Awakenings

When I was about 19 years old, I was searching fervently for God. I’d been searching for some time. I had called myself agnostic since high school. But I wanted to do better than that. I wanted to KNOW. I wanted either to be an atheist or believer, not some wishy washy, lukewarm fence sitter.

When my best friend Mia’s older twin brothers and their wives, all Jehova’s witnesses, asked me if they could witness to me, I said yes. I listened. I tried to believe what they were telling me, but I couldn’t. I said to Linda, “It’s like you’re telling me just to believe that chair over there is purple. I can’t believe that. It’s not purple.”

When Mormons came to my mom’s door, I let them in. I listened. I tried to understand. But nobody was helping me at all.

During my freshman year in Fayetteville, more evangelists found me. The campus was teeming with them. I listened to them all. I remember talking with one young woman. I don’t know her name, can’t even remember her face now. But I remember very clearly what she told me to do if I really wanted to know if there was or was not a God. All I had to do, she said, was pray hard and sincerely for God to reveal himself to me. She said just to keep at it and not to give up. She promised me that if I did this, God would reveal himself to me.

Had I been surrounded by Buddhists or Muslims or Jews, I would have listened to them. But I was in the Bible Belt, so all the prosceletizing around me was being done mostly by Southern Baptists. I didn’t care how the answer came to me, just so it came. I was tired of not knowing.

So I did what that woman suggested, what she promised me would work. I lay in bed at night before drifting off to sleep and I prayed. I prayed to a God I wasn’t sure existed. I said, “Hey, God or Goddess! IF you exist, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE reveal yourself to me. I want to know beyond any doubt whether you exist.”

Nothing happened. But I kept at it. I talked to this maybe existing God while I walked, while I daydreamed, while I ate breakfast, while I drifted off to sleep each night.

Nothing happened.

The following year I was taking Intro to World Religions at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. We had just seen a film in class and had followed it with a discussion. I left class and began my usual barefoot walk through the wooded part of campus between Stabler Hall and the free parking lot where I left my 1969 VW Bug each day.

Tall pines towered above me. The forest floor was a carpet of dry pine needles, reddish brown. I approached the small trickle of a brook that cut across the well-worn footpath. I started to walk gingerly across the slick stepping stones, being careful not to slip.

It hit me like a bolt of lightning.

I stopped in my tracks and gasped.

I looked up at the trees, the shafts of light filtering through the branches over my head. I looked down at the mossy rocks glistening in the afternoon sun.

It was all God. I was God. The trees were God. The air I was breathing was part of God.

How could I have been so blind??? I was searching so hard for Her, and She was enveloping me, inside me, outside me all along.

I KNEW.

God is everything that exists, everything that doesn’t exist, everything we can imagine and everything we cannot imagine. He is all the laws of nature and all their physical manifestations: cause and effect, gravity, karma… YOU NAME IT! Not one bit of it isn’t part of Her.

I wept.

I was so happy.

All those years of off and on Sunday School, of not being able to make head or tails of the scriptures. Would they make sense to me now? I wanted to know.

I flew home and dug out our family Bible. I read and read and read into the night. It ALL spoke to me now. Passages that had been dry before now brought tears to my eyes, made me nod vigorously in agreement. YES! YES!

Next I went back to a book Ann and Brian Elwood had given me one Christmas. I’d babysat their children for a few years. This book was a brilliant translation of the Tao Te Ching. It had been but cryptic poetry before. And now? Now each page held a profound truth.

What else would come to life for me now? I found an English translation of the Holy Q’uran at Paperback Writer Used Books. I read it cover to cover in a few days.

My life has never been the same since. I also can find spiritual truths that resonate in me when reading about quantum physics. I highly recommend The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. This book, for me, reunited the world of scientific knowledge with the intuitive, spiritual knowing I now had. There just is no discrepancy between them for me anymore. They are two sets of metaphors, nothing more, for handling the same Truth.

Robert Bly came to speak at UALR the year I was there, as part of a series of talks on the divorce between science and religion. Bly’s talk rocked my world. I bought the cassette of his talk and must have listened to it afterward well over 300 times.

I really relate to the main character in Life of Pi by Yann Martel. He doesn’t see why he should have to choose just one religion. He is Zoroastrian and Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Jewish and Hindu.

Gandhi said, when asked if he was a Hindu, “Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew.”

I cheerily allowed myself to be brought into the Nichiren Shoshu sect of Buddhism when I was in Japan. I learned and indeed memorized a very long part of the Lotus Sutra, which we each recited morning and evening in front of our home shrines and on Sunday in the beautiful temple, our chanting led by an aged monk and soft drumming of two robed, bald neophytes.

I loved taking off my shoes in the foyer, padding up the stairs in my tabi socks, finding a place on the tatami to sit with my feet folded under me where they would become numb just five minutes into the hour-long service.

Incense smoke rose to the ceiling, swirling through the shafts of sunlight entering through the eastern windows. The old monk would come in, greet us good morning, face away from us and toward the object of worship to lead the chanting.

What was the object of worship? Well, as idols go, I thought this was a pretty good one. Our Gohonzon was a paper scroll on which were calligraphied four ideographs: Myo, Ho, Renge and Kyo. Those represent, in my own wording, 1. The mystical essence of the Universe 2. All of It’s physical manifestations 3. the Law of Karma 4. The relationship between all of this and us.

It worked for me.

But then came the day when I was expected to try to convert others. Naturally, of all the Buddhist sects in Japan, it was an evagelical sect that found me! And so after a point, I was expected to come along on their door-to-door crusades. I said I was not comfortable with that. I loved chanting the sutras. I loved my humble little shrine before which I knelt and chanted twice a day. But prosceletize? No way. When some elders were sent out to talk to me about my refusal to participate in converting others, I said to them, “There are many paths to the top of Mount Fuji,” rather proud of my cuturally fitting metaphor.

“One path!” they insisted, shaking their heads at me.

“No, not one. Many paths,” I repeated.

“ONE PATH,” they said.

We were at an impasse.

And so it went. I was a spiritual tourist. Longing to be around others who shared my overflowing love for God, I went from house of worship to house of worship. I jumped up and down and spoke in tongues with the Pentacostles at Word Aflame Fellowship. I caught the Holy Ghost at St. Mark Baptist, mine the only white face in the pews. Man, that pastor could preach a sermon that stuck with me for DAYS.

Disappointed by the dogma of more fundamentalist groups and feeling at times even ostracized by my unwilingness to conform to each church’s expectations of how a “good” xyz should look and act, I found and stayed a long time among Quakers with their circle of silence, no creed, no minister, no rules, no peer pressure to do ANYTHING other than sit in silence and wait on God. But in the end that did not feed me spiritually. It was very good to be involved in social projects and peace marches (I make awesome posters and banners, by the way). But after a while it began to feel too WASP, too middle class, too intellectual and too homogeneous (an over-abundance of university profs).

Nowadays I don’t have a congregation nor a building I go to each Sunday. My life is my practice. The earth is my altar. All humans are members of my church. I bring into my home anything that speaks to me: a rock, a crow feather, a beautiful leaf. I once found a very old framed Prayer of St. Francis at a yard sale. To this day it is one of my most beloved possessions and graces my bedroom wall.

I love St. Francis because he loves animals. I feel close to him and feel a comforting aura of Love emanating from him. This is my shrine to St. Francis.

I feel pretty lucky. The epiphany I had at age 19 was the most powerful and life-changing, but it has not been the last one. I’ve had two more mystical experiences since then. One happened while I was participating in a Native American rite of purification (sweat lodge ceremony) in Oklahoma. The other happened in a dream last year. Those two are ineffable, so I won’t even try to share them.

Anyway, all this was written down here simply as preface to a poem I want to share. But now it’s my bedtime, so I’ll do that another day.