5 - My childhood glimpse of being Love

This story goes way back to my childhood. After it happened it got buried totally in my memory for several decades, but when I look back now, I can feel how this one brief incident was there in my subconscious driving a yearning whose origination I couldn't quite place...

I was probably 8 or 9 years old. I was in the back seat of our car as my family was making the five-hour drive from our home in southern Minnesota to our cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior, which we did several times a year. I think it must have been winter, because it was dark, and if it had been summer, we would have arrived already before it got dark. So it was winter, and we were getting close to arriving, and it was dark, and I was sitting in the back seat of our car. My mom was in the front passenger seat, and my dad was driving. My brother must have been sitting on the other side of the back seat, too, but I don't remember that detail.

In my memory, I'm actually sitting crouched down on the floor behind the driver's seat. We could do that in those days because there were no seat belts in cars. This detail about the location of my body resides in my memory for some reason, though it's not that important for the story.

What happened is that I suddenly was filled with a feeling of Love -

-  like I had suddenly become the conduit for a very warm feeling of wanting my parents to be happy and at peace

- a visceral Knowing that this Love is what I was here to BE for the people in my life.

I had suddenly remembered what I had come here to do. I was here to BE LOVE.

(It occurs to me, writing this, that the word "love" did not come to mind, but the feeling of the energy has no better word to describe it, even if that same word is used to describe a ton of things that are NOT this powerful and invincibly warm energy that came through me)

It came seemingly out of nowhere but felt like something I had always known

- but had completely forgotten about until that moment.

I couldn't believe I had forgotten!

And I was so grateful that I had remembered!

I felt so invincible and powerful and elated that I had finally remembered what I was here for!

Instead of feeling like I needed love FROM my parents, and needing them to love each other, which is what I had been feeling up to that point, I felt instead that I could be the one who loved THEM! And this felt SO MUCH BETTER than feeling like I needed them to love me.

I could feel how much they longed for unconditional love and acceptance, and I knew that I could be the one to give it to them!

And it felt so good to know I could do that for my parents, because I LOVED them so much!

I am (sort of) sorry for all the capital letters in this paragraph, but IT FELT SO AMAZING.

There I was, little me, on the floor of the back seat of the car as it was going down the road, and I could feel myself radiating this incredible warm Love to the people in the car.

What a relief to be a Radiater of Love instead of a hungry needer of love!

....

And then we arrived at our cabin. I tried to hold on to the feeling that had overtaken me. But I don't think it even survived getting out of the car.

It went away just as fast as it had come.

Swallowed back into the dark.

I was left with little me, without the love, with my parents bickering, my mind confused, and feeling defeated.

I had felt, while the Love was here, that it was so strong and so much WHO I WAS that it couldn't possibly ever go away again, now that I had remembered.

It didn't even occur to me that I might have to make some effort to keep it flowing. And it receded so rapidly I didn't have a chance to even try.

Feeling into the memory, it seems I must have been very angry. Angry at where-ever this Love had come from, for taking it away. It certainly wasn't my idea or intention to have it disappear...

By the time the next day came around, that huge love had become so inaccessible again, I don't think I even remembered what had happened the night before.

I think I must have sealed the whole experience off from memory, to avoid the pain of its absence.

       -------------------

Echoes into the future...

My parents didn't go to church when I was growing up, so I didn't either. Somehow, though, I had heard about this entity called God. And at some point, at some age, which I can't pinpoint, a longing arose in me to know more about this entity.

I had an inexplicable but inescapable feeling that if this entity were actually real, then I should be able to actually have some experience of it, besides being just some story in a book. What was the use of having some Being out there, if they never actually made themselves available to our direct experience?

Looking back on it, I think I must have, on some unconscious level, remembered the night I felt myself as LOVE, and made some connection between this experience of Love, and this being called God that people talked about. There was a yearning I couldn't explain, and I didn't know what to do about it. I think I was actually yearning to feel that powerful Love again.

I remember a day when I was probably a little older than when I'd felt the Love, when I decided to try talking to God, and I said, "If you are real, then give me some sign." The day proceeded, and I had sort of forgotten about asking for a sign, but then that evening, (as it happens, we were in the car again, as a family, this time driving back to our home from the cabin,) as the sun was setting, there were colorful sunset clouds, and one of the clouds was a bright horizontal line across the sky, and then there was a bright jet-trail that was coming straight up from the horizon and crossing the bright horizontal line, and together they formed a cross. By this time I knew that the cross was a symbol that represented God, because it was on every church building, though I'm not sure I knew the exact meaning.

So I was pretty excited for a minute, because I felt that this was the sign I had asked for. But then I realized that even though it was a visual sign, I didn't actually feel anything different when seeing this cross in the sky than I felt looking at any other pattern in the sky. So I felt let down, and doubted that this cross actually meant anything at all.

Then there was the time I went to church with my friend in 6th grade, because I had stayed overnight at her house on Saturday night. She went to Sunday school on Sunday morning, and she invited me to come along. I was interested in what this would be like. There were only me and my friend in the class, with a nice middle-aged lady as the teacher. There was some workbook they were working on and the nice lady would ask me questions that had to do with the Bible, and I was clueless about all of it.

She realized that I was "in need of salvation," so she asked if I wanted to ask Jesus into my heart and be saved. This sounded like what I had been yearning for! So I gladly agreed and repeated the words that she told me to say. But to my great disappointment, after saying the words, I didn't actually feel different in any way than I had felt before I said the words... I think that buried memory of Love is what made me understand that there was something different that I should really feel, if God were actually there with me.

Fast forward another four years, and I had survived the excruciating alienation of being an adolescent in junior high school, and made it through the first year of high school. That summer, my brother's best friend talked a lot about Jesus, and about being born again. He was genuinely nice to me, and was very warm and charismatic, and so when he invited my brother and I to join him at a "crusade" happening at our high school auditorium at the end of the summer, I was excited to come along.

The preacher finished the rousing sermon he had given, and then gave the invitation for people who felt "called" to come forward to accept Jesus as their savior. I was sobbing as I went up to the front. I repeated the same kind of words I had repeated when I had been in Sunday school with my friend years earlier, but for some reason, this time, I felt a flood of Love coming into my heart.

(Looking back through the lens if remembering the glimpse of being Love as a child, which I didn't remember at the time, I can discern that this feeling of Love at the crusade was strong, and a big relief to feel, but it was not as intense, and also felt like it was coming into me from outside, rather than coming through me going out...)

The "crusade" organization had recruited people from churches in our town to take each one of those who had come forward that night into the auditorium's adjoining band rehearsal room, and we each had an individual counselor to help us understand our new status as someone who had been "born again." My counselor was a lovely young woman who was the youth group leader at a Lutheran church in town. She made me feel understood and seen and helped me understand how to nurture this newly sprouted relationship with God. I cried through the whole conversation with her.

Something real happened that night. I felt the real presence of some divine Love that I had been yearning for. Not only that, but because my brother's friend was part of a group of young Christians, I suddenly had a whole group of friends who were all excited about the same thing I was. We had Bible studies in the high school counseling office every Friday morning before school started. Prior to this, I had really only a couple friends, and didn't feel particularly close to either of them. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a whole group of friends who all genuinely loved each other, and had a common set of motivations and values.

I spent the next couple years feeling like a part of something that I believed in. Then I went to college. Also in college, there was a group of Christians who were my support in a new place.

Then I started really having conversations with all sorts of other people who didn't believe what I believed. This was like a series of miniature dynamite sticks blowing little holes in the certainty that I shared with my Christian friends. Sometimes I felt that when I tried to convince them that they needed Jesus in their life, I wasn't even convinced of that myself. 

Then at the beginning of my sophomore year, the movie "Gandhi" came out, and I went to see it at the college auditorium. I was struck by how Gandhi lived such a godly life, and I admired his wisdom and love.

I was sure he must be a Christian, and wanted to know more about him, because I felt I could learn more about how to live in this world by someone like him. He reminded me of Jesus, but had lived in the modern world.

So I found a couple books of his writings in the college library. One of them was just some snippets of his writing, and they reminded me of how I felt about God. The other was his autobiography.

That's where I discovered that he had explored Christianity when he had been going to law school in Great Britain, and had had lots of discussions about the dogma of the church with English friends who were Christians. After considering the belief that a person needed to accept the death of Jesus as the sacrifice for their sin, in order to be found worthy of salvation in the eyes of God, he concluded that he was not interested in having another man take responsibility for his relationship with God. He felt he should be responsible for his own right relationship with God.

This flew directly in opposition to the dogma I had been believing for the past three years. According to that dogma, because Gandhi had rejected the sacrifice of Jesus, he was now in hell.

Some nagging doubts that had been plaguing me about my beliefs came bubbling relentlessly to the surface. How could this God, who I felt was so loving, banish anyone to hell for eternity, much less this man who had lived such a loving life?!

I had been feeling this same conflict brewing about my father for a couple years, because despite my pleading with him, he also did not have any interest in being "saved."

I tried getting answers from my Christian friends, and my pastor, about how God can send people to hell simply for not believing in the need for Jesus yo die for them. The only answer I got was that maybe people make a decision at the moment of death, to turn to Jesus. That was the only thing anyone had to offer that got people out of hell, but that didn't satisfy me in the least.

I agonized over this for a couple months. Finally I concluded that if this was what I was required to believe about God, I had no interest in this sort of God.

I think now, looking back, that it was my childhood glimpse of what Love really feels like that gave me the Knowing that Love is real and would not allow eternal torture for anyone.

I chose to follow my own instinctual belief in Love, and gave up on the church's ideas about God. I could not imagine anything more unloving than sending someone to hell for eternity for making one "wrong" decision in this one short lifetime.

  -----

This left a void in my life. I no longer knew what to think about Jesus, or God, or any of the things that I had been supported by through some tumultuous years of my life. I knew somehow that there was some reality to Love but felt alienated and distant from it. I was completely unable to return to what now felt like an oppressive and narrow understanding of God, and preferred to follow my own instincts where they led me, even if it was into confusion and anxiety and depression, because I knew that God, if They were real, was about Love. And if there weren't really a God at all, at least some part of me knew that Love was real, though I had no idea how to access it anymore.