Reflections on Spirituality

My journey with religion has been a long and winding road. I went to Catholic school for the first 8 years of my life, and just by the process of Osmosis I learned a lot about the Bible and all of the major players in it. I fainted once on Ash Wednesday. I dreaded the idea of someone putting dirt on my head and my body just shut down. I was in fourth grade. Another time the Bishop of our dioceses poked me in the eye and then went right back to working the room. He knew he did it. That was the end of the religious chapter of my life. I was about 14.


The next 7 years or so me and spirituality kind of broke up. Books became my salvation, and these were the years I did some serious discovery, most of it in the hammock of my own back yard. One day when I was 21, I was reading the book “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles and came across this quote.


“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”


And that was it for me. I hit the road. My first stop was Yellowstone park for a summer. It was incredible. I remember watching the movie Field of Dreams. One of the characters said “We don’t realize the most significant moments of our lives while they are happening.” I didn’t know it at the time but that was incredibly prophetic. That summer was my first taste of so many things. Somehow the time spent out in the wild had also reignited an old spark. I felt something when I was wandering in those mountains..I don’t know what it was, but it felt like what I thought religion should have felt like. Plus no one was poking me in the eye or trying to rub dirt on my head.


Something was stirring, but I didn’t know then what it was. As Soren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."


A year later I was working at the Grand Canyon. One day I went hiking all the way to the bottom with a couple of friends. We got separated and I would up all the way at the bottom of that place with not another soul around for miles. 


It was Dusk…


I took it all in All of this had been around for millions of years, yet at this time, in this place, it belonged to me. This was my moment. This was my time. And then I felt an energy. An incredible energy, rise up inside of me… I knew. I knew that whatever energy existed in this world I shared a piece of it. I was connected to it. I had access to it. I also knew that I was supposed to add to it. That I had been given gifts that would help me add to it. Improbably, against all odds, I had defined at that moment what spirituality meant in my own life…


This experience would lead me to the study of what Carl Jung called Synchronicity, which defines how there are really no accidents in our lives. If we can break though the noise, the apathy, the laziness, I discovered that we just might find there were incredible secrets to unravel as to why people come into our lives when they do. This is a lesson that has been presented to me over and over again. I still don’t understand this in real time. I need to stumble, to fail, to push people out of my comfortable world, before I really realize their importance. I am humbled by this.  But it has, finally, after many years, made me a person who likes to listen. It’s why I love people’s stories. They are transformative.


So for me the interconnectedness of human beings is the spirituality we have in this world. We all need each other so much, yet we find a million little ways to push people out of our spaces. I do this too. People that come into therapy do it a lot as well. I am well-equipped to advise them because I have fallen down all the same stairs. We all have little parts of ourselves that loves to sabotage our happiness. Like a Big Blue marble of misfit toys, we are fallible and we are flawed, but we can come to appreciate and even love each other’s imperfections because we have them ourselves. That is our shared legacy. That is what spirituality means to me…