Changing light
Originally published at Examorata. Please leave any comments there.
When I was a child my mind would wander during church. Mostly it wandered towards earthly things, but I have a fairly distinct memory of a particular daydream I’d return to again and again. I would close my eyes during some part of the service, one of the long stretches of sitting or kneeling. I would think about all of those people in that one place, all praying. I’d get a sort of visualization, an image of some visible type of spirit rising up from out of all of us, coming together over our heads, somehow elevating or lifting each little prayer into one larger voice.
Mostly as a child I had the faith of a child, of course. I loved the Catholic church very deeply because it was a place of rules and order, a place that had an answer for almost anything my questioning mind would ask. The expectations of my church, what I perceived as my God, were clear. Nowhere did they say I should sit and visualize the power of human spirits acting together.
But then again, they didn’t say that I shouldn’t. As I grew and struggled - with the church, with God, with expectations - what kept me interested in the struggle was that overarching feeling that I sometimes got in church. That feeling of being part of something larger. When I was a child, I thought that was God. When I got older, I thought it was human energy. I just knew I felt a connection and peace in prayer, even in the midst of my struggles, providing I could clear my head and heart enough to pray.
When I left the Catholic church the first time, I distinctly remember saying that I would still have a spiritual practice. I would go in the woods, and experience holiness directly! I would be attune to the wonder in the beauty of the world! I would tend my struggling spirit!
Right, sure. I didn’t do that at all. Not for years. Not that I was incapable of appreciating beauty, or of having a sense of wonder, but I never thought about that strange sense of overarching connection. I studied mythology and folklore in college. I was fascinated by the idea that all human societies invented gods and religions. With the arrogance of youth buoyed up by stuff straight out of textbooks, I declared that impulse all of God there was. Just a striving in us for answers, I thought. Probably a biological imperative. Obviously its final pathway was science, and eventually we’d all just evolve out of needing religion and be terribly brilliant and enlightened. While shunning the idea of enlightenment.
Enlightenment is such a wonderful term, for a wonderful idea. Yesterday I attended a new member class at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia, a valuable experience. We talked about many things in a wide-ranging conversation on faith, including an exercise where we were to write down our own beliefs. When we talked about the ideas we had behind various “loaded” religious words, we got to “soul,” which I found simple. Light, I thought (and said). The light, the spark, the divine in us all. The light we seek. That biological imperative. The questions we ask. The joy that lights our faces at a beautiful song or an amazing view or a stunning new scientific discovery.
I’ve been attending UUCC for about two months, and I can already feel the ways I am changing in response to finding a faith community that honors that light in everyone. My struggling spirit will likely never cease its struggle until it ceases to be. Despite my many positive experiences since returning to the Catholic church 8 years ago, that struggle never fit. I didn’t feel that overarching bond very much. There was light, yes. That light is everywhere. But it was hard to find, harder than it should be. It was growing increasingly difficult to find within myself. The first time I attended a service at the Unitarian Universalist community, I found myself weeping, experiencing the kind of joy I haven’t felt in church in a long, long time.
Lately I know I’ve been pretty quiet here on the blog. Part of it has to do with all the inward-looking stuff I’ve been doing in the past two months since joining this new community. Part of it has to do with all the changes that were happening in order for me to see my path to that community. Part of it has to do with never knowing quite how to present these Big Ideas. Part of has to do with the fact that so much has been going on I have no idea how to cover it all. Anyway, I hope I can start sharing more stuff here, big and small. Maybe I’ll focus on small.
But in the meantime, you know, here is the next enormous step on my lifetime spiritual journey! Next, a funny story about work! Or the cats! Or this hurricane!