A Higher Power

Whenever there is a belonging, there is an alienation. The very country into which I was born, and in which I choose to belong was founded on religious freedom. We are "One nation under GOD, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." The assumption is that you can believe in any religion you want to, as long as you also believe in a god.

What do I believe? Like the landscape of Mother Earth, my beliefs have changed throughout my time on her earth. Today I question not just the belief in a higher power but more, the need for one. Through the years I have watched family and friends join groups that are called cults. I keep asking, what is the difference between a 'cult' and a religion? Each has a 'higher power.' This higher power (through men) names the laws and the rituals. They have leaders who inspire followers to transcend their own needs in the interest of a common cause. But what makes one religion a cult and another one not a cult?

People of all ages, intellectual levels and income brackets belong to cults and religions. Each group has a higher power which connotes a power-over, supposedly by a source outside ones self. In reality, it is a hierarchical power-over held by living, breathing persons, who also walk this earth and interpret the will of the higher power. In the last couple of decades almost 1200 people have died in notable mass suicides or cult-related deaths who followed the leadership of people like Davd Koresh, Charles Mansen, Marshall Herff Applewhite and the Reverend Jim Jones. Members were not always the disenfranchised. Many were normal, hard working family members. In the last couple of millennia, there has been over 9 million deaths due to a 'higher power.' From our perspective we see those dead as normal, old, poor and probably pagan or people who clung to their old ways against the backdrop of the new way or Christianity. But the thing about higher powers that bothers me most are the billions who belong to a religion that does not allow half of its members, the female half, to speak personally to that higher power, and must submit to those who have the right, the men. Humans are a strange, strange lot.

Believing in an organized higher power has been treacherous, especially for women. Not believing in one could also be socially treacherous. What is it that makes us have need for one? I was twelve when I began to ask mysel if there was a higher power. When I was ten, my sister and brother and I were baptized into the Mormon Church. However, throughout my teens I attended every church I could find, searching for something. I was married in a Baptist church and followed my husband's faith. I attended a fundamentalist theological school in Europe. My first two sons are Baptist, they reflect my early years. My last three sons reflect my present status. They have been baptized as Mormons but their higher power questions are unanswered.

When I was twenty-five, I declared out loud to the whole world that there was no god. When I was thirty, I was swirling in a small boat in the middle of a hurricane off the coast of the Yucatan when I cried out for God to save my life. For some reason my life was spared. Was it God who spared it? The lives of my children have not been spared. I have held my only daughter, dead in my arms, as the warmth from her body turned to cold while her face, twisted from a strangulation, softened into a smile. And I asked God why? I have watched seven children pass from my body, dead, and asked God why? I have watched my five living children be harmed and suffer terribly and I asked God why? Outside my own personal pain, I watch this world of people kill and hurt each other and I ask God why? I have answered this question in a million different ways. Sometimes with a higher power figured into the answer, sometimes not.

Often, when I discuss the question of a higher power with various people, the fear factor always emerges. Some express fear of what might happen to them if they don't believe in God. They are afraid of going to hell, or not going to heaven with the rest of their loved ones. But more often the fear is that if people don't believe in God, what will control their behavior? They never consider what is happening, and what has happened because of their belief in a god.

Higher power. I belive that the definition is changing for many people. As women and men face the issues of equality, the very myths of the existing higher power will also change. I seriously doubt that humans will give up their belief in a higher power, but I can hope that the Bible will be reinterpreted and some of the old stories will be recovered that include a 'woman loving,' 'human loving' culture that Jesus talked about.