A Spiritual Sojourn   A Spiritual Sojourn

My search for a spiritual home has lasted a lifetime.... After much trial and error ... after getting lost in various philosophies and "isms" which may have been helpful to some -- but weren't very, to me -- after "taking what I needed and leaving the rest" from all manner of organized religions and "weird" offshoots ... after experimenting and trying on for size and wearing and discarding ... after a lifetime of effort, I gradually formulated a spiritual path which works, for me....

What works, for me, is, at its foundation, a combination of AA, A Course in Miracles, and The Pathwork. I am not a certified teacher of anything. I am a student of these disciplines/philosophies/beliefs ... and, as a student, I am sharing my journey with you, if you care to accompany me.

Please don't take my word for anything ... Try these things on for size, yourself. See if they resonate as True for you, as they do for me. If they don't -- then discard them. If they do, then please hold my hand and let's continue the journey, together.

The time necessary to keep this page updated is in very short supply, sorry to say ... but I honestly haven't abandoned it. It just looks that way. (smile) Stop by now and then, if you want, to see if I've been by to drop another episode in the pot. I will, whenever I can...

Once upon a time, toward the end of World War II, a little baby girl (guess who) was born into a family of Christian Protestants (Methodists). She entered her new earth family with the pure soul shared by all infants -- in touch with God and the angels, here to learn what she needed to learn to advance spiritually.

What happened?!?! (G)


Well, for one thing, life happened -- and the lessons were contained therein. The lessons were about what unfolds when human will and judgements supercede the Will of God -- which means that the lessons were also very hard ... very sad ... and usually very painful, as well.

After a few years of lugging around the heavy baggage of human will and human judgements, I (as most of us do) forgot that I came from God ... and that I lived with the angels ... and that my soul (as all souls are) is perfect ... without a single flaw. Instead, I began to believe the lies....

I am not good enough to deserve Love
The human lie is that we must earn love ... that love is meted out as a reward and withheld as punishment for whatever we do or do not do ... that even (or maybe even especially) God will withhold love ... and that humans have the power to decide whether other humans are worth or unworthy of being loved -- even by God.
The outside is more important than the inside
The lie is that what matters is how we look ... what we do for a living ... how much money we have ... how famous we are ... how young and beautiful ... how healthy and strong ... how powerful among our peers ... how unquestioningly we accept and adhere to myriad religious dogma and tenents....
God judges -- and by human standards, at that
The lie is that what humans deem most important is also held as important by God. Human religious and ethical cultures and mores ... reputation and standing in the community ... wealth and power ... beauty and health.... And that if one falls short in any of these categories, then God will judge -- usually harshly -- and punish by making the human experience miserable, as well as by damning to eternal hell.
God's love is as tenuous as human love
The lie is that if we break any of the commandments, or other religious dogma, God will not love us ... that we must earn God's love in the same way we must earn human love ... that God does not love us wholly, absolutely and unconditionally ... and that God can (and will) stop loving us on a dime.


I believed all of that. (Didn't you? Doesn't everyone?) It's what I was taught, and (seemingly, at least) what everyone around me believed.

The only problem was ... none of it is true. And my belief and acceptance of Lies as Truth twisted my perception into hard knots of wrong-thinking. Wrong-thinking breeds wrong-action, always ... so, I trod an endless, terrifying path of one emotional and spiritual disaster after another -- blinded by lies which I didn't even know were lies....

What happened to me happened to a whole lot of other people my age, too ... we discovered hypocrisy and wrongthinking in our churches and synagogues, and, fueled by the naive zeal of youth, we turned our backs on all that and turned, instead, to the heady promises of the "love generation" -- "flower power," "turn on ... tune in ... drop out," "make love, not war," and all that....

What we (or at least, I) didn't know at the time, though was this: I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My thinking was messed up. There was hypocrisy in the church, yeah -- lots of it. And tons of wrongthinking, too. But that wasn't God's fault. It was, instead, the result of very flawed humans, daring to assume that they spoke for God.

But in my anger and rebellion, I blamed God. I blamed God for poverty ... for racism ... for bigotry ... for war ... for everything I found wrong done in his name. In the end, I decided that God couldn't possibly exist, since everything about the religions which claimed to represent God seemed so sullied, mean-spirited, unforgiving and cruel.

I wasn't very different from most other people of my generation. There were even headlines in the 60's declaring that God was dead. I believed it. I believed that people who believed in God were being foolishly duped, and were part of the problem -- definitely not part of the solution.

It was only much, much later that I came to realize that the people who claimed to speak for God (i.e. churches, synagogues, mosques, holy sees, all of organized religion and its leaders) did not, in fact, have much of anything to do with God. They were spewing their self-important, self-serving dogma at us -- not God's Love or God's will.

Okay -- All of that is what went wrong ... and I've discussed it at such length only so you'll understand how totally turned off I was to anything even remotely "religious." To my mind, I had unwrapped the package of religion, and found, inside, the rotting, decaying dogma of men -- not the Truth of God.

That left me feeling like a spiritual orphan, for more years than I care to remember. And as we all know, that which isn't nurtured and cared for eventually withers and dries up. That's how I felt, finally, in my spiritual core. Withered and dried. Dead.

What turned it all around, finally, was alcoholism. Because I was driven to my knees and couldn't crawl one more inch through life, without help. Through a Grace in which I had long since ceased to believe, I found AA. This emotional, spiritual shipwreck had washed up, by "luck," on the only shore which held any kind of hope for salvation. (Please note the small "s".) (G)

When I landed in AA, though, practically the first thing I saw was a window shade with the 12 Steps printed on it -- and they referred to (gasp) God. My heart sank to my toes ... because I knew if AA demanded that I return to religion (as I had always understood religion to be), I didn't stand a chance. No way. No how. No sir. Well, AA "demanded" no such thing, of course -- but it's safe to say that I had a hard time believing that and, in any event, loudly "resisted" all the "God stuff." (G)

"Resisted" is a mild word for what I did, however. (lol) In fact, I angrily defied the concept of a Higher Power. I had never seen one offered anywhere which didn't come with strings all over it -- strings of human dogma, anti-love, anti-joy, anti-life (no matter how prettily they wrapped it to appear otherwise).

But let me just cut to the chase and say that before long, I had to find a Higher Power which would "work" for me, if I wanted to stay sober (which I did, very much) ... so I started re-thinking all the "God stuff," from Square One.

When I did, I began to realize, finally that "God" and "religion" were not synonymous ... that I did not have to subscribe to the judgmental dogma of religion to subscribe to the Grace of a loving Higher Power ... that I could have God (easily, happily, joyfully) without having to have a church/synagogue/mosque/whatever, too....

But I still resisted. It wasn't from rage and rebellion anymore, though. It was from fear, pure and simple. I did not know how to have a relationship with God, free from the shackles and judgments of organized religion. I didn't know how to pray, without the attendant rituals of Judaism or Christianity. Every time I tried to "do something spiritual," the choke-hold of fundamentalist Christianity was palpable ... and I would run away again....

Then, one day, a friend in the Program told me about A Course In Miracles (carefully omitting from her explanation the fact that it's Christic to the core). I bought the text -- and recoiled in horror at the unsubtle implication that this was 100% about (not to mention by) Jesus. I put it on the highest shelf I could find and didn't look at it again for almost two years ... until I picked up a book called A Return To Love, by Marianne Williamson.

I read these phrases, highlighting and underlining as they resonated with joy and healing in my wounded, defended soul:

"[The Course uses] traditional Christian terms, but in decidedly nontraditional, nonreligious ways."

"The Course...claims no monopoly on God. It is a statement of universal spiritual themes. There's only one truth, spoken different ways, and the Course is just one path to it out of many. If it's your path, however, you know it."

"Whether our psychic pain is in the area of relationships, health, career, or elsewhere, love is a potent force, the cure, the Answer."

"Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we have learned here."

"We came here to co-create with God by extending love. Life spent with any other purpose in mind is meaningless, contrary to our nature, and ultimately painful... We overvalue what we perceive with our physical senses, and undervalue what we know to be true in our hearts."

"The truth doesn't stop being the truth just because we're not looking at it."

"[T]hat's what a miracle is: a parting of the mists, a shift in perception, a return to love."

"A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary before we're ready for God. When it came to spiritual surrender, I didn't get serious, not really, until I was down on my knees completely... I saw very clearly that, 'of myself, I am nothing.' Until this happens, you keep trying all your old tricks, the ones that never did work but that you keep thinking might work this time."

"The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It's when it begins."

"To surrender to God means to let go and just love. By affirming that love is our priority in a situation, we actualize the power of God. This is not metaphor; it's fact. We literally use our minds to co-create with Him. Through a mental decision -- a conscious recognition of love's importance and our willingness to experience it -- we 'call on a higher power.' We set aside our normal mental habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception. That is what it means to let a power greater than we are direct our lives."

"You are a child of God. You were created in a blinding flash of creativity, a primal thought when God extended Himself in love. Everything you've added on since is useless."

"To remember that you are part of God, that you are loved and lovable, is not arrogant. It's humble. To think you are anything else is arrogant, because it implies you're something other than a creation of God."

" 'There is only one begotten Son,' doesn't mean that someone else was it, and we're not. It means we're all it. There's only one of us here."

And then -- (I still get "goosebumps", remembering the first time I read these words): "The word 'Christ' is a psychological term. No religion has a monopoly on the truth. Christ refers to the common thread of divine love that is the core and essence of every human.... 'There's actually no place where God stops and you start,' and no place where you stop and I start.... You aren't who you think you are."

The hardened, encrusted layers of fear, betrayals, lies and wrong-thinking which had encased my soul for decades cracked ... fell away ... and my spirit soared out into the universe. The journey, so long delayed by dead-ends and treacherous detours, had finally begun....

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