What I Know
(The Kingdom Is Within)
A Short Résumé of My Spiritual Journey
Friday, March 16, 2007
Notice I didn’t write what I “believe”. For the same reason I told my spiritual advisor this week that my knowledge goes beyond faith. My knowledge is certain. Spiritual writers over the past 2500 years or so largely agree that there are two roads to God — one by faith and one by revelation. I’d like to add reason to this mix. However, if God had not revealed itself to me on various occasions I may not have been able to sustain my belief on faith and reason alone — well at least not on faith.
So from where comes my certainty, my knowledge?
I was a fanatical Christian as a child and adolescent - no idea where this came from. My parents were church goers but the only church-related matters ever discussed in our home where what people wore that Sunday, or how much money they made. However, when I was 17 and in my last year of Sunday school, the teacher (who was the Minister of the United Church - the eldest grade gets the Minister - a real honour!) announced on the first day that the miracles didn’t happen — they were only symbols and stories used to illustrate doctrine. I had had no preparation for this announcement. Immediately my faith went up in smoke and I never went to church again for 10 years.
So why did I go back? After separating from my wife and moving from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Ottawa to start a new career I went through a stressful period. This is when “it” happens baby. At an unexpected moment I was suddenly, inexplicitly filled with a tremendous interior sea of light that filled my soul, my body and the entire physical world around me. I was suddenly floating on a could of light and love. Everything was marvelous, everything was bliss — the dog in the street was holy, the wind, the sky, me, my colleagues. I was stupefied. I kept pinching myself, swearing never to forget this because I knew when I got used to it I may not recognize it anymore. It lasted SIX months. Imagine - six months of unmitigated bliss. I think I equated this light with God and/or love at this time and sort of understood finally what “God is Love” meant.
Here is a quotation from Thomas Merton’s “Seven Story Mountain” that sums up my experience.
Then, as sudden as the shout and as definite, and a thousand times more bright, there formed in my mind an awareness, an understanding, a realization of what had just taken place on the alter, at the Consecration: a realization of God made present by the words of Consecration in a way that made Him belong to me.
But what a thing it was, this awareness; it was so intangible, and yet it struck me like a thunderclap. It was a light that was so bright that it had no relation to anything visible and so profound and so intimate that it seemed like a neutralization of every lesser experience.
— it was a light — that was offered to all, to everybody, and there was nothing fancy or strange about it. It was the light of faith deepened and reduced to an extreme and sudden obviousness.
It was as if I had been suddenly illuminated by being blinded by the manifestation of God’s presence. (Why didn’t he say Jesus here?— This is the biggest question in my life.)
The reason why this light was blinding and neutralizing was that there was and could be simply nothing in it of sense or imagination. When I call it a light that is a metaphor which I am using, long after the fact. But at the moment, another overwhelming thing about this awareness was that it disarmed all images, all metaphors, and cut through the whole skein of species and phantasms with which we naturally do our thinking. It ignored all sense experience in order to strike directly at the heart of truth, as if a sudden and immediate contact had been established between my intellect and the Truth Who was now physically and really and substantially before me at the alter. But this contact was not something speculative and abstract: it was concrete and experimental and belonged to the order of knowledge, yes, but more still to the order of love.
Heaven is right here in front of me: Heaven, Heaven! (Pages 311 - 312)
So I assumed at this moment that this “in-filling of the holy spirit” came from Christ. So via my poor friend Robin (who drowned himself last fall) I started going to the Anglican church (Ottawa’s St. Alban’s of all places, — very high). But after six months or so, when I got used to the light, I stopped going regularly — but went off and on to various Anglican churches over the years — including the Ottawa chapter of Integrity.
However, I had to find a reasonable explanation for this unexpected, unsought-for union with the creator, God, light, love, prime mover, or whatever you want to call it. So I started reading books on religion, trying to find writers who had had similar experiences. And there were many, especially the mystics (of various religions), Buddhists, Sufis, Unitarians, etc. The writers with whom I most identified and found most helpful were D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, John Selby Spong, Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, Bonhoeffer, A. N. Wilson, Elaine Pagels, Alexander V. G. Allen, etc. You get the picture.
Friends also helped me. One in Vancouver, the most erudite lay person on Christianity that I know, shares my views (which I’m coming to below) 100 per cent. One in my home town in Nova Scotia (where they now have an affirming United Church) is a meditating Zen Buddhist who helped me to understand what the light means. And a philosophy professor friend in Halifax (an Anglo-Catholic no less!!!) has always insisted that I am a Christian in spite of myself (based on a lot more than the facts that I was baptized in the Christian church and that I am a product of Christian culture that are too complicated for me to remember). (So I now consider myself a Christian by default. But I could as easily be a Muslim if I, for example, had grown up and lived in Nabus.)
My second epiphany occurred about four years ago. This was as intense, but more short-lived and somehow different. In a moment of despair I was lying my sofa and I felt God moving through me. It was if something were passing a loving, strong, steadying hard over a smooth, dark limitless sea (or my stomach:). It was only internal. The world was not filled with light. But I know that God was there, inside me, letting me know that I was not alone. I can remember it explicitly to this day. It was so comforting. It was a physical sign, not an intellectual one, that I was not alone, that God was in me.
These two experiences, along with my reading has led me to believe the following:
— God is in everything. This makes sense scientifically as everything is made of the same substance — quarks — right (well at least in our universe lol)? So if Jesus was divine so are we and so are the chairs we sit on. WE are all divine. What makes people like Jesus, Mohammad, the Buddha, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, the Dahli Lama, etc., so special is that they were able to realize this more than most of us. They knew that God, or the prime mover, or whatever, was light, was love and that this will save humanity. And I believe that.
— There are many pathways to God. One doesn’t have to be a Christian, and one doesn’t have to believe, for example, that Christ physically was raised “up” to heaven. He himself is reported to have said: “The kingdom is within us.” I don’t know what happens to the God in is when our bodies die, but witnessing what God has accomplished to date — nothing would surprise me.:)
— That’s about all there is to it. Pretty simple stuff when one comes right down to it. The trick is discovering this for oneself. I was lucky. For some reason God revealed himself to me in the two aforementioned occasions and he is continuing to do so more frequently now that I am reading more, thinking more and associating more with believers in the spirit.
I started going to an Anglican church here in Montreal about a year ago, after having shopped around at several churches for a few years. I liked the sermons, the music and the architecture (in that order:). They were rational. The preachers obviously treated the Biblical stories not literally but as myth. (Yes there are still churches in Montreal that take most of the Bible literally — in fact even students in my Education for Ministry program do — to my continuing grief.)
But my bond to this church community is growing fast. (Fast? The priest-in-charge asked me a year ago when he saw me at the general meeting — oh Mr. Love — committed are we? I replied with a laugh (no, just looking!). So it’s taken a year. But what a year it’s been. The “Out Mass” with Bishop Gene Robinson last summer. The Sunday service after the disastrous synod last December when my heart reached out to the clergy and realized I wanted to help. (I find it ironic and embarrassing that they are doing so much more than we to help gay people in this city — you would never have dreamed of hearing the sermons preached from this pulpit even five years ago. It’s like witnessing a new Reformation — but this one based on reason and common sense, not on closed dogma and a literal reading of scripture.)
I had another epiphany when my mother was dying on Boxing Day last December. A faithful Christian all her life, almost her last words to me were “God is punishing me — like Job”. I was horror struck that a devote Christian could experience such pain on her deathbed (but then again — apparently Jesus did as well). When I told this to my brother shortly afterwards he agreed with her statement (he is a Prespreterian) and I said no — God is not testing her — man tests man , she is, her culture or upbringing is punishing her — God is LOVE, and again I was filled with the light (and almost ran to my good friend Gordon’s — the Zen Buddhist — house a mile away to share this light with him and his wife.
I also feel the light and the love when I meet the clergy at church (especially when one pats my arm or back before the Sunday service). Can you image — getting true Love in church!? Unbelievable. Does everyone else feel that? Is that what church is for? “Where two or more are gathered”. Well, “God is Love” after all.
Where does all this leave me now that I’m retired? I’ve never felt the need or call for a volunteer role in the church (or elsewhere), but I’ve always felt a calling to the life of contemplation and study. I’ve always felt guilty about this preference — but I think Merton would support me. The challenge now is how to go about it. I am starved intellectually. I’m not getting enough nourishment from the Education for Ministry course. The level of debate and intellectual understanding of the texts the participants are reading is too low. It’s impossible to have rational debate where the majority are fundamentalists. Is enrollment part-time in the McGill Bth program the answer? Or would I be better off in a monastery (lol)?
Questions I want to keep investigating: Can there be any rational justification for the trinity?
What are the criteria for using the terms God, Lord and Jesus? (I often feel people are using them interchangeably without knowing which one they mean.) Does prayer work and if so how? Does one need an intermediary between us and God? (Many believe so, but I’ve never understood why.)
Themes to develop: my edge; my gift of alienating people with my aggressivity; my type of witness (Marty? friends? family? those around me in my faith community?)
