Stop looking. Start seeing.
By: Rev Dr Sparky
Tags: Humor, Spirituality, Religion, Life Lessons, Memory

Choose your metaphor — there are plenty

Spiritual “seekers” may spend years or decades wandering about in the exotic foyers of all the other religious constructs, philosophical frameworks, or spiritual practices besides their cradle faith. Oh, it’s glorious out there, in the metaphysical heights of Buddhism; the sorceror’s world of Carlos Castenada, the rich marriages of flesh and spirit in the godheads of Hinduism; the stern submission of Islam! We seekers yearn to discover the Atman, or the Buddha or the Tao, whatever we might think they are, from a book we bought on Amazon, or a weekend retreat in the desert. And then we hear about achieving satori, and oh, perhaps we did achieve satori, that one night, remember? When we trustingly consumed a hallucinogen that kept us high for most of the weekend?

Sampling the infinite Varieties of Religious Experience is intoxicating, addictive. We might well have started with William James, of course, and hopefully we found James Fowler’s classic Stages of Faith as a developmental guide. But then, our life journeys may have brought us who-knows-where. Feel free to insert here your memory of that guru, or that seminar, or that new church or synagogue or temple, or that teacher you found along the way who took you far, far away from your own American roots into the exotic realms of those Others.

Perhaps you have been a spiritual bag lady, like me — going about collecting the ideas others have discarded, remnants of their childhood faith, or of their incomplete conversion, or of their shattered heart when it flew into the unexpected hard places that challenge any religion we might follow. I don’t knock that process at all. The world is marvelous and varied, and it’s a shame to remain locked in the cells of our original thinking.

Still, when you are busy cleaning house, and freeing yourself from all the dysfunction you think you know about your first religion, remember that, failing a lobotomy, you remain influenced by those core beliefs. And for many dissenters and seekers and survivors of bad religion, it can be unnerving to realize that there almost every area of your heart, mind, or soul was influenced in some way by the world in which you came up.

Parts, puzzles, questions

That’s why I recommend asking the question the astronauts asked when the Apollo 13 space flight was in deadly danger, due to malfunctions they weren’t sure they could fix. Captured in the film was a dramatic moment that I hope actually happened, because I remember it to this day. The captain assembles the whole crew, explains their dire predicament, and asks them:

“What’s good about the spacecraft?”

The crew members then all go looking with that question in mind — seeking whatever was still working; what could be re-purposed; what could be used to replace what was broken. They bring all of their resources from every part of the craft and dump them on a table, and then the saving work begins.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

I’ve used this rubric many times in my life, when things seemed out of control, or descending into a death spiral, or otherwise plainly doomed. What’s good about this spacecraft, I will ask—by which I mean this body, this mind, its community, its possessions, its resources, its will.

This trick is just a quick way to change one’s focus. It forces an assessment that is rooted in reality and not imagined doom. Or even real doom. Even if we feel doomed, there might be some strength hidden somewhere that we haven’t had to use recently; some help we might seek; some practice we have abandoned but might need now; or any small step we can take away from the precipice.

Anyone else see this stance as risky?

Mountain high

But eventually, the seeker begins to see — delightedly or grudgingly — one of two metaphors. There’s the popular trope that All Religious Paths Will Reach the Top of the Mountain. I’m not so sure that’s true. There’s no guarantee you will “reach the top.” You could just as easily fall off a cliff, slide to the bottom, enter a box canyon and get hopelessly lost, or simply go round and round the mountain, halfway up, and never get anywhere.

River deep

There’s another metaphor that seems more reliable to me. Deep below the surface of all our souls runs a massive underground water table of cosmic truth and sustenance, fed by hidden springs and bubbling up in wild places all over. Faith traditions are shaped by the landscape in which they emerge, and the structures built around those springs, but the essence is mostly the same. And daring mystics might even sink their own wells — go straight to the source and drink deep.

As I am internalizing this metaphor, it begins to seem superfluous to keep flying about, trying to see all the places where that underground river of soul shows up. I begin to see that the Infinite Cosmos is great enough and varied enough to encompass and bless (if that is your language) all the sacred places, holy icons, divine practices, and human beliefs that there are. I’m trying to dwell and revel in the deep waters that were hidden under the house I was born in.

Our earliest memories generally last the longest, as we know. I observed this tendency first-hand, when I made a pastoral call on a woman in her 80s with severe dementia. The debility had gradually erased great swathes of her mature life and memories, leaving all but her earliest recollections. She had learned fluent English after emigrating from Germany at the age of 10; now, though, she had forgotten English almost entirely. The only utterances she could make were to sing, in German, scraps of the hymns and songs she had sung as a child. Singing or hearing those songs were the only remaining sources of real joy in her life. I recall how her face lit up. That language; those songs; those mysteries, were the essence of her faith that remained.

It’s the memory of this woman that makes me certain that it is not a mistake to revisit one’s original faith. In fact, I wonder: if we spent the same time and energy exploring that faith as we did looking for another, better one, wouldn’t we find there were depths there that we had never noticed? Mystery. Paradox. Poetry. Love.

The great religions offer different ways to explore the lifelong, central mystery of our existence. That mystery doesn’t just unfold neatly in your hand, like badly folded origami; moreover, finding one “answer” usually means you have to discard three others. Finally, after all the running around looking for the perfect faith, perhaps it is better to return to our OG faith for the deepest insight, the most internalized means of figuring out the world.

One way to return home.

“…If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard; because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that it?” “That’s it.”

But a spiritual journey isn’t just a remake of Dorothy’s trip to Oz — though for all we know that’s what L. Frank Baum had in mind. Rather, it is perhaps more like a labyrinth. A labyrinth is not a maze — it begins in one spot and allows you to walk through it to the center. I walked a labyrinth once, and noted after a time that I found myself quite near the place I had entered. Quite near, but not exactly at the entrance, for I had walked all that way.

And I still had all that way to go.