For some people, a crisis like my father’s stroke last October expands and deepens and affirms their faith. For some people, it has the opposite effect, and I am in that second group… much to my surprise.
You see, I have always and forever been a seeker.
From the day I saw… something… when I was jumped on in a pool at the age of six and immediately started to drown, the air pushed out of my body so fast by the weight of the other body.
From the day I walked into the kitchen soon after and asked my mother, “how do I know I am me?”
There are too many instances to recount here, but by the time I was maybe 10 or 11, I was sitting on a stool in our city library pulling books off the shelf in the Eastern religion section and trying to freaking figure all of this out.
I knew there was more than this and I knew there were too many simple explanations out there, keeping people from exploring and discovering. I knew that wouldn’t be me. I knew I wanted to experience what I had experienced in that pool, that’s for sure, and I wasn’t finding it in any church, though I’d get the occasional glimpse there.
Over my life, I have studied and studied so many religions and philosophical systems that resemble religion. I like this about myself. I like synthesizing and integrating.
If there is something bigger, something God(dess)-like, then a few things I do know are that one container is way too small, containers are metaphors and yet simultaneously real, and language (a construct of this limited human mind) can never touch reality.
And so, I like having Our Lady of Guadalupe on my altar next to Kali next to Kwan Yin next to…
Over my life, it’s been my relationship with Guady (as I call her) that has, for whatever reason, been the most powerful, the most consistent. When I am lost in a dark place of doubt, which happens not rarely thanks to this deeply curious mind, it is Guady who seems to somehow find me.
It sounds… fluffy, doesn’t it? but it’s the only way I can explain it.
My father’s stroke was remarkably transformative in ways I could not have foreseen and have not liked one bit.
Nothing that I used to do was breaking through.
Chant. Prayer. Meditation. Reading. Visualizing. The rosary. Going to mass.
What is the point of life if all we do is die?
I could not get past that question.
I could not get past the idea that there’s quite simply NOTHING MORE than this.
I’m writing about all of this as if it were in the past and it’s not.
It’s my right now.
I have some good helpers in this arena. They are all saying the same thing to me… do the things regardless. Do the chanting and the prayer and the altar creation even if you don’t feel it.
Plant the seeds. Cultivate. Keep working it. Wait.
In the meantime, a good friend giggled and pointed out that I am spiritually constipated, and I just need the right enema.
I’m thinking I’m not alone.
I know I’m not alone in this.
And speaking of Guady finding me…
A few weeks ago we were in Asheville and I knew they had a rather famous Basilica but I wasn’t going to seek it out. Instead, we walked and walked one day downtown and suddenly, we were at it. It loomed in front of us.
And she was in there, in so many of her guises.
I lit a candle and said a prayer that for the first time in a long time felt like a true prayer.
I say prayer like things when I am teaching all the time, but they are more inner directed.
In that quiet, cool, dark basilica, lighting that candle in front of a Marian shrine, for the first time in a long time, it felt outer directed.
I don’t believe in a God that sits above us, watching over us, judging or helping, but I do believe that I am woven into something bigger that I can access.
I believe that when I am not NOT believing it.
I believe that when I am not spiritually constipated.
In the meantime, my enemas include chanting and reading some tantra texts but also a new work by Mirabai Starr about women mystics. A few pages in and I can feel a slight stirring deep in my belly.
I have built a water and stone altar to Guady and I plan to create an altar to some of my significant ancestors.
That’s all I’ve got right now… some hope that these things might take root and grow, that I might find my way back to that little girl on that stool in the library who was so open and wondering and in awe of life.