It’s been a long time since I listened to this podcast. The topics are often weighty and I don’t feel I have the energy to give due attention, but this morning the title of the latest episode struck me, so I decided to listen to it. There’s so much here. You can listen to the episode or read the transcript.
One of my favorite parts is this (emphasis mine):
DR. MILLER: … I think about this idea of normalcy a lot. I and many, many others before me have been agents of normalizing disability, and that’s really potent. And I also think there’s a second half to that equation, that we need – that doesn’t mean that we fit these other things into our idea of normal, it means we expand our idea of normal. And I think that life is weird. Life’s hard. Life’s weird. Humans are weird. And I worry, sometimes, that we exist in such a narrow bandwidth of accepted behaviors and thoughts that we really clip off so much of the strange beauty that can be part of the human experience.
@ircmaxell has a great explanation of the concept of dependency injection (DI). I
won’t even link to anything else about the concept because any Wikipedia
entry would just confuse the issue. Watch this video first, then go Googling.
Yes, AA asks that you believe in a higher power. I call that higher power god
because that’s what works for me. Not a Protestant god. Not a Catholic god.
Just a god that loves me unconditionally. It took me a little while to get to
that point, but I could get with that idea. My concept is simple: There is a
god, and I’m not it. That’s the construct I came up with shortly after I
arrived, and it’s still serving me well today. My god and your god aren’t the
same. And that’s totally fine.
That struck me, particularly as I’m now reading Karen Armstrong’s
A History of God.
Reading about the history of what we mean when we talk about “God”, leads
me to the conclusion that we don’t need to agree on what we mean by
“God” in order for that concept to have a very profound (positive)
impact on our lives. The beginning of this realization for me is the thought
that God isn’t something “out there” but is literally everywhere.
From that you proceed to the idea that God is inside of all of us. (And
thence to the idea, perhaps, that we—and the whole cosmos—are
really just God playing hide-and-seek from godself.)
Each of us has a totally unique experience of God. Reading Armstrong’s
work drives home the idea that this is something that virtually all religions
have understood at one point or another. More recently, however, there’s
greater emphasis on objective experience of God.
This is something I’ve believed for a long time now, but only now am I
beginning to understand what this feels like at a gut level. I’m sure I
have a lot more (self) work to do on the road to more understanding about the
implications this truth has.