Reconciled by the Light: the after-death letters from a teen suicide.

 I lost my faith in the Catholic Church when I was sixteen for two reasons – first, even though I was a devout member, there was an empty hole inside my soul that Catholicism had not filled; second, I came to the conclusion that if God was omnipotent and still allowed the tremendous suffering and evil in the world to continue, he either did not exist at all, or if he did, he was a mean uncaring Being that I wanted nothing to do with.

My attention turned towards the East, towards Taoism, Buddhism, and meditation, spiritual paths that did not include a personal God. I considered myself agnostic regarding the existence of a personal God.

One day I decided to camp out on Mt. San Antonio near my Southern California home. As I gazed into the night sky at an elevation over ten thousand feet, the stars were out in force. Suddenly, a bright meteor gently shot across the heavens from left to right high in the sky. Forgetting I was alone, I cried out in excitement  “Wow! Did you see that?”

Nobody heard. I was alone.

I felt that the fact that I had no one to share such a magnificent display with made the experience basically meaningless. Dispirited, I rolled up my sleeping bag, put my things in the car, and drove home.

This experience drove home to me the importance of relationship; I felt that if I had no one with whom to have a deep sharing of the heart with, life itself was meaningless.

When I was twenty, a missionary taught me that I was wrong to have judged God so harshly. He said that God does have tremendous power to affect change in the world, but he can manifest the way he would like to on the earth plane only if humans make the necessary conditions. Like the electrical wall socket that only transmits power when something plugs into it, God only manifests when humans find the way to “plug in” to him.

This sounded plausible, so I decided to give God a second chance. I began to pray again, something I hadn’t done in years, but in a different manner. Instead of the rote prayers like the “Our Father” or the“Hail Mary,” I was taught I could say whatever was on my heart.

Since that time, I have had several direct encounters with God. My faith in God is not based on reason, or blind faith; it is based on direct personal experience.

I cannot deny that God is personal. I’m not talking about the anthropomorphic God of some faiths; I don’t believe in a God that looks like a man and has a white beard sitting on a throne in heaven. The God of my experience is formless Spirit; the only form I have ever seen him manifest with is a huge sphere of very bright white light. Sometimes he will appear in my dreams as a man, but I think his “body” is a creation of my mind to make it easy to relate to him.

Nevertheless, God is a person. Philosophy defines the word “person” as “a self-conscious or rational being.”  It is according to this definition that we can say God is a person.

In my view, the most significant thing about this personal God is that this God loves, and in that inclination is found the ultimate meaning and purpose of life.

God has an irrepressible propensity to love, but the realization and fulfillment of love requires two partners, not one. God is one, but love takes two. As a result, God longs for a partner to love; therefore, God was compelled to create, in hopes of finding someone to love. Genesis states that during the six days of creation God would create something and find that “it  was good,” but on the sixth day, after God created humans, he said that it was “very good!”

In my experience, God is attracted to humans because, more than any other creature we know of, humans reflect the “image and likeness” of God. God is not physical, so it is not anything physical that is so attractive. God is Spirit, and it is the spiritual aspect of humans that God finds attractive. Specifically, because humans have the potential to develop spiritual self-awareness, they have the potential to have a personal relationship with God.

In humans, God has found the one who can recognize, receive, and ultimately respond to his love. Whenever God has “spoken” to me, the communication from him always begins with “I love you.” The meaning I have found for life centers around the conviction that God is my loving Father, and I am his loving son. The rest is just details.