I believe this year, after much searching and struggling, I am closer than ever to finding my idea of God, and it is transformative and it does feel especially wonderful and exciting.

Human beings seem to need a God, they have always sought God, worshipped God, justified horrific things in the name of God, killed for God, loved for God, died for God.

From the first conscious human, and  at every stage of human development, there was God in countless forms and incarnations and representations. We have always wanted and needed God.

Quite often, when people believe they have found God, they demand that everyone around them believe the same thing or be evil and despised, thus comes some of the worst misery in human history.

Even though we are the only creatures on the earth with a conscience, it only occasionally spares us from doing awful and immoral things, believing we are acting on behalf of our God.

A God I believe in would not tolerate that.

In our time, it is getting difficult to distinguish believers and God-worshippers from hateful politicians and political parties.

Increasingly, both hate the “others,” pity themselves. People who differ become enemies, not partners on the earth.

These kinds of worshippers teach me where to look for God, because I can’t believe he is the manifestation of them. So I know to look elsewhere.

In his book “God: A Human History,” the religious scholar Reza Aslan writes about the need to de-humanize God, to make him less human and more ethereal, even superhuman, more universal. If God is like us, then I can’t worship him, because human beings are quite often harming one another and cannibalizing the earth.

Why would I worship a God who is like humans?

This year, I’ve had a revelation, an experience in which God or any deity reveals himself to us.

The more we see God as a human with human emotions, the easier it is to justify our behaving in inhuman ways to one another.

Aslan is a pantheist, he worships God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe – for the universe, he says, is God.

Pantheists do not believe in a fierce and righteous God with a long white beard and flowing robes. They believe everyone and everything is God, and in a way, that idea is more manageable to me than most of the Gods people have come to worship over time.

“I pray to God not to ask for things but to become one with God,” writes Aslan. “I recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices…I recognize the divinity of the world and every being in it and respond to everyone and everything as though they are God – because they are.”

I like this idea, it is similar to the Kabbalah’s idea that God is energy, is the light, the experience of making love, of joy, of compassion and empathy, of giving.

When I began working with the people I call the Army Of Good, I was responding to a new political reality that was upsetting to me, and I didn’t want to be angry and upset for a considerable part of my remaining life.

I looked instead for meaning and a kind of healing. And I found it in my work at the Mansion, and with the refugees in such great need all around me and the grounding and spiritual clarity those things brought me.

This morning, I launched the Refugee Grocery Project,  a new project for the Army Of Good, a plan to deliver $150 in groceries to a refugee family the first week of every month. This felt like God to me, it felt like a revelation, like a rebirth or resurrection. I felt great joy and excitement, I felt awake and alive, I felt as if my life had meaning or purpose. These are all things so many people describe as feeling when they discover their God or their own spiritual revelation.

God, to me, is the better part of us. It is the feeling of compassion and empathy, the special miracle of doing good. The Army Of Good feels this, we have been sharing this spiritual reward all year. God is color and light for me, the impulse to be better, do better, do good.

Like almost everyone reading this, I’ve spend many years and most of my spiritual life trying to bridge the vast space between me and the fearful idea of God as a vengeful and omnipotent figure, all knowing and all seeing and frightening.

I am drawn to the idea that there is really no distance between God and myself because I am essentially, God manifest. As are we all. This is what I am learning this year, and at long last.

God is in me this year, in my heart, soul and consciousness. He is with me because he is me.

God is a world of infinite spiritual Light. A realm of action rather than reaction. The love of a true partner. The desire to do good. To comfort the vulnerable and the poor.  In the hidden origins of the physical world of the universe, a world of fulfillment, infinite knowledge and change, and boundless and endless joy. God is the aspiration, the yearning, the dimension of positive, lasting change, the exercise of our unique gift to perform acts of kindness.

For me, these are not the acts of saints and angels, but of mortal people. Like me.

I become one with God by reaching out to others, by learning to listen, by seeing God everywhere, not just in one book or one Temple or one Mosque or one Church. God is everything good and hopeful to me. He is also everything else.

I don’t need to be a saint, just to be me. A New Year’s revelation for 2018.

God is giving a cold refugee a jacket or a meal. God is buying underwear for a poor woman who has none. God is bringing a dog so an elderly man can reach out and touch something loving and warm again.

God loves small things and small deeds, because he is small things and small deeds, he is all deeds.

What could be  holier?