Understanding God's Ambivalence

It’s not easy being God in that He is all we want to be in and of ourselves, yet what we feel we can’t be without His assistance. Consequently, He is cure and crutch, Love and Judgment, and the all-powerful Light whose inaction makes possible the Dark. God’s ambivalence is deeply troubling – especially with His monotheistic guise – and ideas like free will, fate, predestination, Satan serving as God’s tempter or a cosmic battle between Good and Evil don’t really resolve His inaction.

A telling example of this ambivalence is the hardships of the Biblical Job in that although God’s answer to Job gave meaning to his plight, it didn’t save him from having to undergo it. It underscores an unpalatable truth, namely, God isn’t omnipotent and good and evil aren’t truly absolutes. The belief in an all-powerful just God doesn’t answer any of our pressing questions about existence. If anything, it confuses the matter because most of its assumptions are contradictory, and in turn, give rise to an image of a contradictory God. Yet God doesn’t make us in His image; we make Him in ours. God and all gods are made in our likeness, by us, for us.

If triangles had a god, he would have three sides. - Montesquieu

The uncomfortable truth is that we are contradictory beings that are just as ambivalent about Him as He is about us. For example, we rarely take the time to know God yet expect Him to remember us in our times of need. We pray to God to steer His will but close our ears to His teachings for us. We bemoan His authority but shirk the responsibility for the freedom He gives us. We love God and our neighbor, but only when it suits us to. We go war over His words yet fail to see the peace that is their essence.

We fail to realize that what we see as God’s ambivalence is our own when we look out into the world from deep within ourselves. We externalize God because we feel powerless in the face of an ambivalent Universe. We have lost touch with the God within, and as a result, feel empty and vulnerable. Yet what we don’t realize is that by owning our ambivalence we’ve the power to change the darkness into light. This means that when we acknowledge our ambivalence is also God’s, we connect with our authentic power – our own innate godliness. We’re God and godliness is our birthright … but only when we embrace His inadequacies as our own hidden strengths. It is not easy being God, is it?

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. - Marianne Williamson

This raises the question of how to overcome this fear of our innate godliness. Interestingly, the answer is as likely to come from the great civil rights leaders of our times as the spiritual ones. When Aung Sun Suu Kyi was asked how she did what she did, she never claimed special courage. Rather than steely determination, she spoke about never giving up and rather than individual bravery she spoke about giving herself over to a purpose greater than her own life. She and those like her accepted that it was simply something that had to be done because this is where the humanity of humanity lies – individually and collectively.

Free will is the ability to do gladly that which we must do. - C. G. Jung

This enabled the momentum to come through them, instead of from them. Their courage – if that is the word – lay not in doing it, but in continuing with it. They could continue because they saw the oneness of humanity. No one said it is easy being God. Yet we don’t have to be Him…we have to realize we’re One with Him.