists.

Everything lost is found again, everything hurt is healed again, despair turns to hope, sorrow to joy, want to abundance, may you never hunger, may you never thirst, blessed be

This is why being broken is so beautiful; being broken means you have cracks for love and light to shine through, gaps for the Godiverse to burrow and bloom, space to move from the person you were to the person you will become.   Being broken means healing can find you and hope can gush forth like a geyser, following every part of you, until you can see why the breaking was necessary in the first place: to give birth to you.

So I rested my healed spirit and broken body in this deep pool of hope, choosing to be thankful for both what I had and what I lacked.  Because real victories?  Real victories happen in weakness, where strength is closer than your very next breath.

I picked all of them and none of them. I chose something much bigger than religion: Love. I think all religions are equally incapable of containing God.