Tag Archives: Religion and Spirituality

Trust Your Own Journey

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Gate The spiritual journey is a path of waking up our awareness. It demands that we trust our experience, become friends with our burning. It does not matter if your hunger is a different hunger than mine: you must trust your own hunger. Sufi mystic Rumi writes that our hunger itself is proof of the existence of bread. Our thirst is proof that there is such a thing as water. If we trust our deepest inner hunger it will lead us on our own spiritual path.

I cannot tell you what your spiritual path must be. I can only offer you some gleanings, some sparks of light for your spiritual journey from my experience of following my own burning, and my experience of being in community with the people of my congregation and other spiritual searchers. Hallway with DoorsSomeone once described our faith community as a hallway with many doors to the holy. One temptation is to get stuck in the hallway, celebrating the freedom to choose whichever door we want, rather than to open any of them. There is a Buddhist parable that says we can’t find water by digging many shallow wells. To begin a spiritual journey we must actually open a door, and walk through to where it leads us.

Albert Einstein’s questioning hungers led him to open a door into scientific experimentation and mathematical reasoning, and he followed that pathway more deeply than most minds are able to fathom. Was that a spiritual journey? I think so. He became a friend to his own burning. His vision has inspired and changed our lives, even if most of us could not explain the theories he developed.

Spirituality is not an escape from the world. Spirituality is about experiencing more deeply our relationship to all that is. Spirituality is awakening to awe and gratitude for all that is. We don’t have to be a Rumi or an Einstein to enter a spiritual doorway. We only need to become friends with our own burning.

Frederick Buechner says,“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace.” 

To be spiritual means to pay attention to our own experience of the mysterious reality of which we are a part. I am inviting you to take a risk—to befriend your hunger, to pay attention, to go through the doorway, to see what you might experience about our miraculous world.

To take that next step through the door can be difficult. We might be suspicious of what lies on the other side. We may be drawn to mystery, but uncomfortable with the irrational or unproven. We might discover old wounds triggered by the symbols or language from difficulties in our religious past.  How do we heal?  How do we re-imagine or reclaim our own connection to divinity?

For now, I invite you to notice what is in your heart.  Notice the hungers you feel, the questions, the passions, the fears.  Notice, just notice, any wounds you may carry that surface when you approach a doorway into spirituality. Make a list.  Explore what triggers those wounds, and let yourself remember any painful experiences from your own religious past.  I will continue to explore these questions in future posts.

Risky Talk

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I have some of my own baggage attached to spirituality. From my earliest memories, I knew that it was risky to talk about spirituality. It was sure to mark you as strange or crazy, or get you into trouble. I don’t even know how or where I learned this—maybe at school among my classmates? There was something embarrassing, or dangerous, or profoundly broken with the idea of speaking about this realm.

But in my immediate family, it was just the opposite. Spirituality was an ever-present force. My father didn’t just believe in God, he was in love with God. He had called out to God, and experienced an answer. It filled his life like a contagious fire. A spark of that fire ignited in my heart, too.

FlameI was hungry for this burning love. But I was also afraid of what other people would think of me. How often do we deny our own deep experience to gain social acceptance? It seemed to me that most people outside my family said they believed in God, but they didn’t really expect anything to come of it. So I learned to keep certain things hidden—especially the solitary and mysterious experiences of longing or feeling loved.

Because I was a child growing up Catholic, I fit my experience into the stories I learned, the beliefs that were given to me. It was safer to talk in the language of belief, rather than to reveal my feelings. Later, those beliefs were challenged by my experience, and my journey brought me into a very different place. My beliefs got turned upside down, in order for me to be true to my experience. But that fire of burning love kept re-igniting.

Today, when I venture inside my own heart, I still experience deep longings, these hungers that feel almost like pain, or sometimes like restlessness. It is difficult to feel this and I am tempted to read a book, or find something else that might fill up that empty place. But instead of escaping or fixing it, I invite myself to try to be present with it. I breathe into the longing and let myself experience the hunger. Is this what it means to become friends with my burning? I accept the feelings of my heart just as they are. I connect with the experience of my deeper self.

Perhaps that is all that happens. But sometimes, something else happens too. My heart opens up, the emptiness becomes a doorway, and I fall into a larger awareness. I feel the earth, the sky, the wind. I feel joined to everything. I find answers to questions and guidance when I face a crossroads. I feel held in the arms of tenderness. I feel that I have come home. Sometimes, as Rumi says,

Something opens our wings
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear
Someone fills the cup in front of us
We taste only sacredness.

This has been my experience of spiritual awakening. Hunger itself becomes a doorway into sacredness, into feeling connection beyond my aloneness. Does it matter, on any particular day, whether I feel longing or feel love? Whether I feel questions or feel answers? The Buddhist mystics would say no. What matters is that I am becoming conscious. Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, says,

“If we want to enter Heaven on Earth, we need only one conscious step and one conscious breath.”

Take some time to notice what is brewing in your heart. Do you feel a sense of emptiness? A sense of connection? Do you feel questions? Don’t try to change anything, just become aware of what you are carrying in your heart in this moment.

Quotes from: The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks p. 280.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living, p. 8.