Claiming God

Rainer Maria Rilke’s words come to me these days as I find more truth behind this broken relationship that as long made it’s stay on my heart this year.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is the live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I feel like I am finally starting to live my way into an answer. An answer for why I could not stay with Fady. I have spent the last six months still bearing the painful “why,” unable to really understand. The break-up was on his terms and his terms only. But it is finally becoming my terms and that feels so good and the heaviness lightens significantly.
“God,” he, an atheist, said. “It is about God.” As a Unitarian Universalist and as someone who believes in the reason-defying qualities of love, I believed with all of my heart that we would work through this- Our love was stronger than this label- related divide.
And now, I realize, he was right. Ok, so God did divide us. But it’s not a God held by clouds holding a wand and interacting from afar. It’s not even a God such as that I believe in- a higher power that moves in and among all sentient beings, opening us up, calling us closer to life. It’s the God that is community. God as our pull out of our isolated existence towards a greater cause of societal transformation. God is not a cerebral choice to “maybe” participate in community… mmm… tomorrow? It is a deep human need for community. For in order to know ourselves, we must seek the Other. It is a deep feeling that we need each other in order to grow. This is the center of the God I believe in.
It doesn’t concern me whether one finds their power in something beyond or within humanity. Theist or humanist can worship together when there is mutual desire to grow and deepen as spiritual and response-able beings in this hurting world. It concerns me that one opens oneself to change, to transformation, through relationship and commitment.

By opening ourselves to change, we create change. There is no other way. At last, this loss is on my terms. And with it, I find a renewed sense of self, calling, and devotion to the transformational power of God/community.