This week there has been a lot of time in my life spent on the subject of God. I went to the American Atheists convention where I met Richard Dawkins and spent a lot of time with a lot of people who don’t believe in God. While there I bought a book called “God” by author Alexander Waugh. Tonight I watched George Burns in the role of God in the movie “Oh God!”. God, it seems, has been everywhere.
This got me thinking today that it would be interesting for me to write about my ideas of God throughout my life in much the same way that I wrote about my history of electric guitars recently. Just as I have gone through a variety of musical instruments, I have traveled through a variety of conceptions of God. So, without further ado, here is my personal history of God.
The earliest memory of God I have is as the guy who could scare away bad dreams. As a kid I had occasional nightmares, some of them that I still remember. I remember one particularly bad one in which my friend Chad Erickson and I were both decapitated in a car accident and were wandering around as ghosts. We generally had a good time until we found this old shack that contained two dusty coffins covered with spider webs. I touched one coffin and Chad’s head rolled out onto the floor at my feet. He was still wearing his glasses and he had spiders crawling across his face. I woke up in a sweaty panic and did the first thing that came to mind… I chanted the mantra “Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah”. See, from a very early age I believed God had very practical uses. Just saying his name practically invoked a magic aura of protection. I believed that the demons themselves could be frightened off with it. God definitely helped me get back to sleep on more than one occasion.
That’s not all, however. Religion was a pervasive part of my families life when I was young (we’re talking elementary school and younger) and so when I was told that God listened to my prayers and could do anything he wanted to I remember asking him to do things. These weren’t little things, mind you. I didn’t ask God to help me find $5 on the street or anything like that, I asked him to do things that would prove to me that he really existed. You know, things that were actual miracles that couldn’t be written up to random chance. One particularly odd thing I remember was when I was not more than 4 years old. I was laying in bed one night staring at the ceiling and wondering if being a girl was different than being a boy. I didn’t particularly wish to be a girl, but I wondered what the big deal was, if they internally felt and thought the same way as boys did. So, I asked God to turn me into a girl for 5 minutes so I would know. The funny thing was that I didn’t know if it had succeeded or not because I was so young that I was unfamiliar with the anatomical differences between the two. Seeing as how I didn’t feel any different during those 5 minutes I was oddly annoyed with the whole experiment. Had I actually been turned into a girl for 5 minutes and discovered that it felt the same as being a boy or had I just been a boy the whole time? I had no idea but I never asked God to do anything like that again because, well, I didn’t want to be a girl and I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression.
Another early idea I had of God was that he was sort of a super protector of his people but that somehow his people were always in danger of being thrown in concentration camps. The stories about the horrors of the holocaust and WWII had been impressed on me over and over. I knew that an older man in our Kingdom Hall had been sent to prison for refusing to fight in WWII. I knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses like us had been sent to concentration camps by Nazi’s. What I didn’t know was that WWII had been over for 30 years. I still thought there were Nazi’s and concentration camps and so I prayed a lot for God to help those poor Brothers and Sisters who were in the camps to be strong and survive. I pictured him making miracles happen like hiding people in plain sight or providing food from thin air to foil the Nazi’s. He was a superhero.
When I got a bit older, God started to change for me. Probably the first thing to go was my belief that God was willing to do miracles on command. When my cat was run over by a car in 2nd grade I cried like crazy but I resisted the temptation to ask God to resurrect her. I knew that Ebony was gone and Jehovah wasn’t in the business of bringing dead animals back to life. I did consider asking, yes, because he resurrected Lazarus and Jesus and that guy who touched Elisha’s bones, but I figured out that he wasn’t that kinda guy.
My belief in God as a supernatural super hero lasted longer but changed as well. The power of saying his name to ward off demons, bad dreams, even just creepy feelings was still going strong but at some point the belief that he was busy rescuing other Witnesses in concentration camps disappeared. For one thing, I found out that there weren’t any camps anymore. For another, I realized that he hadn’t specifically done anything particularly miraculous that anybody I knew could vouch for, so again, he got a little more distant.
It was in, maybe, 3rd grade that God gained a new dimension for me… the dimension of an authority figure to be feared. This happened when sex entered my life via a few events. The earliest one I can remember was when I was at my cousins house and my brothers, cousins and I were all playing at a construction site across the street. We found an adult magazine and for the first time in my life I was face to, well, let’s just say face with the anatomical differences between a boy and a girl. In this case, an adult female centerfold of some sort. I didn’t really know for sure that looking at that magazine was wrong but I was uneasy about how my buddy God felt about it. I started to worry a little when I prayed to him that maybe he wouldn’t protect me quite as much anymore. Not too long after that incident a girl who lived down the street from us decided she wanted to go behind the bushes one day and play “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine”. I was curious and I indeed saw hers and indeed showed her mine. This may or may not have blown up into a tiff between God and I except my younger brother was with as well and he also played the little game. The difference between Reed and I was that when we got home he immediately bragged to our mother about what he had seen. Needless to say, Mom was not happy. I suddenly felt like I was in terrible trouble and I went down to my room and laid in fear on my top bunk awaiting the spanking I would get when my dad came home. It took forever but eventually he arrived and instead of spanking me he had a serious talk with me. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I know that the main message I got from it was that Jehovah was not pleased.
It was the beginning of a new phase in our relationship, me and Jehovah. Now I felt like I owed him, like I had disappointed him and really really really needed to make it up to him. He never felt more present and distant at the same time. Before he had sort of been available when I woke up from a nightmare or was sad, but now he was looking over my shoulder all the time, checking to make sure I was doing his will. Jehovah became a slightly nerve wracking character because thoughts of him mingled with feelings of guilt. I prayed a lot to him, asking him to please forgive me for not doing the right thing and averting my eyes on those occasions with the magazine and the girl down the street but I never got a response from him to know that I was actually forgiven. His silence was very discomforting.
Up next in part 2, I go from using God as a superhero and talisman to obsessing about the end of the world…
More From Ryan Sutter
- God As I Knew Him – Part 4
- God As I Knew Him – Part 3
- God As I Knew Him – Part 2
- my last post as vioman
- The Historical Jesus Puzzle – Part 1
