By Cindy Griffith

So often I find myself and others getting tied up in the name question. "I don’t want to insult those that worship the Goddess, Brahman, Allah, God or anyone for that matter." "Should we use God, Goddess, Spirit, Great Pumpkin, or Beloved?" I also find myself questioning should I use Father, Mother, It, He or She. Then I remind myself that it doesn't matter what we call the creator or what anyone else calls that unnamable energy.

Each sound has a certain vibration to it, therefore each word has a different vibration. Just like you might like strawberry ice-cream and I like mint chocolate chip, "God" might work great for you and I resonate to the vibration of "Spirit." As my mother once said to me, "Just believe in something!", just call the Creator something that works for you.

I was in Cayman, in January, talking with a little girl about God. I said to her, "How do you know God is a man?" She looked at me as if I were crazy. I continued, "I think God isn't a man or a woman!" She looked at me with eyes wide and replied, "You mean God doesn't have any privates?" I nearly fell off the couch. We laugh, but we are often like that child. We think of Spirit with our linear minds and that "created in His image" means He has "privates", or He is male or female.

When I think of Spirit, it is sometimes easier to think of a person because that is what I know. But when I truly think of Spirit, I think of an energy. I think of the life force energy that is the basis of all things and that of which we are made. Even science has confirmed we are made of Spirit. I must say it is hard to talk to a neutrino, so when I am praying, I talk to "Spirit" as if "He" has ears.

Humans want to give God human tendencies. Energy doesn’t judge us, we judge us. I was talking to a beautiful soul the other day and saying that I think God is harder on me than most, she looked at me and already I knew what she was going to say. She lovingly said "God doesn’t judge you, he isn’t a person, you judge you. Only you need rules. Walk from your heart and you will not need rules" As another friend said recently, "Judgement is a human thing."

We also tend to think that God can only come to us in the ways we were taught. He only comes to ascetics or Guru's or mediators! We have often judged ourselves unworthy. We want to hear Him in the loud billowing voice that Bill Cosby made famous, "NOAH, I WANT YOU TO BUILD AN ARK!".

Often I find people saying to me, "I wish I could hear Spirit like you do", or forlornly whining, "I can’t see Angels like Susan can!" (That one is me, I know that they are there, but I don’t see them with my physical eyes!) It is important for all of us to remember that Spirit comes to each of us, as individuals, in our own individual way. I recently had a great conversation with my friend where I said to him "How do you hear Spirit?" I hear him as a thought form, yet my friend often hears Spirit as a separate voice. Some people get a gut knowing of what to do, and don’t realize that is God talking to them. Susan can see angels, I can’t. Some people can see aura’s. At this point, I can only see the etheric body and only that when I really concentrate. Our talents evolve and so does the way we sense Spirit.

The point is that your connection to God is personal to you. You will have your own individual way of speaking to Him and of sensing His response. If a man on the throne does it for you, or the Goddess is what you relate to, blessings to you. No word or image can describe God, so all attempts are limited. We are all right and wrong at the same time. We are all one with God. God is everywhere and in everything, including us. How do you name that?

We can learn from Linus. He saw God in Nature’s Pumpkin Patch. He didn’t worry if The Great Pumpkin was a girl pumpkin or a boy pumpkin. God talks to us everyday, through the whisper of the pumpkin leaves, the gut feeling that directs us which way to go next or in a baby's cry. Today, I will learn to listen to Spirit speaking through the neighborhood kids as they laugh, yell and cry. I’ve noticed their screaming doesn't seem to bother the squirrels or the cat! I think it’s time I take a lesson from Nature, as Nature doesn’t question the way Spirit makes itself heard!