My Surprising Quest
Photo compliments of Dena Duke
“...awareness of...the friendly light inside, the tiny and usually ignored part that hasn’t been faked, cheapened, or exploited. It is an infinitesimally small point of light…” --Anne Lamott Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage
In 1990 I came to the Boise Unitarian Church (BUUF) a religious refugee. I welcomed an environment that didn’t try to name what was holy or even expect that anything had to be Holy. I was living in liminal space (the great “in between”) for years, and BUUF was a safe place to land. I grew up with a gas lighting guru God who was exclusively male, judgmental and cruel. Unfortunately, he was also the first one I called on when I was suffering, and I felt more comfort in that than I wanted to admit. As I began to untangle that rubber band ball the healing journey became a spiritual one.
With that kind of ambivalent attachment I couldn’t bring myself to become an atheist. There was great relief in learning that being agnostic meant that there still could be some kind of mystery out there, and that fit fine for a good long time. I healed myself through a couple of decades with that belief. When a friend recently said she had fired her Higher Power I realized I hadn’t quite done the same, but I certainly rejected the one originally forced upon me.
In 2017 when I heard about the Quest program offered at BUUF, an 18 month spiritual quest, I was ready to understand more of that mysterious mystery. The biggest surprise during this time was having to admit to myself how little I was in contact with myself. Although I felt pretty darn woke (which should’ve been my first clue) I came to realize I was not centered on my True Self nearly enough. I had swallowed the lie that the God handed down to me, handed me, which gave me no power or value or strength. As a result I spent way more time reading and listening to others than listening to any Inner Teacher or nurturing any “small point of light”. I hadn’t spent nearly enough time in the deepest space inside where Anne Lamott suggests there is “relief from anxiety and self consciousness, where there is room to breathe, to settle in, settle down, mull things over without anyone’s hot breath on our neck.”
When asked to cultivate a spiritual practice during Quest I immediately leaned toward yoga and meditation because I already used them both with some success. They were outward motions of what I longed to do better on the inside. I leaned away from centering prayer because it sounded like everything I was running from. It wasn’t until sampling it that I realized I was protesting too much because after establishing it as a practice (which Buddhist Jack Kornfield calls creating “inner art” and Fr. Thomas Keating “divine therapy”) I found a wide open door to that deep space, and others willing to go there with me.
In that space I have learned many things. For example, if there was ever an entity that needed rebranding and new pronouns it was God. “He” was much bigger than a gender or a name. The ancient Jewish people didn’t want to limit “him” with a name so for a time they even removed the vowels from YahWeh making it Yh-Wh, becoming simply the sound of breath. With sacred breath I learned to more fully come out of what Lamott refers to as the “casino mind” that keeps most of us from hearing any still small voice, and I made “a conscious decision to begin listening harder [using key words from poetry and/or scripture to pull me further in]. Whether it’s [from] Mt. Sinai, a pasture, a library...or [wherever]...to have a feeling of at one-ish with the universe”.
In this place of breath and contemplation I have not only been led to a great oneness but also a deep and abiding love that has made everything so simple. In doing so I learned that all my incongruent parts could be reunited. And I learned that wholeness leads to holiness because I didn’t feel like a traitor inside myself anymore. Everything got set right. Now when suffering comes it is not usually the result of my own superficial separation from that light inside of me, but can truly be experienced as compassion for the whole world, the way it was meant to. But the best thing is I’m no longer ashamed of praying to a monster God because I had never been talking to him in the first place. I’m grateful to have created the conditions to reimagine a familiar, vulnerable, and compassionate Presence that I now see has been with me all along.
May it be so.
"May we not neglect the silence
printed in the center of our being.
It will not fail us."
—Thomas Merton
—David Benner, author of Human Being and Becoming writes of the importance of embracing “wholeness” as a path to holiness, which recognizes and affirms the “oneness” of who we are, without needing to eliminate or perfect any part of ourselves. This generates the same goodwill towards others, leading to greater love.
You can find me at “A Tiny Light” (My Facebook Page).
