I’ve been reading a lot of spiritual books (again) lately. I seem to go in cycles, where I inhale everything I can get my hands on, and then stop reading while everything processes.
Lately I’ve been pondering the idea of Truth-with-a-capital-T. It seems to me that the Truth shows up everywhere, across religions and spiritual disciplines. Love each other. Forgive. Don’t put too much stock in the trappings of life. Recognize that everyone is here for a reason, and everyone is a child of the Divine. (Yes, even the asshole who cut you off on the freeway this morning. Even the boy- or girlfriend who cheated on you. Even your narcissistic parent. Even them.)
But it seems like we each get that message a little differently. For some it’s wrapped in a specific religion, for others in a “spiritual-not-religious” paradigm, for some people it’s in nature and for others it’s written in books and scrolls.
I come back to this over and over, to be honest, this idea that God speaks to us in different ways – or more precisely, in exactly the way we need to hear. God is always talking, the Universe is always communicating, but each of us responds to some messages better than others.
It’s like a radio – if you turn on the radio, there are a million types of music to listen to. Maybe you like pop, or alternative, or country, or jazz. Maybe you’re a rap fan, an opera fan, an R&B fan. Maybe you’re all showtunes, all the time, or only listen to Christian pop. The point is, all those types of music are MUSIC. You might not like them all, not all of them might raise the hair on your arms and give you chills – but they’re all music, nonetheless.
God is music. It’s always playing, in different ways, different tunes, different genres, sending out infinite variations so that everyone has a chance to hear the music in a way that makes them stop, and breathe, and PAY ATTENTION. If opera brings you to tears, but you don’t like country music at ALL, that’s ok. Someone else is listening to country and wonders how you could POSSIBLY connect so deeply with opera. But they’re both music.
We get caught in the dogmas, in the doubt, when we start thinking that our TYPE of music is the ONLY type. When we deny that rap is music, because everyone knows that music is SUNG, not SPOKEN. In religion, when we announce that people who don’t think exactly the same way we do will be punished.
So how do we find God? How do we sort through the ego-bullshit to find the Truth-with-a-capital-T? How do we know if we’re listening to music? How do we know that what we choose to believe is a good thing?
Honestly? If the “music” you listen to – that is to say, if the beliefs you choose to believe – are joy-affirming, and growth-affirming; if they bring you to a place of non-judgement, and forgiveness, and love (for yourself and those around you), then you’re listening to God-music.
If what you’re choosing to believe brings you anger, or an “us-vs.-them” mentality, or judgement, well, there could be a couple of things at work.
Either you need a different type of music – a different religion, a different belief system – or you’re hearing an unbalanced version of the song(s). That is to say, if you play a song with the bass all the way up and the treble all the way down, you’re not really getting the full effect of the music: you’re hearing one part overwhelmingly and not hearing the other part at all.
You can see this in some interpretations of religious traditions: the more people get wrapped up in the “rules,” the more we turn up the bass, and the more we overlook the commonalities – the Truth-with-a-capital-T – the more we turn down the treble. Pretty soon we’re only hearing the bass, and we’re not really hearing the music (or the message) the way it was meant to be heard.
Find the belief – the “music genre” – that brings you to a place of love and joy and peace and forgiveness. And then don’t forget that other beliefs/genres are still music, too.
P.S. If you think you might be listening to talk radio instead of music, turn it off! That ish is enough to make anyone angry and crazy. 😉
So, tell me . . . what are your favorite ways of hearing God?
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