RELATIONSHIP OR ROBITIC RESPONSES?

    Think about it, what if you made a new friend and that friend knew only a few things about you. Suppose he or she knew that your favorite food is Chinese, your favorite movie is Gone With The Wind, and you like to talk about sports. Now, what if every time you saw that friend, he or she served you Chinese food, made you watch Gone With The Wind and only talked about sports? Would you consider this a fruitful and meaningful relationship, or would it start to feel rather redundant over time?

    The sad fact of the matter is, most of us treat the Divine Being much the same way the fictitious friend treated us in the paragraph above. We join a certain religious movement, we learn certain prayers or meditation techniques and we do them repeatedly for years. Some people pray 3 to 5 times a day or more, and say the same prayers, verbatim, every time for a lifetime. Do you not think that the Divine Spirit deserves more from us than that? There are many religions that teach us that God is a personal being, yet they train us to treat him/her like a machine that we must put the same information into every day of our lives. The same rituals, the same prayers at the same time of day or evening, the same meditation techniques and whatever else they tell us that we must do to be good religious folks and excepted by God.

    I believe the time has come when we must, and many already have, take our spirituality back from the organized institutions that have put the Divine Being in a box for so long. We must free ourselves to worship and contemplate the Divine in a way that is natural for us. We must begin to commune with God in a way that is more like a relationship, rather than a bunch of robotic sayings and responses that some group has handed to us decades ago. After all, what kind of friend would you like to be? The kind that serves Chinese food and watches the same movie every time you see the person whom you supposedly care about? Or do you want to be natural and spontaneous, bringing light, joy and originality to the relationship? I think the answer to that question is fairly simple for all of us to answer.