GOD-centric :

A life centered on the pursuit of a good and fair God of love

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Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)

No Golden Fleece

  As I regained equilibrium and thereby lost the desperate need that fueled my quest, I began to let go of the idea that I was going to find a replacement for my childhood relationship with God. I refocused my attention to being grateful for what I had found. Through all these meanderings among different religions and philosophies, I had noticed patterns within myself: I responded negatively when God was attributed with qualities that contradicted goodness and fairness and I distrusted dogmatic representations of belief that denied God's mystery and foolhardily claimed complete mastery of God's truth. I had become far cozier with my hopeful uncertainty. I had formulated that God was about transformation, not transaction. There would be no exchange of proper doctrinal belief for salvation. The life of faith was the ongoing transformation towards God. I now understood that I would probably never again rest in solid assurance but I would have the joy of continually growing and transforming as I engaged God through engaging life.

  In the next chapter, I am going to share my God statement with you which is a culmination of this quest but I think you should know that I did not develop the statement right away. Once the major thrust of my quest ended when I was twenty-two, I was satiated. I had flooded myself with information and I decided that I needed to give that deluge time to seep into me so it could nourish me and transform into wisdom. So I lived some life and then wrote my original God statement when I was twenty-nine.