My OperaOh My Me
Wednesday, January 6, 2010 7:28:23 AM
Through shamanic practice I have learned to connect deeply with the selves that populate my inner world, and I have been shown what I may have forgotten about myself, or what I may be hiding from. And these dismembered parts of myself have been healed. I am a child of the Light. I experience the creative, conscious, enlivening, and transforming Spirit who breathes into and through all creation; who challenges, transforms, and renews all Life. I have sometimes experienced the oneness that mystics and poets speak of in their impossible language, experiencing the movement of the "burning oneness binding everything" described by Kenneth Boulding in the Naylor Sonnets. I also experience the healing and challenging Light Within, which restores and refreshes, which reveals the true nature of things, and from which I sometimes try to hide. And I understand that what I think I know or experience of the Divine is still a very small glimpse of a great and unknowable Mystery; that the Universal Presence is far more complex than the God of my understanding. While I will never have a complete understanding of this conscious, moving, healing energy that is Life and Light and Love, I trust that it operates in my life and in the world for the highest good of all, even when there are seemingly logical reasons to give up on the idea of Love or God or Spirit. These experiences are each an integral part of who I am, as different from one another as my heart is from my hands, and yet part of the whole that enlivens my own "I Am." I imagine my spirituality something like the beaches along Lake Michigan: there is great water across which one cannot see land; there is sandy and rocky shore, among which only small and hardy plants and animals can live; and there are the forested dunes, where mammals and birds can live. The edges of these places, where one "climate" meets another, are liminal. They are "betwixt and between." This liminality is also present in twilight and dawn when light and darkness mix; in March when the winter meets the spring; in the winter solstice when the longest night of the year melts into a slightly longer day; in the condition of illegal immigrants who are present but not "officially" so; in the experience of transgendered people as they pass from one kind of body to another; and so on. My direct experience of the Divine is like this—betwixt and between the labels that define people as being of this spiritual tradition or that one. I count this multiplicity of experiences as gifts from a multilingual God who heals and sustains me. And yet some people, even some Friends, try to juxtapose my experiences as if they are opposites of one another, accusing me of being an apologist for impossibly contradictory positions. Friends have referred to my experience of God as being "fundamentalist" and "anti-Jesus and anti-God," and also as an "anything goes as long as it feels good" spirituality. Plainly, there are few places in our world where someone like me, who lives in the liminal places, can find a spiritual home. And yet, in spite of the difficulties, I have found a home. I know it is possible to live in the stream of these many traditions with spiritual integrity, commitment, and focus. I no longer feel torn between Christ, Spirit, or Mother Earth.
