Packing for a Spiritual Journey

    We are on a spiritual journey.  Our time on earth is both a spiritual as well as a physical journey.  At some point along the way we need to have a check list to be sure we have the necessities.  Some of the obvious items for being on a spiritual path are prayer, food for the soul, which can be gotten from books, tapes, lectures, or even, walks in the woods. We also need companions or like minded friends to share the journey.

   Attention to detail will also help. Remember the difference between the two people who visited Niagara Falls? One person saw the mist, the other missed the scene.  As we travel we need to pay attention!   We might be at the scene and miss the point.  Life provides us with the time, the sights, the sounds and the colors.

    For most of us there is a superior power, infinite intelligence, the God of our understanding.  Growing up in the Catholic Church, it was not unusual to be reminded that “God sees, and knows everything”. In a Catholic school two young boys were causing trouble for Sister.  She sent them over to the pastor.  The first boy was called in and the priest, in a stern voice, asked “Where is God??”  After hearing this several times the child began to cry.  Father told him to think about this and come back when he was ready to answer.  The first boy stumbled out of the office where the second saw the look on his face.  “What happened???”  The first boy stammered, “God is missing and Father thinks we took him!”  If this takes you back, just remember that discarding some of the stuff we carry might be a good thing.  We are responsible for the decisions we make.  Spiritualists believe in personal responsibility. 

          Meditation is a helpful tool.  There are many ways we can quiet our souls.  Remembering that we each have a spark of the divine within us is comforting.  Throughout history poetry, art and literature have presented the idea of the divine.  The author of The Hound of Heaven describes the poet’s search for God and ends with: “All of which thy child’s mistake fancied as lost I have stored for thee at home”. 

    Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, realized that we are all divine within our very being.  He wrote, “if only people could see themselves as they really are…I suppose the big problem would be that people would all fall down and honor each other.”  “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusions, a point of truth.  This point is the pure glory of God in us.  It is in everybody”.

    In every form of religion there have emerged spiritual leaders.  Many of these have engaged in mystical encounters which have taken them to a much deeper awareness of being.  Andrew Jackson Davis, the father of modern Spiritualism, predicted that a wealth of information would soon be made available concerning communication between those on the earth plane and spirits in the higher spheres.  Only a few months later the Fox sisters in Hydesville New York began hearing rappings under their home.  The event is credited as the beginning of modern Spiritualism.  Andrew Jackson Davis had predicted this and other remarkable things while in a trance state.

    A spiritual journey is made up of decisions.  My own journey began as a child.  Summer days often found me up in the branches of a cherry tree in our backyard.  The tree overlooked a cemetery.  I loved to sit up there all by myself.  The tree swayed in the wind.  I sometimes thought about the people buried there.  How was I to know that more than fifty years later I would think very differently about the thing we call death.  No one was there, they had passed over.

    Decisions, when to stay, when to go…I spent 35 years as a member of a religious community. The latter part of that journey took me on a path through many towns in northeast Ohio. I wrote:
“The main road must be the story, with side street chapters, angling at degrees of ninety or less.  The road winds through a valley of changing seasons.  I know where the road has passed, and others have been permitted views of varying lengths.  Here is the center of town… what remains to decide is the choice of departure.  Isn’t life really made up of trips to town, and the back roads linking all towns?” (1977).

    Once, in Geneva Switzerland, I remember a wall titled, “Saints of the Reformation”.  Calvin and other “Protestant” reformers were being honored as saints.  My “correct” thinking was assaulted.  On your journey, where have you had to stop and decide to go ahead, or take a side road?  Jean Houston, who facilitates Mystery Schools, speaks about our leaky margins.  We have the opportunity to allow “stuff” to leak in as well as out.  Thus, I refer to myself as an “expanded Catholic”, rather than “recovering”.
Spiritualism and its principles have leaked in. A gradual reforming of my beliefs has been in process for years.

Will you choose to look at the path you have been following?  You have choices.  It is time to recognize your good choices and rejoice in them!