Can you point to a time when your spiritual journey began? It’s a question that came to me when an old high school friend and I reconnected on social media.
My friend wrote that one of my articles prompted him to ask the question. The article suggested to him my spiritual journey has taken place over many years. “Did it begin in high school?” he asked. Then jokingly he added, “Not in high school, I hope, where I was only concerned with hormones and sports.”
I haven’t yet answered because I don’t know when my spiritual journey began. Did it begin in high school? Has it been life-long? There are watershed moments, times of purposeful dedication and purposely accepting The Call. There have been times of knowingly jumping off the cliff into the abyss and times of quiet dedication and devotion. Have I led my life in quiet contemplation and meditation? At times, yes, but not always.
I believe the spiritual journey asks of us more than we think we have to give and give us more than we think we deserve. Often I have banged and barged my way through life often paying a terrible price for my foolishness while at other times experiencing such grace I felt I could not endure the blessing for it burned away all that was unlike itself and there is an agony in that to the human being who, by our very nature tends to cling to the familiar while our souls cry out for the adventure and the growth within it even in the moments of fear.
When I most want to curl up, I am pried open and forced to lie awake, my very being, stretched wide to the limits until the terrible storm that whips across my heart is stilled and I am at peace once more. Why then, you may ask, would any human being take such a journey, and I answer, “Because we are human, and it is the human experience to remember the truth of who we are—the spiritual being having the gamut of the human adventure in all its glory and gore.
And in the end, in the end, some say, we shall all return to enfold ourselves back into the God Head, once again become part of Prime Spirit, evolving forever, washing us all clean of pain until there is only a love so profound and perfect, we only glimpse for the slightest of seconds its depth while here on Earth. Is that then what we strive for? To reach our original home and never leave. Perhaps.
But then again, perhaps we only reach there to leave again. After all, who can avoid the pull of the adventure whether it be the thrill of the open road or the unknown destination of life around the next corner—or galaxy—or dimension? Perhaps then, when we return to this adventure we call life, we begin where we left off, already on our spiritual journey.