September 8, 2023
Dear Leland and Everett,
I mentioned in a previous letter that I engaged in ‘spiritual direction’ with the minister at the church I attend. Recently the minister alerted me to a group forming that will engage in specific exercises in spiritual direction over the next 9 months. From what I’ve learned, a local minister will lead the group; the group will kick-off and wrap with all day retreats; in between the group will meet bi-weekly, engage in 1-1 meetings with the minister in the off weeks, and complete daily assignments in scripture reading and meditation. I had been looking for a personal development community, and had explored secular options through my coach, or perhaps even attending Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings. But what I am ideally looking for is a spiritual growth community, not just a personal development community. And so I have decided to give this group a try.
I met with the organizing minister a couple days ago. He asked me about my spiritual journey. My answer, in retrospect, was sufficiently revealing that I’d like to summarize it for you here.
I grew up in small town East Texas, which is (or was, at the very least) part of the Bible Belt. This meant that I was surrounded by evangelical Christians. I grew up in the Presbyterian church, which is one of the more intellectually oriented of the Protestant denominations. The implication was that I was a bit of an outlier [I believe I used the word ‘weirdo’] in my community.
Somewhere between high school and college (and I really don’t remember the timing any more precisely than that) I recall understanding that I was meant to surrender to God. I explicitly remember saying to God something along the lines of “I know I’m meant to surrender, but I’m not ready yet”. My belief was that surrendering to God would be too hard, too all-encompassing, and maybe even a little too vulnerable. First, I wanted to go off and take care of a few things. Namely, I wanted to establish my career, achieve some financial security, get married and start a family, and (if I’m being truly honest) achieve some status in life. I expected that I would circle back to God at some point, but wanted to keep God at arm’s length for a bit.
What ensued was two decades of emptiness and hollowness. In particular, the career to which I dedicated most of my time and energy provided for me and my family financially, but largely at the expense of my soul.
I started working with a coach a few years ago. She taught me that our intellectual mind was not our only source of knowing. She taught that our bodies and emotions were also sources of knowing that our society (and I in particular) had neglected in service of intellectual knowing. Through the process of working with her, I’ve come to understand that we also have access to spiritual ways of knowing.
A couple of years ago, I started having interactive meditations [what I’ve referred to in prior letters as ‘visions‘]. In these, I am an active participant, but other entities appear and act independently of any conscious thought that I might have.
My first reaction to these meditations was to assume I should seek guidance and expertise. But then I realized that whatever I was doing seemed to be working, and that I wanted to explore it alone, at least for a bit. I didn’t seem to need expertise right away: somehow I seemed to be able to access what I needed. It’s hard to explain those experiences exactly; what I can say is that I was learning things that didn’t seem to be coming from me, and yet somehow I felt a certain confidence that these things were real and true, even if I couldn’t explain them (or how I knew them) to anyone else in a way that would make logical sense.
Eventually I came to understand that it was time for me to find ‘others’. It had long since come to me in a meditation that there were ‘others’ who experienced this spiritual dimension in ways we would find relatable, and that I would eventually be called to go find them. And now (about the end of last year or the beginning of this year) that call was coming.
Around that time I remembered the Presbyterian church in my neighborhood (I moved into the neighborhood a little over a year ago, and had driven past this church several times). My immediate reaction was “I’m not going to find what I’m looking for in the Church”. As I mentioned before, Presbyterians especially (and Christian denominations more broadly) tend to intellectualize our spirituality. We have a philosophical understanding of God. We have an intellectual understanding of Jesus, at least as he’s taught to us by our ministers and priests. But we really don’t understand the Holy Spirit, that energy and life force that surrounds us and connects us to everything. I just never thought I would find what I was looking for in a church, much less a Presbyterian church.
In fact, I assumed I would need to go find a Buddhist monk or irreligious spiritualist to help me cultivate my spiritual practice. Around this time my uncle, who I would describe as a Catholic intellectual, reminded me that Christianity does indeed have a long tradition of mysticism, just mostly coming from Catholic tradition. Catholicism has had a complicated relationships with their mystics, but they at least have them.
Ultimately I realized that I would likely need to cast a lot of lines in order to catch what I was looking for, and decided to give my neighborhood Presbyterian church a try. In that first visit, several things happened that felt like God hitting me over the head and telling me “this is where you are meant to be”. And so I’ve been attending most weeks since, and have engaged with the minister in spiritual direction. It turns out that spiritual practice does exist in the modern Church, even the Protestant traditions, though I don’t get the impression it’s yet popular.
I’ve come to believe some crazy things through my spiritual journey over the last couple years, particularly from my meditations. Christians talk about the First Covenant being with God as represented in the Old Testament and the Second Covenant being with Jesus as represented in the New Testament. Well, I believe we will soon enter a Third Covenant, this time with the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is universal: virtually every major religion and tradition believes in some version of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, Chi, Buddha Nature, Atman Brahmin, and Consciousness are but a few different names for what I believe to be the same thing: the energy force that flows around and through us, that connects us, and that is available to all of us as a source of knowing and guidance, if we can just get still and listen. And so, I believe that going into covenant with the Holy Spirit will be unifying for humanity across cultures and religions.
I believe that a spiritual reawakening is coming, and probably quickly. I believe that I am relatively early, but that others are coming, and that I am in part meant to help create a path for others to follow.
I believe that one way to interpret the epidemic of overwhelm is that God is tapping us on the shoulder more firmly than before, trying to get our attention. So it’s getting harder and harder for us to ignore God’s call. And so we bury ourself in myriad distractions in order to avoid getting still and hearing God’s call for us.
I believe that one way to interpret our modern political and social strife is that various of our institutions are dying. Depending on the institution, one political side is attacking it and accelerating the demise, while the other side rallies to its defense, not ready to say goodbye. Said differently: we are grieving the death of our institutions in different ways. But what we all need to understand is that some things need to die in order make room for God to usher in a new era. But I also believe that these changes are likely to be turbulent, and therefore scary; so we should treat the grieving and scared with grace.
I believe Christians have been looking for the Christ to come back in the wrong place. We’ve been looking for the Christ to come back in the form of a singular man. I believe that the Christ is meant to be revived in each of us. Jesus wasn’t meant to be our savior, Jesus was meant to be our guide and mentor; he was meant to show us what was possible. We are meant to follow his lead, and realize that we are each fully human as well as fully divine. We are meant to manifest the Kingdom on earth; not in the afterlife, but in this lifetime. And we are meant to do this by tapping into our internal source, our internal connection to God.
I believe that each of us has, inside of us, a portal of sorts to interact with God. I often think of the metaphor of a radio station: we are meant to tune into God’s station. We are each set slightly differently, and so will each receive a slightly different message from God. But our purpose is to tune in. Of course, tuning in is hard, and remaining tuned in perhaps even harder (many of us have experienced extreme closeness to God; unfortunately most of us have also experienced feeling that closeness fade over time as our radios went back out of tune).
Over the last year I finally surrendered myself to God. I asked God for my calling, and word came back almost immediately: “you’re not ready; you need to heal”. It was true, I needed to heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually [as is, I think, reasonably documented in these letters]. And so, I quit my job several months ago, and have been on a healing journey focused on exercise, meditation, and writing.
And now I am looking for a community. I have come to understand that it is my calling to stand firm and walk my path, and resist temptation to leave my path and walk with others. Similarly, I should resist the temptation to call others off their path in order to walk with me on mine. I see an image of people each walking their own path, but somehow reaching out metaphysically across time and space, holding hands. We support each other and buttress each other, and provide community for each other, while we each walk in our own paths with God.
[I didn’t say this to the minister, but I’ll admit that I’m not married to this journey being explicitly Christian. I don’t believe God is a Christian God or a Jewish God or a Hindu God. I believe there is one ultimate God that constantly reaches out to humanity to communicate with us; I believe across time cultures have experienced God in different ways and captured and emphasized different learnings. What is, I think, somewhat constant across time and culture and religion and individual difference, is an ability to have a direct interaction. Anyone can do it, though it does take some time and effort figuring out how to dial into the right channel and receive and interpret the signals available to us. For now, I’m intrigued to explore this spirituality from a Christian perspective, for a couple reasons. First, I’m steeped in Christian history and knowledge, so the learning curve should not be steep. Second, I’m finding that reading scripture through this new lens of spirituality opens up new worlds of interpretation. Third, I live in a country full of Christians, or former Christians; it will be useful to understand whether I am offering those Christians something fundamentally new and different, or something connected to our Christian past and traditions (and if so, how). I may or may not remain on an explicitly Christian path. My hypothesis is that I am learning to build the bridge from Christianity to what comes after, though I believe this less strongly than I once did.]
I love you both, and I hope you find this note useful. Part of me wishes you a deep personal connection and journey with God. Part of me very much doesn’t: a personal journey with God is humbling, exposed, vulnerable, and (so far anyway) constantly uncomfortable. And yet, what I’ve experienced of the alternative is worse. If forced to choose, I’d rather walk with God alone than walk without God but alongside all humanity; fortunately, I don’t think we have to make that choice (though sometimes it may feel like we do).
What I do hope for you is an earnest struggle. Struggle with your beliefs, struggle to understand your spiritual identity. By the time you are adults, I anticipate the culture’s relationship with God will have evolved from the time I write (it has evolved dramatically over the course of my lifetime, at an accelerating rate). But your spiritual identity and beliefs are the one thing nobody can dictate but you; they are not collaborative or shared. They can and will be influenced by others and the culture around you, but you yourselves will eventually want to sit down and determine what you believe as part of who you are.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 