The God Who Was Never Lost

A Theological Vision from "Healing the God-Image"

There are two kinds of gods: the one we imagine, and the one who is.

The imagined god is born of fear—an inheritance passed down through centuries of trauma, projection, and misunderstanding. This god watches from a distance, measures our worth, and threatens punishment for being human. We have called him holy, but he is only the echo of our pain made divine.

The real God has never needed defending or appeasing. The real God is not an idea, not a father figure in the sky, not a moral accountant tallying sins and virtues. The real God is Being itself—the boundless Love that breathes through all things, the luminous awareness from which nothing is excluded.

When the human heart forgets this Love, it begins to construct idols of the mind. These idols are not carved from stone but from belief: I am unworthy. I am separate. I am alone. And the moment we believe them, God seems to vanish. The heavens grow silent, not because God has withdrawn, but because our fear has muffled the frequency of the Divine.

The Great Projection

The image of God that lives in the psyche is a mirror of the self that imagines it.

A child who grows up unseen imagines an unseen God.
A child who is punished for mistakes imagines a punishing God.
A child whose worth is conditional imagines a God whose love must be earned.

Before we can heal our relationship with God, we must recognize this projection. The “angry deity” is the face of unhealed human shame. The “distant deity” is the echo of parental absence. The “demanding deity” is the internalized voice of control mistaken for holiness.

To heal the God-image is not to change God—it is to unmask the illusion that ever hid God from view.

The Fall Reimagined

The myth of Eden is the story of consciousness itself.
The “fall” is not a historical catastrophe but the birth of duality—of me versus God, good versus evil, worthy versus unworthy. It is the exile from immediacy into judgment.

Religion, in its healthiest form, seeks to return us to union; but when it forgets the symbol’s purpose, it reinforces the very split it was meant to heal. A church built on fear cannot reveal Love. A theology obsessed with purity cannot know wholeness. In trying to protect God’s holiness, we have defaced God’s image.

The Nature of God

God is not a personality but Presence.
Not a monarch but the marrow of existence.
Not male or female, not above or below, not even “other.”

God is the living current within consciousness itself—the invisible pulse animating every atom and every heart. To know this God is not to believe a doctrine but to awaken from the dream of separation. When the veil of fear falls, the ordinary world blazes with radiance.

The neighbor, the stranger, the tree, the breath—all reveal the same truth:
There is only Love, appearing as everything.

Evil and the Wound

Evil is not an equal power opposing God but a wound within creation—the echo of forgotten love. It is trauma that has become contagious, fear turned outward as harm. The task is not to destroy evil but to transform it. Love is not threatened by darkness; it illumines it.

Forgiveness, therefore, is not moral heroism but spiritual hygiene—the refusal to pass on the poison. To forgive is to say, The chain of hatred ends here. It is to pull the arrow from one’s own flesh and, by doing so, to heal a fragment of the world.

Prayer and Union

When fear dissolves, prayer changes. It is no longer bargaining with an external deity but communing with the Presence that already fills the heart.

Prayer becomes participation—an act of remembering.
We do not pray to God; we pray as expressions of God’s life.

Forgiveness, silence, and embodied love are the sacraments of this remembrance. The purpose of every practice is the same: to awaken from illusion into intimacy with what already is.

The Restoration of the True Image

As the false God-image heals, the true one emerges—not as a new concept, but as a living awareness.

This awareness sees that:

• Love cannot condemn, because condemnation is separation.

• God cannot be angry, because anger belongs to time and opposites.

• No soul is lost, because nothing can fall outside what is infinite.

This is the theology of wholeness:
God as Love without opposite,
Light that includes even shadow,
Mercy that is not earned but inherent.

In this light, sin is no longer rebellion but amnesia; salvation is not rescue but remembrance.

The Divine Mirror

Each person who heals a distorted God-image becomes a mirror through which the Divine beholds Itself. Every act of compassion, every dismantled fear, every reclaimed fragment of worth is God knowing God more clearly through human consciousness.

The mystical marriage is fulfilled each time a human heart awakens and whispers, “You were here all along.”

The Final Knowing

God was never the problem.
The problem was the veil cast by fear—the projection of human woundedness onto the Infinite.

The healing of that projection is the reconciliation of heaven and earth within the human soul.
When that healing occurs, religion gives way to relationship, and relationship gives way to union.

There is no longer the sinner and the savior, the seeker and the sought.
There is only Love recognizing itself.

A Closing Invocation

Love is the beginning and the end of every theology.
It is the truth that cannot be improved upon.

We have wandered long through doctrines and defenses,
but the journey was never to reach God—
only to remove what hid God from sight.

And when at last the veil falls,
we discover that the One we were praying to
has been praying us into being all along.