Me and God part One

Today in church it occurred to me that my relationship with God has been a long enduring search for understanding. There have been times in my life that I had no idea who or what he was yet feared the fact that He was going to burn my soul in Hell for eternity. There were times I didn’t believe in Him at all; times He was in everything, every molecule, and He was merely the energy that held the universe together; Times the possibility that our universe and all things were no more than a test tube experiment, or that we were one small cell in some giant body. Where I am today after all these years is back to where I could have been when I started trying to choose my life. I am still trying to understand something I believe in, I believe because of observation, study, and most recently because of a simple statement I heard someone else say, “I know there is a God because every day the sun comes up and every day the sun sets, because the tide of the oceans always come in and the go out.” I thought at the time that this was a simplistic poor example because everybody knows those things occur because of the natural order of the universe, the sun the moon etc.. The more I considered how this person could have picked many more astute reasons for belief in God the more I understood the reasons for my own belief. Not only the reasons but the how of that belief. The simple and the complex could not be one and the same as a result of random spontaneous action. There has to be a intellect of high ability to create such a model. The description of this intellect for most of us is God.
Faith is a slow creeping fact of life. We rely on it for a portion of our beliefs in all things that we don’t really understand, and God is at the top of those things. For a time in my life faith in God was absent in my life, partially out of choice and partially because those who were teaching me about God proved they were mere people the same as the rest of us. They all had warts of some kind, personas that were not true to that which they were attempting to push into the heads of their students.
I was raised Catholic. At the time I was growing up the Church was quite different than that of today. I was raised on a ranch near a small town in Eastern Oregon. My religious training for the first few years consisted of two weeks of summer schooling with the visiting nuns. What I learned was that I enjoyed meeting all the new kids from the surrounding towns and farms, and I liked the music, and the nuns and the parish priest were very special human beings far unlike the rest of us. I also found out that if I didn’t confess my sins and faults to the priest. and promise that I would never again be bad again, it was a trip to Hell for me. This is where and how I learned God was one to fear and it was virtually impossible to please Him all the time. My faith at this time in my life was that The Fire was basically inevitable.
As I prepared to become a high school freshman in my little town my dad had an entirely different thing in mind for me. His idea was that I would come to no good in my little comfortable high school so a nice Catholic boarding school some four hundred miles away would be just the ticket. Needless to say this was a shock to my system, which would be even worse than being a country boy who knew no more about city life than the small amount of time spent at school in his little home town. Larger shocks were in the making.
On my way to the school, the first time I had ever been on a four lane highway, little did I know that it would be one of many firsts. I envisioned the school as a kind of religious training camp with the students all packing the catechism books and bibles around, and groups of holy, holy priests to show us the things we needed to learn to be better people. My first eye opening experience occurred about three hours after my parents had introduced me to the principle, got me settled in with the dorm rector, and left me there.
For a country boy, in my little town, I had kept myself up quite well with fads of the time. I sported what was then called a Princeton haircut which was basically a crew cut on top with long sides combed to the back into a ducktail. I had also picked up the habit of smoking cigarettes ( that is another marble of life in and of itself). These two little tidbits were catamount to my first what the heck. As I was enjoying my first cigarette in the smoking area I was confronted by a guy about twice my size who grabbed me by the shoulder and informed me that I was in an upper classman area and my presence there would never happen again. He also informed me that only punks wore DA’s (referring to the back of my hair as a ducks ass). Needless to say my idea, regarding the bible packing student body, quickly evaporated into an awareness that little hundred and fifteen pound new comers were in a place of danger. The second situation informed my mind that priests were not just Gods men but they were capable of just as many faults as anybody else. Maybe even worse, because of their position as proposed holy stand ins for Christ. To this day I still have a strong and dangerous reaction to bullies and people who misuse position. It was at this school that my loss of faith began its trek.