Spiritual Journey

My mom was always a spiritual person.  Early in her life, she was part of a charismatic church, which includes among its beliefs that individuals may talk in tongues through the holy spirit.

Later, when I was in high school, my mom believed that she had a calling to become a minister, and enrolled at Wesley Theological Seminary, a part of American University in Washington, D.C.  She spent a total of seven years finishing her master’s in divinity and graduated from school the same year that I graduated with my bachelor’s in fine art.

However, at the end of that journey, she faced a committee to be ordained within the Methodist Conference.  Ultimately she was rejected by that committee and left the church (having later attempted and denied entry a second time through the Congregationalist ministry).  After much sojourning, she arrived as an outsider to a church she had belonged to for most of her adult life, having failed to attain the goal to which she believed was called.  A particularly heartless colleague quipped to her, “Many are called but few are chosen,” after he received his appointment as minister to her former Methodist church in Catonsville (where she had been an active member since we had moved to Catonsville in the 1980’s).  There could not have been a greater failure to be unable to reach a calling in the spiritual life, and her subsequent frustration and disillusion from the organized church left her deeply hurt, abandoned it would seem even by god.

My mom was ultimately called home; she saw her end about a week before it arrived on a Sunday afternoon, in a quiet intensive care unit, away from all that she knew and loved in this world, forced by her failing body to let go of the people she cared most about here.  Her agony and suffering at her end – physically and spiritually – would have broken a lesser person.  Just watching left the rest of us heartbroken and desolate.

Some years later, I find myself walking on my own spiritual journey.  I know neither the way nor the destination, but find myself walking – perhaps alone and truly in the wilderness of false expectations – but compelled forward by love anyway.  Some days I think we may really be marooned here, left to our devices, cut off from the “real,” left instead with this world and its meaninglessness.  Assuming that the New Testament reveals truth to us, God sent Christ into this world to show us the path of eternal salvation, and we responded by crucifying him and his own followers denying him.  On the darkest days, perhaps as a mere mortal I can be excused for losing the way when even saints and apostles can be so easily lost.

But then I hear my son reminding me that it is time to get up, I see a rainbow out my window, I hear the silence after a deep snow, I awake just in time to watch the sunrise over the landscape, I see a student come to an understanding of a difficult matter, I smell the spring flowers and cherry blossoms, I walk a familiar path on a clear day, I make a new friend or re-connect with an old one, I level-off to my own internal center, I see a little way down the path clearly after some of the fog clears off.  Broken as I may be, my love points to true north, pale reflection that it may be of its greater source.  All of us – All of us – forever know the true way home.