There is nothing in the universe as intimate as the Divine. When the image of the Divine we inherit is negative, it can do untold damage. When your God is a harsh judge, he forces your life to become a watched and haunted hunt for salvation. Like a sinister Argus, this God has eyes everywhere. He sees everything and forgets nothing. Such images of the Divine cripple us. If salvation and healing do not come lyrically as gifts, they are nothing. Belief should liberate your life. Anything that turns belief into torment hardly merits the term “salvation.” The reduction of the wild eternity of your one life to a harsh divine project is a blasphemy against the call of your soul. People who inhabit the tormented prison of negative deity have awful lives. Tragically, they are partly responsible for keeping themselves locked in there; religion supplied the building material and they took up the task of their own self-incarceration. The spirit of a person is as intimate as his or her sexuality. When a person is theologically or spiritually abused, the pain can shadow the whole life. Spiritual abuse sticks like tar in the core of the mind. When you stay in the inner jail of harsh deity, all the fun, humour, and irony go out of your life. Such a God has a fierce grip; he awakens everything fearful and negative in you and whispers to you that this is who you really are. Your presence becomes atrophied. Your face turns into a brittle, mask-like surface. You have become prisoner and warder in one.
When you turn your natural longing for the Divine into a prison, then everything in you will continue to ache. The prison subverts your longing and makes it toxic. Watched by a negative God, you learn to watch your self with the same harshness. You look out on life and see only sin. Your language becomes over-finished and cold. Others sense behind your eyes the ache of forsakenness that does not even know where to begin searching for itself.