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Midweek Faith Lift
April 19, 2023
A Spiritual Journey
Clark Ford, Guest Speaker
After Easter, Jesus appeared to his disciples several times, then left them, and they were on their own. Where they had once let Jesus do all the heavy spiritual lifting, they no longer had that luxury. Where they were once a group of Twelve, they were now mostly on their own, to travel to different parts of the Mediterranean, teaching what they had learned. When Jesus was with them, they were on one kind of spiritual journey. When he left, they were on quite a different spiritual journey.
Spiritual journeys take many forms, and I believe we are all on a spiritual journey whether we think we are or not. We can have many shared spiritual experiences with others, and perhaps walk the same path as others for a time, but in the end, our spiritual journey is ours alone. It is our path to connection with the divine.
It’s about what we each feel and don’t feel, what we believe and don’t believe, what we do and don’t do. We can talk about the exterior parts of our journey with others, and find others with similar experiences, but the meaningful interior parts of your journey are ours alone. There’s no place to hide. No one to BS or look good for. We many not even be able to put words to that interior experience. It is about our light, our love, our beliefs, our faith, our spirit, the very essence of our souls. But even without words, our light leaks out, our love radiates. People around us know, despite our words or lack thereof.
So what I am talking about is an inner journey. Some folks may claim they’re not on a spiritual journey. They may deny the existence of spirit at all. They may erect walls against change, growth, and enlightenment. But I think their effort to deny that they are on a spiritual journey is just part of their journey. There is no one right way to be on a spiritual journey, no one right time to start it or change directions. We may be conscious of our journey, or unconscious of it, but if we consciously desire to start such a journey, how do we do it?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We’ve got to put one foot in front of the other and lead with love… Or as the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins said to his nephew Frodo in Tolkein’s The Lord Of The Rings: “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” One thing is for sure about spiritual journeys: there will be change. And you can’t help but learn from every experience.
So we are all on our own spiritual journey, and the point of it is spiritual growth. We are on the path to our higher self, to our conscious connection to the divine. Today I’d like to share some mileposts along my own spiritual path, at least the parts that I am conscious of to talk about!
I was born into a family with a long history in protestant Christianity. My mom and dad may not have had that much in common, but both of their families had been Presbyterian going back generations. I have relatives who were missionaries to India in the 1800s. So, I was raised in the Presbyterian Church. I went to Sunday school, learned bible stories, and eventually began to wonder about the disconnect between what Jesus was all about, and what the congregation dressing up in their finest and their furs to attend church (or the Easter Parade!) was all about. I had stepped out on that road, and had no idea where I might be swept off to!
It turns out my parents were not particularly faithful churchgoers, so I was spared too intense an indoctrination at the Presbyterian Church. But in high school I joined a musical group at a Baptist church, and that really left an impression. The Baptists were all about faith and the gospels. I read the gospels, and enjoyed that. The popular paperback version of the New Testament was “Good News For Modern Man.” Back in those days, women were considered part of Mankind.
I took to heart the message of Jesus about love, kindness, and spirit. But in the end I had a crisis of faith. I had too many questions seeping in around the edges of the mighty fortress of my faith. I wanted to believe, I wanted to be a sincere Christian trusting God, I wanted to have a strong faith, giving my whole being to God, believing that everything in the Bible was true, and all was God’s will acting in my life.
And I just couldn’t do it. I was a failure as a Christian. Tempted by Satan to question and disbelieve…
Well, in college I majored in Biology. I became a scientist and was particularly enamored with what I learned about evolution. Such an elegant and comprehensive explanation for all of biological life forms!
The way I see it, many Christians do themselves no favor fighting against science or the idea of evolution. Some Christians, of course, see evolution as part of God’s plan in action. God’s means to an end. If one views the natural world like that, then all study of science is a study of God in action. That is one way to reconcile science with religion. Of course, not the fundamentalist way…
And for a scientist, the other way to reconcile science vs religion is just to deny the very existence of God, deny the existence of spirit, and settle for a world hurtling forward through time with no creator, no spiritual meaning, with humans just the product of natural selection. Some sort of Nihilism. Made sense to me.
One could clearly see how instead of humans being a creation of God, it was God who was a creation of humans. Many people agree with this point of view when considering other religions and their gods. All created by humans.
Which got me to thinking, why was I not Hindu? Why was I not Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or some other indigenous religion? Why? Because my parents were Christian. That was the only reason I was even considering the Christian point of view. So, I was trying to extract some great religious truth from an accident of birth. Ha!
I was interested in truth. Science is a search for the truth of nature but with limited tools. It is said that science shines a bright light on a very small spot. If there was such a thing as spirit, if there was a God, science would not be useful for revealing it. At least not in my lifetime. So I had to decide whether I was happy with the bright spot which was illuminated by Science, or actually try to understand something broader than that.
I had become an atheist, believing that God was a made up thing that was used to control people, to pacify them, to give nations created by conquest something everyone could believe in, to justify kings and conquest in the name of religion, and thus to justify the injustice of kings and nobles controlling the wealth and labor of these conquered nations.
Access to Heaven was a powerful way to control people, mediated through the church and its hierarchy. The protestants broke away from the Catholic hierarchy, and found a connection to God through reading the bible, thus promoting literacy and independent thought. But even the protestants used the promise of heaven to convert and control people. It was all madness.
So here I was having rejected the faith of my ancestors, but with nothing to replace it. At least I didn’t have to worry about faith. Or did I? A lot of atheists were pretty rabid about how spirituality was a hoax, a figment of imagination, wishful thinking, coincidence. All of that seemed to be an article of faith for some atheists. There are some rabid Agnostics too, but most agnostics said they didn’t know, and essentially that they didn’t care. Not an issue. Maybe yes, maybe not, they weren’t going to spend time thinking about it. But I was thinking about it! Inquiring minds wanted to know!
What about ESP? All wishful thinking? Not in my experience. What about the mystics? Fakes? Just fooling themselves? Or was it the atheists who were just fooling themselves? And what about other religions? It seems mystics of every religion had more in common with each other than they may have had with people of their own faith. What were they on to?
And so, having rejected much of the Bible, I became very interested in spirituality. New Age spirituality. Auras and chakras and ESP (oh my!). Healing and past lives and channeling. Eastern religions. Past lives? I had been indoctrinated all my life in both Christianity and in Atheism that past lives were wishful thinking, hocus pocus, wrong, not how God worked, even silly, blah blah blah.
Never mind that in the Bible Jesus was thought by some to be the reincarnation of Elijah, and reincarnation was taught as a Christian doctrine in some of the early churches in the Mediterranean. That was before Rome defined what it thought Christianity should be and pushed out so-called heretical beliefs from all the other churches.
Some folks that reject reincarnation do believe that spirit never dies, that the spirit of Jesus lived before his birth, and that having gone to heaven, he will come again. Other folks believe that Jesus is the reincarnated Buddha, that he was accompanied at age 12 back to India by the wise men who were searching for him, and that he lived there until he returned to Israel as an adult, bringing many of the concepts of Buddhism back to the Hebrew people. At any rate, Reincarnation is not part of the post-Roman Christian tradition, so is widely rejected in our culture along with many other things that are associated with foreign belief. Can we say xenophobia?
For me, having cleared my own landscape of beliefs, I felt free to explore everything and decide for myself what felt right. Say what? WHAT FEELS RIGHT? No, no, no, I was told all my life. You can’t trust your feelings! There must be authority in religion! Who are YOU to decide what is true or not? Well, authority had gotten me absolutely nowhere. Maybe it is a path that works for others, but not for me… I have to feel it. A thing has to resonate before I accept it, and then I call it inner knowing. It is not that I desire a faith in some book or some teaching, it is that I want to know it to be true for me. That is what I wanted – I wanted to know the truth, my truth. And I found out that I have to take responsibility for that. I can’t just believe in the authority of a book or a doctrine or a preacher. I can be inspired by them, and if it resonates, then it becomes part of my truth.
Someone may say “Truth is Truth, you’re just fooling yourself again – oh, and by the way, the REAL TRUTH is right here in my holy book, in the tenants of my religion, etc., etc.” And what I say to those folks is “I am so glad for you.” I too wanted to be sure. To seal that surety with faith, a mighty fortress of faith. But the path of faith is not my path…
So I pursued what I am attracted to. That is a New Age principle that resonated with me. What am I attracted to? Nature. I love nature. The forest, the plants, the flowers, the meadows, the mountains, the oceans, the stars, the skies, the seasons. I came to believe “as above, so below” that everything we experience in nature IS an expression of God, and thus a path to God.
Of course, I long ago abandoned using the G-O-D word, as it brought to me connotations of the parts of the Bible and the Christian religion that I am not inspired by. But I found a path to the divine in nature that resonates with me, gloriously. And also in music. And in people. As Victor Hugo said in Les Miserables, “to love another person is to see the face of God.”
So, nature is my church, walking in nature my meditation. I celebrate the seasons with ritual, using some traditional Native European ways of connecting to nature through the energies of Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and Spirit, a kind of Neo-Paganism. But for me it’s very non-dogmatic. Just tools for connecting to spirit. Singing and music are likewise, for me, tools for connecting to spirit.
I believe in the cycles of life reflected in the seasons: birth, death, rebirth over and over in a spiral dance of ever-growing spiritual awareness. For me, I had to reject the religion of my childhood and start from scratch, connecting with ideas that made sense to me, that fed me spiritually, and rejecting things that did not.
On my path to becoming a Unitic, I spent time with the Unitarian Universalists, and also at the Catholic Church where I wanted to connect with people who believed in spirituality and had a connection to the spirituality of the Mystics. I didn’t find too much of that but I did find sincere, loving people who were on their own spiritual path. I have found sincere, loving people of many faiths, beliefs, and cultures, and am inspired on my spiritual journey from all of them.
We are all on a spiritual path learning the lesson of love, and each path is different. Even here at Unity, many of you know I am not exactly a dogmatic Unitic, whatever that is, but I do feel spiritually at home here and encouraged and inspired to continue my spiritual journey. Thank-you, all of you, for your continued love and support. And may your journey continue to lead you to grow in spirit and love.
Blessed Be.
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