In the Garden "Orange: Religion"

"When through fiery trials thy pathways shall lie,
My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine."

My journey with God started when I was an infant. My baby book records that I was at the ground breaking for the new First United Methodist Church in Fort Benton, Montana, at age 7 months. My relationship with horses started about the same time. We routinely start our babies riding at age 6-12 months, when they can sit up.

Spirituality comes easily to me. I have always felt at home in church, and enjoyed the service. Many of my earliest memories are the Christmas children plays in which I participated during preschool.

I started out Methodist, attended the Presbyterian in high school, the Congregational in college, back to Presbyterian in medical school when my high school youth minister started a church just north of Seattle, then Lutheran when I needed God's guidance to extract myself from the abusive relationship. When I did my genetics residency in Portland, I became interested in Hinduism, and studied for six months at an ashram. I have picked and chosen what makes sense to me from all of these various sources, as well as from Celtic spirituality, and the treatment of religion in various science fiction/fantasy novels that I have read.

If you picture one's spiritual beliefs as a rose garden, then the roses that festoon the premises are the individual beliefs that best fit with one's own creation. A good gardener often consults with experts, and much is at the whims of nature, or God's Hand.

My roses are varied. The first is the image of God as Light, and each of us having a beam of that Light within us. One of our roles is to find the part of us that is Light, and work to enhance that Light in our lives. We cannot ignore the Dark in our lives as well, and as I noted last week, dark enhances the light.

Another basic belief is that all Gods are one God. The same God who speaks to me in the Christian Church is the same voice who spoke to me at the Hindu ashram, and He/She is also Allah. Jesus is special. There have been many avatars and only Jesus was the essence of God Incarnate--God's Soul if you will. Others may be representations of part of Him, but only Jesus was His Soul. And Jesus came so that we might live, truly live. So that we may face our demons and dragons and battle them, going through our trials by fire, and forgive ourselves for our wrongs. The first step is often confessing them to Jesus, or your own ishtar, and feeling His forgiveness. If we do not do this, we stay stuck in guilt or denial. Only those who cannot feel guilt are exempt from this. It is through guilt that we learn to be better people. Yet too much guilt, especially guilt from another person that is not given in love is manipulation. That is for our egos.

This brings us to another basic belief, that the role of religion is to teach us to move beyond our innate narcissism. We come into this world and in order to survive, we must manipulate others into fulfilling our needs. This is what is meant by being born into sin. As we mature---as our brains make the connections and modifying pathways that allow us to think in a mature manner--we learn to be independent, autonomous, and take care of our own needs. Once secure in that, we then are able to interact with others from a position of strength to become truly enlightened people. The games of family are when the brains are still immature and working through manipulation. Belief in a Higher Power is the first step in saying that I cannot control my world and the others in it, nor is it desirable for me to do so. I must work within the limits of my humanness. Babies are close to God, very close to God. So close to God that they are like God---we treat them like God. It is important that we get over that at the right time and allow them to become adults. Freud said it was at age three years. I think that it needs to be in the late teen years. I believe that childhood needs to retain it's connection with fantasy, so that we learn to dream.

So I believe that we must become "gardeners" as part of our life. We must create a place in ourselves where we take those "roses" that make sense to us and cultivate them. As we mature, then those "roses" will become more sophisticated.

My favorite hymn goes, " I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses. The voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And He walks with me and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His Own." In your Garden, you will find the unconditional love that we all need in order to have the strength to face our fire, and no human can give you that, only God.