Finding your spiritual center or Whack-A-Mole Jesus

“Oh my motherfucking god,” and, “Jesus fucking Christ,” are not spiritually sound calls to prayer nor are they centering ways in which to begin your day. While invoking the spirit of a higher power upon awakening is a healthy and natural ritual, the former statements do not qualify as such or if they do the method and effect of the invocation is certainly in a manner proscribed by most spiritual elders.

When one does begin the day with such an invocation the broader implications for the next 16 or so hours are usually grim. If one can take pause at this point reviewing the actions or moments that led up to this outcry, it is best to rethink them and attempt to rapidly deescalate your approach to the morning from, “I will bring my personal motherfucking war to the doorstep of this day and tear the marrow out of its bones,” to, “What can I contribute and how may I best be of service to my fellows today.” It is a radical and therefore difficult shift because tapping the infinite source of all things and becoming a beacon of love and font of spiritual wisdom is hard. Sure “the source” is infinite and all, but it can be darn hard to access especially when the veins running across your temples are distended and pulsating like the thud of a techno groove. They call high blood pressure the silent killer––feels more like Sasha and Digweed have moved into my neck and are using my jugular veins to power a 100,000 watt rave in Ibiza.

But finding a way to get centered when in a state of heightened anxiety, for this Presbyterian, is more like a game of whack-a-mole Jesus, “Where’d he go...there he is...no there...got him...nope. What the motherfucking, fuck, where the fuck is God!”

Unfortunately this is progress.

As someone who began his first true dialogs with the alpha and the omega in the equivalent of emergency Federal Reserve sessions, “Please God let her get her period…today,” or, “All I am asking is can I get a do over for those three seconds where I drove my parent’s car into the backhoe, seriously God, just those three seconds. How hard is that? Just me and this teeny tiny area, not the whole time space continuum.”

Later in life I moved to believing I was inherently evil assuming the demonic possession scare of my early childhood after seeing "The Omen" had been realized, and that I was now actually in league with the devil––and this may have been true. In retrospect I feel the good news was at least I still believed in a supreme being, higher power, lower power…whatever.

I then moved beyond the principles of faith north or south to embrace sex as my religion, worshiping the act of physical love not in an earthy, pagan way but more in a slaughter fuck manner that left carnage, heartache, and despair in its wake. Despite the realities I had convinced myself there was sound basis in my love via lust approach and I was perhaps fucking my way to a serene state of oneness with the One. No, that was not the case and I will continue to pay karmically for this approach to spiritual well-being for some time to come.

Today I understand the importance in my life of embracing something, anything that is not simply, “this is it, kill or be killed, worm food next stop.” This is not because I fear death, not at all, my screen saver in the days of screen savers was, “May death come swiftly.” Which I changed after one of my partners felt it did not send the right message to our clients. I had to agree. No, I do not fear death––protracted illnesses or disfigurement sure, but not death. Nor do I fear damnation or await some reward in an eternal paradise which as my furnace guy assures me will be, “…like Boca, dude.” I have never been to Boca Raton, but Vero Beach is quite nice. Not Avalon, but nice.

No my desire to have a faith and sense truth in my life comes from my need to feel connected to something that connects everything. Of all the things in life that I attempt to rationalize, explain, understand and dominate through intellect and reason or power and aggression, having a connection and relationship with God is something I actually just need to accept, hence the faith part. Unfortunately I also believe God works largely through other people, I say unfortunately because as Sartre said, "Hell is other people," but alas, paradox is balance.

So in my effort to understand the infinite source in a non-intellectual manner, I have developed an understanding of God as the neurochemical system in each of us that transmits electro-magnetic pulses creating quantum connections to the fabric of the universe where all things that ever were and are yet to be exist simultaneously. So every thought and action you have ripples across this matrix affecting all things that are, were and will be.

Which leads me to think the seasonal advice we get from Alan Jackson at Macy’s each year while buying crappy presents for our loved ones is well founded and I really should, “…be good for goodness sake.”