Last week, I gave
you a suggested assignment, to write a short spiritual autobiography. I
don't think it's right for me to make an assignment I don't complete
myself! So here goes.
The earliest experiences of
the spiritual dimension of my life that I can remember were at age 3 or
4. The first five years of my life were spent in Los Gatos, California. At that time, the Santa Clara Valley was still the Valley of Heart's Delight. There were still thousands of acres
of prune and apricot orchards, and the smell of the blooming trees in springtime still haunts me. I remember looking up at the Santa Cruz
Mountains, glowing in the late afternoon sunshine, when I was very
young, and having a powerful sensation of awe. The mountains beckoned
my soul toward them. That sight is engraved in my consciousness to this
day, and I can still feel that feeling of reverent wonder.
The
lesson that stays with me from those tender years is that the essence
of spirituality is awe. Libraries are filled with books about who God
is and what God want. Heresy trials and pogroms have been waged about
such matters. But there's no arguing with the experience of humble,
reverent, slack-jawed wonder that fills us when we contemplate the
everyday miracles that surround us. Awe is about all the religion that
we need!
I grew up going to Presbyterian and later
Congregational churches, but it wasn't until I was in high school that
I began to connect the dots and begin to understand that God had
anything to do with the many incidents in my childhood in which I was
overwhelmed by the beauty of nature. I recall having a very fun
childhood, with lots of playful happiness, but I also recall being a
pretty serious guy when it came to studying and trying to understand
the world. Our family had library night every week, which I cherished,
and on my own I did a lot of reading, mostly about natural history. I
took Sunday School very seriously, too, and asked my teachers a lot of
questions. Because I was so fascinated by nature and science in
general, and by geology in particular, I had trouble dealing with the
creation story in Genesis, and later I was bothered by the story of
Jesus being born from a virgin. Science and religion weren't lining up
together very well and that disturbed me. I think I was about ten or
eleven when I realized that my church was telling me that my status in
eternity depended on my ideas. I thought I believed in Jesus, all
right, but then I wondered if I believed in Jesus the right way. I knew
that sometimes in school I thought I had the right answer, but then the
test would get graded and I'd have got it wrong. What if that was how I
believed in Jesus? Since I was just a kid and didn't understand the
Christian religion very well, how could I be sure I believed in Jesus
the right way? And if I didn't believe in Jesus the right way, I'd
surely go to hell and have my skin roasted off my body for eternity! I
talked to my parents about it. My mom said, "Jamey, don't worry, honey,
you are a Christian and you are going to heaven. It's okay!" But it
still bothered me a lot. I was old enough to know for sure that my mom
couldn't read my mind. Only God could read my mind and know what and
how I really believed. And God must have know that I was not sure that
I believe correctly, so that must have been evidence for God that I
really didn't believe correctly. So if I died then, I'd go to hell.
Thank
God, life provided me plenty of happy distractions from these
existential questions. I had a lot of pals in my childhood, but one
friend became the most important. Bruce Urbschat and I would talk for
hours about religion and science and philosophy. We'd walk home
together from Sunday School and talk about our questions about
religion. I think this friendship had a powerful effect on both of us.
We're still very good friends and correspond to this day. Our
friendship emboldened us to think for ourselves, study for ourselves,
explore on our own outside of school and church. Our friendship gave me
the confidence to question the religion in which I'd been raised. Bruce
and I concluded that one day, there would be one world religion that
would replace all the current ones. We had concluded that God was
bigger than any one religion, including Christianity.
My
friendship with Bruce has taught me a spiritual lesson that I want to
pass on to those who come after me. To grow in my relationship with
God, I needed the companionship of a friend; someone who would be a
mirror for me, and for whom I could be a mirror, so that we could
validate our experiences for each other, give each other courage and
motivation to explore and discover. To draw closer to God, you need the
help and company of friends. Which is why I'm a member of a church,
which is a company of friends who help each other in their spiritual
journeys.
Our family moved to California
when I was thirteen. It was the 60's and quickly I found myself taking
great interest in social and political issues. In high school I got
involved in anti war activity, and at age 16 I was appointed to a
federal advisory board of students, focusing on environmental issues. I
was still going to church; I was the president of my church youth
group. But I was increasingly frustrated that my church had nothing to
say about the great issues of the time - the war, the environmental
movement, the civil right struggle, the problems of poverty. Religion
was, to me, another subject for debate. It was still a matter of ideas.
Until
I went on a backpack trip in the Sierra at age 16. I had signed up for
this trip through a Christian retreat center. I had no idea that the
leaders of this backpacking trip were hard-core fundamentalist
Christians who believed in the Bible literally. Every time we stopped
along the route of our hike, one of the leaders would pull out his
floppy Bible and start talking. I was outraged by the stuff they were
saying. I argued with virtually every word they said. No wonder, I
suppose. At that time I was a star of our high school speech and debate
team. The other boys on the trip kept telling me to stop debating with
the trip leaders. "The more you talk, the longer they talk! Just be
quiet so we can get it over with."
On the
top of Kearsarge Pass, a spectacular place where I was stunned at the beauty of the lakes
and mountains, sure enough, the leader got out his floppy Bible again.
I groaned at the idea of him spoiling this beautiful experience with
dogmatic nonsense. This time, he read the words of Jesus from the
Sermon on the Mount. "Love your enemies", said Jesus. And when I heard
those words, I had a very sudden and powerful sensation, very physical,
almost like an explosion, leaving me with a sense of peace and calm and
awe all over my body. I was sure it was God. I was sure that God was
the kind of love that even extends to one's enemies, and I felt that
love in my mind and body, and I was sure that practicing that love was
what life was worth living for. It was overwhelming. And I knew this
love was also what was behind and within all the beauty that surrounded
us from that pass in the Sierra.
I was speechless,
something for which I'm still not well known, and didn't say anything
for a day and a half. Finally I knew I had to practice what I had just
discovered. I had to love my enemies: the leaders of the backpack trip,
with whom I still disagreed about practically everything. I went up to
the main leader of the trip, looked him right in the eye, and thanked
him for helping me discover the reality of God.
I
learned a powerful spiritual lesson that day, which I want to pass
along to those who come after me. God is love, and love is something
you do and feel, not just think. Love that extends even to those we
don't like and even to those who do us harm. We may not be any good at
loving our enemies; I'm still very far from living up to this ideal.
It's very difficult, sometimes seems impossible; it gets me into thorny
and confusing situations, puts me between a cross and a hard place. But
the challenge of trying to do so is supremely worthy of one's life. The
path to reconciliation in our private lives, families, communities, and
world is to go beyond the kind of love that we share with folks who are
easy to love, and dare to love those who seem unlovable.
That
incident in the Sierra set the course of my life. It is what set me on
the path of becoming a minister. In college and seminary, I sought to
put it all together, to find the universe in the university, to connect
the dots of my spiritual experiences, the discoveries of science, the
wisdom of philosophy and theology, and the insights of art and
literature and poetry. I served as an aide in a nursing home for a
couple of years, making money to get through college, and I learned
that changing bedpans for sick elderly people could be a form of
spiritual service. That job helped me put body and soul together, to
understand more deeply the way that our spirits and our substance can
come together or fall apart. Being with people as they were dying, I
lost a lot of my fear of death. I realized that life after death is not
so much a matter of belief, or of positing an objective place in the
universe that you go after you die, as it is a powerful and vivid
subjective experience. I deepened in the awareness that God is not a
being out there who intervenes in the world, but rather that God is the
divine quality of nature, that God is one with the universe, the
essence of the universe, and that this divine essence is always beyond
our complete knowing. Certainly God is experienced beyond the confines
of any one religion.
In seminary, I was assigned to live with a roommate who had spent a year and a half in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal.
He taught me how to meditate. This was a major discovery for me. In
silent meditation I experienced what I had read about in so many books
about religion and spirituality. I felt at one with the universe and
with God, though that did not mean I understood or could describe God.
I experienced that eternal life is not about the afterlife; it's about
experiencing eternity in the moment, while we are alive.
I
met other spiritual explorers when I was in seminary and learned much
from them. The spiritual lesson I learned during that time is that our
potential for seeing the world in radically different ways, our
potential for creativity and insight, is enormous and largely untapped.
I want to pass along the lesson that while changing our minds doesn't
necessarily change the world, the potential is huge for changing the
world for the better by opening our minds to new, positive ways of
seeing and understanding. The future of humanity depends on our
willingness to set aside our usual way of defining and describing
things, and make room in our minds and hearts for radically different
points of view.
Being married has been a profound
spiritual practice for me. From my relationship with Roberta I have
seen so many sides, discovered so many rich dimensions of what love is
all about, and thus known more of God, who is love. We have been to the
top of the mountain and down to the bottom of the swamp together, and
back up again. I'm so grateful for her in my life. You know, our
culture gives us plenty of sex education. But it gives us hardly any
sense education: it gives us hardly any education in the art of loving.
I want to pass along the lesson that by telling the truth to your
partner, no matter how hard, by sharing your heart, and not just the
ideas or opinions of your mind, the way to the bliss of intimacy will
be opened.
My
daughter has been my spiritual teacher from the moment she was born, 21
years ago, and we gazed into each other's eyes for the first time.
Nobody has been able to get me out of myself more completely than Liz!
Years ago, a friend of mine, Dan Rauker, said a wise thing: "I am not
here for me." Those words stuck with me, but it wasn't until I was a
parent that I felt the full truth of what Dan said. All the
accomplishments of my life pale in comparison to the privilege of
loving and serving my daughter as she has grown into the lovely,
bright, caring young woman she is today. St. Paul said of Jesus that he
"emptied himself" to become a servant. I have emptied myself, so many
times and in so many ways, in the course of parenting. For this I am
very, very grateful, because the emptier I am, the closer I feel to God.
I have cherished my years as a pastor in churches, on the streets with homeless people, and on campus at Stanford.
The many moments I have spent at the side of people in crisis, at
death, in illness, and also through joyful passages, have opened my
heart. From you and so many others I've served as a pastor, I have
discovered that my walk with God is not so much about those mountaintop
experiences, those sublime moments of rapturous union with God, nice as
those times have been. My walk with God is most importantly about the
divine quality of the relationships I have had with people, those
amazing moments when the soul's truth is revealed, when tears flow and
hearts break open, in the hospital, at weddings, at memorials, in
counseling sessions, and in tender encounters in everyday life. Just
having the privilege of being present at so many sacred moments in
people's lives has made my career completely worthwhile. Yes, there are
hard parts in my profession: fractious internal politics, budget
crises, and the like. But the spiritual rewards of this work are
overwhelming. I am so grateful to have this job. The spiritual lesson I
want to pass along from my career as a pastor is that if you want to
find God, you don't need to look any farther than the people around
you. Pay close attention to them, be emotionally and spiritually and
physically present for them, honor the turning points in their lives,
and you, too, will enter the kingdom of heaven on earth.
I
expect I have many more spiritual lessons to learn and pass along as my
life continues. Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing and reading the
stories of your spiritual development and the lessons you want to share
from them!
