A Shared Philosophy

By Brielle Goodman
Johns Hopkins University
(KOACH-On-Campus Editor)

The concept of God is one with which I have struggled for a long time. I have had conversations with close friends of varying faiths and I still have not found something that fully works for me.

To me, God is something very personal for everyone – something that cannot be defined by any authority, other than yourself. No one can teach you what God is. God is a spiritual feeling which is different for everyone.

My concept of God has changed over time as I have gained the ability to think more critically for myself. When I was in elementary school, we studied Greek and Roman mythology. I knew both the stories of mythology and the stories of the Bible had to do with God. Mythological and biblical stories were both from ancient times. And mythology taught that God was this big, fat guy sitting on a golden throne sitting on a cloud looking down at people throwing lightning bolts. Reading these stories of Zeus or Jupiter as a fourth grader led me to believe that our Jewish God was the same "big, fat guy on his golden throne." The Greek and Roman god was the same God that told Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt, told Noah to build an Ark and ruined Sodom and Gomorrah. One threw lightning bolts and the other drowned the world. It made sense to me as a fourth grader.

As I hit middle school, I still was not sure what to think of God. I didn’t like thinking of God as this omnipotent being sitting on a cloud overhead, (after all, what happened when it wasn’t cloudy? Did God leave us?) yet I didn’t know how else to think of God. My thinking was still in the concrete realm, attempting to roll into the abstract realm, but not having much success. It was frustrating.

Then I went into high school, and my concept of God changed a couple of times. During my sophomore year, I lived in Montana. I was in an English class at the local high school and the topic of God came up. (I do not remember how it came up. This was at the time when the "God in public schools" controversy exploded.) The topic was specifically how we thought of God. One boy in the class who was Baptist suggested an idea that I tweaked just slightly and found that I could make work for me too. The idea was that there is a soul within each of us and in our souls, there is a small part of God. That part of us connects to that part of everyone else on the planet to form what Ralph Waldo Emerson called an "Over Soul." In this way, we are all the children of God, because we all have a part of God within us and put together, we all create God -- yet each person’s concept of God is unique to them. This concept really moved me. It struck a chord that made me feel peaceful. All of our souls are connected intangibly and we all have our own unique personal connection to God. To some extent, I still hold on to this concept. This abstract vision of God as an intangible spirit that moves us all, uniting everyone in special moments, creates a spiritual warmth inside of me. It makes me feel like we are all responsible for our own destiny, as well as being responsible for each other. In this way, we all really are brothers and sisters. It’s all about the spirituality of it all.

Later in high school, when I moved back to California, I lived with a Catholic family, who I’d known since I was two years old. While living with them, I had a discussion with the mother of the household. She was by far the most religiously open-minded among them. She took things from many religions and melds them together, to create her own personal philosophy about religion. During the year I lived with them, she and I had several discussions about various topics in religion: afterlife, dogma, God, etc. It helped to open both of our minds to other philosophies and other ways of life. I realized that we both pick and choose what we believe in our individual religions, based on what makes sense to each of us. I described Emerson’s idea of soul to her and she took it and twisted it in her own way to make it her own: she added some things, subtracted others, and fit it into her own philosophy of God. Through my discussion with her, my concept of God changed a little more, in that it became even less concrete. I no longer imagined invisible strings going from every person in the world, up to this big bubble in the sky, creating this overarching concept of soul.

As she and I discussed God more and more, I realized that God isn’t really an invisible bubble, but rather, a spiritual feeling that connects all of us, regardless of our faith. God is present in all of us, whether we pray to Adonai, Allah, Christ, Buddha, Zeus, Jupiter, or any other god, named or nameless. The fact that we all believe in some spirituality that is larger than our mere selves - a spirituality that brings us warmth, courage, strength, and love – unites everyone on our planet. And that is extremely special. This is the point that we lose sight of all too often. We need to focus on what brings us together and unites us all, rather than the minor points of religion that tear us apart. Every religion teaches love and kindness. Let us embrace that message of religion, rather than worrying about the details of worship or how many gods we worship. Let us be connected and united. After all, regardless of religion, we are all the children of God.

[Posted 5/19/04]