Sacred Sundays

Today is Easter. I’m not Christian but I am also all religions and none at the same time. That’s how I roll. I want to take this holiday as a moment to contemplate.  

I know it’s old fashioned of me but I like to devote my Sundays to spirituality. I do this to remind myself that I am the most important component in this thing I call my life. I do this to tend to myself. 

So where is god in all this? I believe god is inside me, that she is in fact me, that I am her. 

Do I think god is female? Absolutely not, have you looked around at the world? Only a male could do this...

But in all seriousness, this idea that I think god and me are one may sound a little presumptuous to many people. What makes me think I am god? The truth is I think you are god. I think all together we are God. I think we are all little gods. “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”--Jesus

What does it mean to be god? I think it means to love. To love it all. The agony and the ecstasy. The yin and the yang. The dark and the light. The real and the unreal. The illusion and the truth. 

I love. That is my primary purpose in this existence. 

Today I will do the dishes listening to my spiritual books on my new Air Pods and pay attention to the warm water on my hands. And the suds. I will look out the window and be mindful, and notice the birds and the trees and flowers trying to make it out of the April ground.

I will notice myself in the mirror and be thankful that I am. There is a famous line in the Bible where god says, “I am that I am.”  A lot of spiritual masters talk about this line. We are. We are that we are.

What does that even mean? It means everything. We are all of it. I am you and you are me. I am not just god, but I am also you. How can I be you if I don’t even know you? What does that even mean?

I am of the belief that we are all one. That is one of the teachings in my religion, Sikhi. What does it mean to be one with everything?

It does not mean that we are the same. I am not the same as a worm. I am not the same as a butterfly. I am not the same as the Dali Lama nor am I the same as that truck driver who just rode by my house. We are not the same but we are intrinsically connected. Our souls are made of the same substance, the substance of divinity. Whether you want to call it god or love or Allah or any other name. 

We are all made of this spirit. This spirit expresses itself in various unique forms. I am one of those forms. So are you. We are simply smaller parts of that a larger mosaic.

This, of course, is just a theory, and feel free to disagree with it. I’m sure you have your own theory about who we are and what it is all about. And it is good that we all have our own story about how it is. It would be so boring if we all agreed, wouldn’t it?

What would we do, what would we argue about and fight about if we all thought the exact same things?

So while we are in quarantine we could take this opportunity to think about why we are so obsessed with other people believing the same things we do. I mean even if you think the Easter Bunny is your lord and savior, who am I to judge?

So just because I am not a Christian, that does not mean that I do not honor the beauty of Jesus Christ. I don’t know what it means to be saved, and I know there are those who believe I will not be saved unless I accept Christ as my savior. And I’m actually OK with not being saved. 

I am of the humble belief that I am the only one who can save myself. I am also of the belief that I have no idea what salvation or enlightenment means. I just know I have felt moments of ecstasy in meditation that I like to call glimpses into nirvana. I have felt love for the entire universe, in one moment, and then gone right back to my selfish life where all I think about is myself. 

I have been it all, perfect and totally and utterly imperfect. I have had moments where I knew it all and loved life. However, most of my moments are filled with inquiry and expression. I feel my purpose is to question, discover, and create who and what I am. And in the end, I am love.

That is all I think we are. 

We can fight over how that love manifests and forms and does its thing. But that is all I believe we are in the end. 

I think we are made of love and an expression of what love looks like. We are what love looks like when it gets a chance to love. 

nina