A letter to God

I wrote this letter to God a couple of days ago in a moment of clarity after expressing some anger at God. I still feel very much like I'm at the bottom of a difficult mountain to climb, and unsure of who I am and how to proceed from here, but on re-reading it this morning I felt that there was enough truth in it (and enough fear of negative feedback!) for me to go ahead and post it.

14 April

Dear God,

As you well know, I've had a pretty crap last 24 hours, actually a pretty crap 2 ¾ years. But just now I'm feeling a bit more 'myself' or at least I hope it is me. It was suggested to me yesterday that since I was very small, since before I can remember, I've allowed assorted spirits to direct my life and that resulted in me feeling awful, very 'yuk' inside, and also very afraid, not knowing where to go from here.

Because I was wondering what was 'real me' and what was not, and feeling I'd been taken for quite a ride, studying for most of my life on behalf of some spirit, perhaps taking up all sorts of pastimes to satisfy someone else's addiction, denying my own feelings and in some unintentional way choosing to feel someone else's.

One thing I queried was my long-held view of you, which is both the punishing God of my early childhood and the loving-father God of my teens and beyond. I've not questioned why I might have two opposite versions of how I see you until now, but when I ask myself which God my very small self believes in there is no question in my mind that it is the punishing God. And I'm left wondering if in fact the other version is just what some spirits (and I) would like me to believe.

Why? Because when I see you as a loving tender parent I can be a lovable little girl who feels actually quite sad but knows her Father won't get angry or make her feel bad about herself.

And for a long time I've retreated to this position, telling myself I would learn to trust you and love you and in time I would feel your love for me too.

But I'm still waiting. It strikes me that I've been waiting all my life. My little boy age about two was once in the bedroom holding up a large poster that had started falling off the wall while he was playing, calling out to me to come so that the poster would not be damaged as it fell. But then I heard no more and, being preoccupied (with less important things!) I assumed the situation had sorted itself. However after several minutes I heard his undemanding gravelly voice calling out, 'I'm waiting and waiting' and hurried in to see him quietly holding up the poster as best he could. I still feel the pain of how he must have felt in there, wondering why his mummy would not come to help him. And I guess that is my pain, waiting for you to love me.

But I have learned to wrap this in a variety of covers: zoning out for much of my life, but over the last few years increasingly indulging in self-pity and self-blame etc and so now I notice that I spend a lot of my time feeling quite heavy, struggling to do what I feel I have been taught is the Right Thing.

And I feel sure this heavy feeling hasn't gone for good but this afternoon I thought maybe that the truth is that the Real Me is very angry at what I still believe is you as God-the-punisher and that the other view of you is perhaps only a borrowed idea, not my own really. So I set off to see if I could express some anger. Actually I only got as far as being angry that I 'had to' do this anger stuff, angry that again I was 'having' to do something I didn't want to do.

But I notice that my head is clear for now, and it feels quite a bit like I'm me again. Still with lots and lots of anger to get through I know, but not bogged down, and definitely not feeling like I want to sit on your lap and be your little girl – which is a surprisingly good feeling.

Because my sense is that I've been kidding myself into believing that you will only make me feel good. But now I see that that's impossible while there are painful truths about myself I have yet to acknowledge. It makes much more sense that the real you (who neither punishes nor helps us gloss over the truth) has arranged the universe in such a way that the more truthful I am about myself the more real I feel, the less 'heavy'.

So I guess I'm just warning you that I want to get stuck into this feeling of anger I have at you - and at the world. I haven't wanted to pay it attention until now, judging myself for not being a 'good little girl', but at the moment I see it as the 'truth' I hold that you've been waiting for me to offload. And while I stay with this goal I have a feeling that I may not feel particularly loved by you but I will feel much more myself and clear-headed than I've been for a while now.

I will be asking for your help to be angry at you! And I hope to remember that waiting to feel your love for me while I deny the truth of how I really feel is not somewhere I want to return to.

Love

Karen