My Spiritual Journey

"The journey you wish to take can only begin from where you are right now this very minute." - Ron Atchison

I decided to write an intimate portrait of my spiritual journey before I ran across the Ron Atchison quote. In some respects that is what I've been doing here on xanga all along since starting my blog. But writing about "spiritual things" isn't necessarily the same as recounting the story of my spiritual journey.

Contrary to what Atchison claims, my spiritual journey doesn't begin right here, right now. In a real sense, it didn't even begin with my birth. My journey is but a jaunt along a path paved by those throughout history who have already undertaken it. Most of what I've seen has already been discovered yet my uniqueness guarantees there will be some surprises along the way.

The unconscious lessons of my infancy - unconditional love, protection, trust, nurture - serve as a point of departure for my spiritual journey. I covered a lot of ground in these early years without ever realizing it. Before I consciously asked my first spiritual question, I had progressed in my understanding of the ways of the spiritual realm.

Looking back at my childhood I recall experiences of intense emotion which, for the first time, had a profound impact on who I was and how I saw myself. These became the first conscious steps taken on my spiritual journey.

As a 3 years old I experienced my first conscious taste of fear. A young and troubled distant relative, perhaps a psychopath, who lived in the attic of my maternal Grandmother's house next door, made it a habit of jumping out of nowhere to scare my cousin and me and would chase us through the woods behind our house. He was my boogeyman and every bit as scarey as Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers or Jason.

Also around this time I had my first conscious encounter with being critically ill and the disconnect between what I wanted to do and what my body allowed me to do. Instead of doing the things that normal 3-4 year old boys would be doing, I spent a significant amount of time in and out of the hospital living in oxygen tents to treat pneumonia, asthma and a series of respiratory complications.

I had my first taste of abandonment as a 6 year old. School had been dismissed early because of tornado warnings. Long after everyone had left for home, my cousin and I found ourselves alone on the playground. We eventually rearranged some large stones in an attempt to "build" a car that we could "drive" home. This was also my first experience of salvation as, after what seemed like hours but was likely only a matter of minutes, our teacher discovered us playing alone on the playground as she left the school and gave us a ride home.

My initial conscious experience of separation and loss was at the age of 7. My parents bought a new home in the neighboring suburb. In the move I lost everything that was familiar to me - my room, my house, my neighborhood friends, my school.

By age 10 I had my first taste of death of someone close. My maternal Grandfather succumbed to cancer. Over a period of weeks I had witnessed his confinement to a hospital bed in their trailer's living room and the ravaging effects of a disease that literally ate him up into nothingness before my eyes.

It was at this same time that I began to put on weight and became a chubby child, facing cruelty for the first time in the taunting and ridicule of peers.

These experiences and others like them tore the first gaping holes in my emerging view of the world. The world was scarey, health was fragile, we sometimes found ourselves alone, there was no permanency to the things that make us comfortable and secure, those we love don't live forever, people were cruel and I was not worthy of respect. The need to fill these holes and make my world whole again drove my spiritual journey in my early years.

In my early years the spiritual journey was not framed by religious instruction or church attendance. This did not mean, however, an absence of values. I was taught from the beginning that we had a moral responsibility to be our brother's keeper and that our existence was defined by identification with family. I was taught there were rules we live by and consequences when those rules were broken.

The closest thing to a religious experience prior to my adolescence was the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Life came to stop and time stood still. Eyes fixed on the television set, each image became etched indelibly on my mind and heart. I felt an awkward mix of sadness yet at the same time an awe for the pomp and pagentry.

I learned that dreams could be gunned down and the good died young. I learned that there were rituals that could bring us all together, carry us through our common grief and bring about healing and reconciliation.

It wasn't adolescence that made my teenage years turbulant. It was my mother's mental illness. Dealing with the changes brought on by puberty took a backseat to behaviors in my mom that defied explanation or understanding.

To say that watching your mother bang her head on the cupboard until her forehead bled while loudly chanting that she wished she was dead was unsettling is an understatement. It was impossible to predict what would provoke those too frequent episodes. My dad would get in the car and drive away leaving my younger sister and I alone. My manner of coping was to withdraw to my room with the door shut and locked. It was the only place I felt safe... or at least could hide. I lived my teen years as if walking on eggshells, afraid of doing anything that would trigger another outburst.

Bi-Polar. OCD. Borderline. It doesn't matter anymore what those years were all about beyond their having an impact on my spiritual make up. I thank God my mom is better now and has been so for the last thirty years.

I learned that the world is unpredictable, that sometimes there is no explanation for what happens. Sometimes all we're left with is unanswered questions. There are things in life we may never understand. And these lessons lent a sense of urgency to my spiritual quest.

Despite growing up in the 60's, I was never into the drugs or free sex scene. I wanted to be a teacher and that's all that really mattered to me. The war in Viet Nam played out on television sets nightly. I observed a growing rift between young and old, black and white, hawk and dove. A part of the idealism of my youth died in 1968 with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Hope and dreams went up in smoke as riot-torn cities burned and napalm bombs detonated on the other side of the world. Innocense was lost. I learned brokenness, hopelessness and despair. I learned that evil was a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Another defining moment for my spiritual journey occurred between my junior and senior years. As a sophomore and junior I weighed 210 pounds and was a lineman on my high school football team. Whether attributable to will power or anorexia I do not know, but I returned for my senior year a mere shadow of my former self weighing in at 138 pounds. I was struck by the instant celebrity status I gained among my peers. Everyone wanted to hear my story. One of my assistant football coaches who also coached track urged me to try out to see what I could do with the sleeker, slimmer me. People took notice of me only after I became "hot" looking. But even though the newfound popularity and attention felt good, I knew that appearance had nothing to do with who I was. I learned that it didn't matter who a person was on the inside. Life was driven by the superficial, by outward appearances.

The greatest surprise of my life came at the end of my senior year when I received my high school's Art Departmental Award. I was dumbfounded by the recognition but it drove home an appreciation of the power of art in any of its forms to convey truth.

These latest of life's lessons further defined the issues that would encompass my spiritual quest. I set off for college in search of understanding and answers to the complexities and contradictions and conundrums of life.

I set out for Western Michigan University in pursuit of a career as a middle school math and art teacher. I took with me a host of unanswered questions and a thirst for understanding or answers to the complexities, contradictions and conundrums that had challenged my childhood.

When Edward Kennedy quoted Yeats at the funeral of his assassinated brother Robert in June 1968, he spoke of a spirit that characterized RFK's life and was pervasive in youth at the time:
"Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?'
I dream things that never were and say 'Why not?'"
The times presented a cultural climate conducive to questioning every convention with an open mind. While volumes could be written about this spirit's impact, it did place me at the right place at the right time for the soul searching I needed to experience.

During this time I explored and experimented with a number of spiritual disciplines and churches, but didn't find a home until I came in contact with John Grathwohl, a priest who loved liturgy and was an activist when it came to living his faith. He became my mentor, I took instructions in the Catholic faith and became a Catholic at the Easter Vigil.

The Catholic faith didn't provide all the answers I was looking for but John's life made sense to me. My hunger was unquenchable and I soon found myself entertaining the idea of the priesthood.

Liturgy appealed to my artistic nature. The power and timelessness of the rituals connected me to the God I loved more than anything the world had to offer and the community that both gathered around and was defined by its participation in them. My interest took me to Notre Dame where I had the opportunity to explore further my fascination with liturgy.

At this time I continued to ponder the possibility that I was being called to the priesthood. Having completed the prerequisites for secondary education and a teaching major in math and a minor in economics, the only thing that separated me from my career was one last semester of student teaching. In order to keep the door open to the seminary however I added another year to my undergraduate studies to pick up a major in religion, a minor in philosophy and the language requirements for admission to the theologate.

Upon graduating from WMU, I was off for the seminary to study theology. Toward the end of my second year, I began to harbor doubts about my readiness to continue. In just three short years I had gone from converting to Catholicism to nearly being half-way on the road to ordination to the priesthood. It didn't seem right to continue without first giving myself a spiritual "time out" to give God a chance to speak to me and either confirm a return to the seminary or send me off in another direction.

Instead of sharing the next installment of his very interesting and special journey, YNOT's post yesterday dealt with the frustrations of parenting his 13 year old daughter who has discovered her interest in boys. How much easier it is when the reaction to the opposite sex is "Eeww" or "Yuck!" How do you keep the lines of communication with your teen open and preserve mutual respect yet set appropriate boundaries that give the space needed for her to continue to unfold and mature while at the same time protecting her from situations where she'll find herself vulnerable or susceptible to unnecessary hurt? They just don't teach that in school, do they?

Ynot's anguish was cause for me to revisit when I first found myself star-struck over a girl. This too represents an important milestone in my spiritual journey. It was the spring of 1963. I had just turned 12 and 6th grade was winding down as summer approached. I can't pinpoint when it happened, but at the snap of a finger my interest in sports, in cars, in things mechanical and in other "boy stuff" faded in the shadow of an infatuation with Jean Taylor.

I doubt I even understood what it all meant at the time. Had I discovered girls because of some change going on within myself or did I set my sight on Jean Taylor because other boys were hooking up with a girl and I didn't want to be left out? Mind you, it was different for my generation because there was no such thing as cell phones, instant messaging and xanga. These staples of modern technology may have pushed me along faster than I was emotionally mature enough to handle.

At any rate, we're at recess (yes, I said "recess") and are playing a game of softball. My team is at bat and as I go to the plate with runners at second and third base and one out, the kids began to taunt me with crescendos of "You better get a hit or Jean Taylor won't like you anymore!"

Kids are cruel that way. Good grief, talk about pressure! Determined to hit a homerun to win Jean Taylor's heart, I tightened my grip on the bat and leaned into the plate to meet the pitch with as much power as I could muster. Strike one. I stepped away from the plate to do the "between pitches fidget" dance to the beat of further taunts. "Jean Taylor," I thought, "this one's for you!" Strike two.

I could feel the momentum of the pressure shift from "can do" to "oh, no." As I stepped to the plate for the third pitch, I was fearful and tentative. "I've got to do this for Jean Taylor!" Strike three.

I was crushed and couldn't shrink any lower than I felt at that moment. I had no way of knowing that what transpired on that playground in the spring of 1963 would become a metaphor for my luck in life with women.

For the next three years I served as Youth Minister for a church comprised of over 1000 families. It was the same Church where I had first met John Grathwohl but he was no longer the pastor there. With his departure also went the quality of the liturgy. The same sermon was preached Sunday after Sunday and became so canned that the congregation actually began to lip sync it! My spiritual hunger was not being met and I was not alone.

I also took one last stab at dating and finding Mrs. Right. I never understood or fully appreciated manditory celibacy. Among my peers in the seminary most saw it as part of what you had to accept if you felt God was calling you to be a priest but it was not essential to the priesthood itself. It is a powerful witness IF God were calling you to a life of celibacy, but the call to priesthood and the call to celibacy were two distinct calls.

I had a serious relationship with three different women during my time out from the seminary and actually got close enough to one in particular that I could picture a life with her. But God didn't stop tugging at my heart and I concluded in the end that His call was too persistent and undeniable.

After a three year sabbatical I readied myself for a return to the seminary.

Throughout the 1980s I was known as 'the deejay priest.' Almost every weekend I deejayed at least one high school dance, wedding reception or parish/community event. I started out modest with a decent personal sound system in 1982 and, with the channel of communication it opened with youth and the personal joy it brought me, my hobby unfolded into a budding professional business. Known first as 'Sound Station' and changing the name three years later to 'Cruisin' to the Tunes!' my reputation as the deejay priest grew by leaps and bounds. The evolution of my deejaying years took me through large music collections in five different formats - first vinyl singles, then vinyl albums, then on to cassettes, music videos and, with the birth of compact discs, on to CDs. I had a professional sound system, full light show and live video with two large monitors on either side of the stage.

I became something of a peculiarity if not an oddity and as interest grew I started receiving phone calls from newspapers throughout southwestern Michigan interested in writing a feature. Many of these features became syndicated. I will never know how far my story spread.

Music has always been special to me, a mystical door to innermost and transcendant feelings. A song by itself not only could elicit a memory and its accompanying mood, but also could actually propel me back in time to the moment itself. Even today as I work within the prison, I have playing in the background collections of music carefully put together to carry my spirit again and again through my personal story.

In 1990 one of the most amazing gigs of my lifetime came to an end.

© Copyright 2005 gentlefootprint. All Rights Reserved.

Look Within

In his book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle frequently reminds his readers that he is not teaching anything that we do not already know. Cheril Carter-Scott in her book If Life Is A Game, These Are the Rules echoes that sentiment when she observes "Deep inside, you already know all you need to know."

Such an empowering truth, but do we really believe it? We greet our inner voice with distrust and heed it only after its been verified by external sources.

Consider the many wonderful spiritually-themed xangas. Are these not, in part, an expression of the writer's inner voice seeking common acceptance or ratification? Why are we so uncomfortable expressing and embracing the profound, life-altering spiritual truths etched within our heart, our spirit, our soul?

A legitimate concern might be the fear of confusing the inner voice of truth with the voice of the ego. Only by sounding out our inner voice through the ears of those we trust can we minimize the risk of being played by the ego.

If we agree with the premise that the answers to our innermost questions rest within us then it is also important to consider who or what the origin or source of the inner voice is. Is it the voice of God? The voice of a collective unconscious? Or is their no inner voice other than that of the ego?


What is the source of our inner voice? What inner truth or lesson do you have the hardest time believing or trusting?

© Copyright 2005 gentlefootprint. All Rights Reserved.