Falling Out with God

While I was thinking about what I wanted to write about this week, I started to wonder how the journey began, the one that has led me to my current beliefs, those soul-deep things that I am absolutely certain about. The very best place to start would be, of course, the beginning - the time when I made my first life decisions and took the first steps onto a path and a life of my own making.

It was 1966, my family lived in Toronto and I was 11 years old. My mother was very ill. In fact she was dying, although I didn't know it at the time. I had been raised as a Catholic, attending church almost every Sunday but when Mom got too ill to get out of bed we stopped going. She was admitted to hospital some time in the Spring of '66. I would take a bus and then the street car to Holy Rosary church once or twice a week, on my own. There I would light a candle before slipping into a pew to say a few Hail Marys while I asked God to take care of my mother and make her well. Every night I said my prayers, asking for the same thing. I made sure to remind Him that my brother was just 6 and needed his mom. I promised to be good, to do all the housework, to do better in school, anything ... just make my Mom better, please. I even took confession every few weeks just to be sure I didn't have too many sins piling up that could be used to prevent my prayers from being answered.

So when my mother passed away early in October my young faith was shattered. I could not comprehend how a loving and caring God could take such a wonderful and needed person; how He could have ignored months and months of heart-felt prayers. My mother wasn't a bad person - she didn't deserve to die, and my family weren't bad either - we didn't deserve to lose her. Since there was nothing wrong with my family, the logical conclusion was that there was something wrong with my God. 

I asked the priest at the church why God would be so cruel. He told me the usual "God works in mysterious ways" tripe, and that it wasn't up to us to question God's choices, we just had to accept them. This stuck in my craw for some weeks until early in the new year of 1967, when I decided to have one last chat with God. I told Him how He had hurt our family by taking my mom, how I mulled over all I had been taught as well as told about God and his Mercy, how I couldn't understand for the life of me how a benign, loving Deity could ignore the pleas of a child. I told Him I had come to the only conclusions left to me: either God ignores people's prayers and does whatever He wants regardless of how it hurts others, or God doesn't exist. Either way, I did not believe in Him any longer. He failed me when I needed Him the most, and in that failure He shattered my belief in the whole system of religion. I wasn't going to waste my time or breath on Him any more.

There in the darkness of my room that winter evening, I closed the door on God and the Catholic Church. Barely 12 years old, I refused to blindly believe. I didn't yet know what it was I wanted, but I knew for sure what I didn't want. Without hesitation, I turned from that closed door and headed off down the road of my Life. The sky was full of stars and I was not afraid.

So the Journey began.

Into the Mystic

When I walked away from God and the Catholic Church at the ripe old age of 12, I was too young to realize that there is being religious and being spiritual, that there is blind faith and there is belief, and there is a world of difference between those things and sometimes there’s no difference at all. Consequently, when I first headed down the road of my life after wishing God well, I called myself an atheist and wondered how others could allow themselves to be so fooled by religion. 

Now, despite being adamant that there was no God, throughout my early teens I spent a great deal of time searching … at first I couldn’t have told you *what* I was searching for, I just knew there was something missing or lacking, and I needed to find it. I read books on different religions, on spiritualism, on the paranormal, on reincarnation. I found tenets here and beliefs there, philosophies and ideas I could accept, adopt as my own. I soon realized that I was far from being an atheist, so began to call myself an agnostic, using this definition: one who did not believe in God but accepted that there could be “Something Greater” out there.

You know, after her death I’m not sure if I placed mom in “Heaven” – being so young it was hard to discard everything associated with my old religion, and I certainly associated Heaven with God. I know it gave me comfort to think she was an angel, although I certainly didn’t make her into an angel complete with the halo, harp and wings! I just always felt that my mom existed somewhere … beyond. I would talk to her, share worries, ask for guidance … so through those early years Mom was the one I spoke to. She took the place of God in my life.

As the years were passing and I was maturing & evolving in my thought processes, I never once abandoned the thought that my mother was watching over me. She was there, but there was still a need within me for something more ... and somehow I knew I would recognize it when I finally found it.

One beautiful spring night when I was 17 my boyfriend was walking me home and we cut across the town’s golf course. We lived in a small town and this was many, many years ago, so it was very quiet and the sky was a gorgeous midnight blue black with billions of stars strewn like diamonds across it. We were walking and talking when we heard a sort of fizzing sound, like you’d hear if you put your ear next to a glass of pop. We stopped and looked around. There came a faint crackling from overhead, so we looked up. Above us and just behind us, magnificent curtains of Aurora Borealis stretched out from horizon to horizon and seemed to reach from just above our heads to a thousand miles into the night. I’d seen the Northern Lights lots of times; they were common where we lived. But these … these were so close it felt like we could touch them! They rippled and swayed to some cosmic breeze, crackling here and there. They were a phosphorescent green with areas that flowed into yellow or purple and then back to green again. We stood there, absolutely spellbound!

As I looked up into that amazing phenomena, I knew with every fiber of my being that there most certainly was Something More … the connection was re-established, the one that began somewhere in the stars at the beginning of time, and that continues to call to that part of us that remembers it, even today. In that instant I felt as if I had been given Divine Knowledge! Almost simultaneously I had a rush of fear, thinking this vast cosmic curtain was going to split apart and take me through to the Other Side for daring to look in, for daring to see and to realize I’d seen this Great Thing! But instead of taking me this vast, undulating vision suddenly began to rise into the sky, and almost as quickly as it had arrived, the light faded and the sky was empty save for the billions of stars. What felt like an eternity was probably only a few minutes in real life, but they were minutes that transformed me. This was the something I’d been looking for. This was the moment when I understood that there truly was a Higher Power, and it gave me a sense of both connection and completion.

So many years down the road of Life, I can look back at that event, feel the intensity of it, and know that it’s the exact moment SOULshine began. But being a mere mortal, it took me a lot of years and a lot more life experience to gather the rest of the pieces together!

Let the Journey continue!

JUNE - a Time of New Life and New Beginnings

June has been a powerful presence in my life for many years and she holds most of my memorable life moments within her glorious 30 day time span.

My firstborn child came to me on an early evening near the middle of June, with the sky blue as a robin's egg and the earth hot from the day's sun. Five years later my third and last child woke me in the wee hours of this, the last day of June, and made her entrance shortly after the sun had risen, when the shadows were still long and the cool morning air smelled sweet & damp. Just this past week my new grandson made his entrance in the middle of the night, quietly increasing the population of the sleeping city by one very precious person.

Huge milestones such as these, many of my life's "firsts" including starting & ending relationships and even the first steps in discovering myself ... all have happened in June. And this year June has given me more "firsts" to celebrate along with my grandson and my children's birthdays ...

As I mentioned in my first blog, I managed to win the internal battle against my lack of self esteem long enough to hoist a victory flag and launch my fledgling business! While baby birds were testing their wings in the warm June air and taking their first tentative flights, I was also trying to spread my creative wings, let go of my insecurities and allow myself the freedom to believe in me and my ideas. It's a hard thing to do, this stilling of the negative voices ... they really don't like to give up! I've lost the battle many times in the past, sometimes without any chance of winning, sometimes very shortly after what I thought was victory. But something is different this time around - I have a strength of purpose I've never felt before. At least in this context I'm confident my victory will endure.

Something is blossoming inside me and I know my time to shine is at hand. When I close my eyes I see a beautiful flower bud, like a peony or a lotus, in the center of me. It's slowly opening and as it opens a golden white light  radiates out from it's center, and I am filled with this Light. I know that what is unfolding inside of me is part of the reason I won the battle, and winning the battle is part of the reason it has grown and feels so powerful!

June arrived in all her burgeoning beauty, full of promise. She did not disappoint! She is departing, having given me the gift of new beginnings to fill both my heart and my soul. Life is so very good!

Let the journey continue!

"water lilies" photograph by Sheelagh Newton. All rights reserved

Time to Talk - an Inner Dialogue Between Artistic Self & Bluebeard (Negative Me)

This is a whole new world for me! A friend suggested I start blogging just last week. Never thought of it before then. But I realized I DO have things to say, ideas to share, and a light I want to shine for all to see! Funny that this idea is so new, since I toyed with the idea of creating a website for a couple of years and only did it a few weeks ago. I know what you're thinking - sounds like procrastination at it's finest! But it wasn't really that. It was lack of belief in my artistic self. 

I kept letting that voice inside tell me that my creations weren't really all that good, that there were millions more talented people out there than me, and that I wouldn't sell a thing because no-one would want to buy what I had made! It seems stupid to think so negatively about something I love to do, something that makes me feel *so very good* and sets my Soul to singing when I'm doing it. Sadly it was all too easy for self doubt to whisper and eventually shout in my head. No amount of praise from friends and loved ones could get me beyond the taunting dismissal of my work by my own inner mind. As a reader of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes book "Women Who Run With the Wolves" I realized that Bluebeard had moved in on my Artist, and he was doing his finest work on our dreams!!

You see, I have a vision of myself and my world, and it was never going to come to pass if we didn't shut this ugly voice down. I found self worth and self belief for the first time several years ago, and became such a better person for it ... I now needed to do that for the artist in me. So instead of listening and caving in, I began a dialogue between my artistic soul and my negative self. It went something like this:
(Artist in Me): I love this new collage I created!
(Bluebeard): what's the point? you don't do anything with them. No-one will want to buy it.
(Artist in Me): Why not? It's good!
(Bluebeard): There are so many REAL artists out there - this is just stuff you bought or pictures you took, all jumbled together. It's not ART.
(Artist in Me): Lots of people like my work. I don't have to paint or sculpt to be considered an artist. I create my own style of art!


And so it went for many months, the Artist in Me slowly getting the upper hand, until one day I realized that Bluebeard wasn't so loud, didn't leap in as quickly as before, and had less to say about why I wouldn't make it! It was clear that we had negativity on the run, and the time was right to take action!


Don't get the wrong idea - I know and have always known that I might not "make it" selling my creations. But if I didn't try, then it's a given that I would *never* succeed and then Bluebeard / Negative Me would have won. I was able to overcome my fear and my self doubt to create and publish a website. Now, I'm trying a blog as well. I look upon these things as major accomplishments, great victories for the Artistic Soul!


Let the Journey continue!