I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what I want to say here. I thought this blog would be easier than my other one but it has turned out to be a lot harder. I have been reflecting on the things I have seen in my 34+ year spiritual pilgrimage. When I am alone with no pressure my thoughts flow easily, sometimes like a river. But now they seem elusive. So, maybe I just should start with a bit of my history, a Reader's Digest view if you like (yes, I am old enough to remember Reader's Digest). As you read, you will find I am open, honest, and transparent about my life. I think that is very important. Some of my experiences with cause some folks to even question my sanity. That's OK. I don't think I've met the person yet who has impressed me so much that I cared much about what they thought. Since you don't know me that might sound arrogant. Again, I don't really care. I don't equate telling the truth with arrogance. But, I've experienced much that is not considered "normal" from a Western worldview. Just giving fair warning.
My spiritual journey actually started from when I was no ore than 2 weeks old (I am assuming my mother is being truthful with her story and recollection). I was born with special abilities from God that the Bible calls spiritual gifts. It took me many years after my deep spiritual awakening to know what to call them. But one thing I could do was perceive the spirit world. I could "feel" it. Sometimes it felt more "real" than the natural world was to me. I could also perceive beings that were there both "light and dark". This was way before I heard about angels and demons.
Being an only child meant that at least half of the time I would play by myself. There was not always one of the other kids in my neighborhood to play with. So, I would be alone playing with my Matchbox cars (the real ones made in England), Hot Wheels, or Tonka cars and trucks or my G.I. Joe when suddenly I would know something about a person or a situation or circumstance. It would hit me out of left field. I didn't know how this happened, it just did -- and a lot. More often than not it turned out to be true. But I don't ever remember telling anyone else for a long time. The reason was that sometimes I would hear grown-ups make jokes about a special place where they would put people in straitjackets and padded rooms who saw things that no one else saw and heard things that no one else heard. That imagery disturbed me for a long, long time. It was a terrible thing to believe there was something wrong with you when you were a child. This is one reason I was extremely lonely in my childhood. I would play with a group of kids in my neighborhood of about 6 but I only had one friend. I met him in kindergarten and when he went through high school together, not always in the same classes but always in the same school. I told him most of what I experienced. I never knew until about 10 years after graduating high school when he came over my house that I used to scare him with what I had told him. But, growing up with these things happening mostly I just kept it to myself.
I was born and raised in the Roman Catholic Church. I was made to go with my mother. It was like you had to go and there was no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The worst time of the week was the Saturday afternoon four o'clock Mass. To me, it was 45 min. of the most extreme boredom you could imagine. It seemed like it was 3 days long. Since all of this was supposed to represent Jesus, I thought Jesus was extremely boring, too. So I had no interest past doing whatever the bare minimum was. I could not understand how I could be walking around outside the church building, feeling the spirit world then walk inside the church building and lose that sense totally! So, I thought at that time, I tried Jesus and there's not a whole lot here. OK, I'll look elsewhere. That "losing the spirit world feeling" when I walked in a church building only intensified after my spiritual awakening years later. It took me a long, long, time to figure out that there is a huge difference between the real Jesus and religion. Like I wrote about previously, just a superficial look at the Gospels show that the biggest critics, haters, and persecutors of Jesus were the religious people. The "sinners" (according to the religious crowd, anyway), i.e., the outcasts, rejects, and misfits of society welcomed Jesus and even looked forward to being around him. Hey, who wouldn't want to be around someone who didn't judge and condemn them?
My awareness of the spirit world brought me to books on the occult and the paranormal. I read everything from ESP to ghosts and haunted houses, from UFOs to Atlantis, from cryptids (i.e., Bigffot, the Loch Ness monster, etc.) to witchcraft, from psychic phenomenon to vampires and werewolves. So, when I say everything I mean everything. This journey lasted about 4 years but no matter how much I put in I never felt satisfied. Somewhere in the last year of that journey (I think), I got hold of 2 books: Angels by Billy Graham and Satan Is Alive and Well On Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. These books planted the seed in me that not everything I was reading and doing was good. The next year (1978, if I am remembering correctly) I came across another book by Billy Graham called How To Be Born Again. I knew who Billy Graham was but I had no idea what "born again" was. It was not in my Catholic vocabulary so I didn't have a clue.
I sat down to read the book alone in the indoor porch of my house. I don't think I got past 8 or 10 pages when my mind was filled with loud, emphatic thoughts screaming, "This is what you have been looking for!!!" I had found a "sinner's prayer" while skimming the book so I turned there and said it out loud by myself. A moment later I had the most powerful spiritual experience I had ever had. I felt this powerful yet gentle Presence fall on me like a tsunami only it came from above me. It then filled me up from the inside out. It felt intensely warm and totally peaceful, like I was wrapped in a cocoon. This was my deep spiritual wakening. It also ended up putting me on the right path for the continuation of my spiritual pilgrimage that has lasted right up until today.
It has been an interesting 34+ years now. I ended up leaving the Catholic Church 3 years after my spiritual awakening and joined the conservative evangelical part of the greater Christian community, what I call the "renewal community" (classical Pentecostals, varied charismatic groups, and the Vineyard movement). Initially one of my problems was with putting religious traditions on equal par with the Bible (something both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities do). What I saw was that the Bible gets tossed in the back seat in favor of whatever religious traditions are being considered. I heard from conservative evangelicals that they believed the Bible was the final authority for what they believed and how they lived their lives. I believed then (and now) that that was true. However, after spending 25 years there< I found out that they had just as much religious traditions as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communities except they did call then traditions; they used the word customs. It ends up meaning the same thing at the end of the day.
My intention has not been to purposefully insult or offend anybody, wherever you chose to hang your hat in the greater Christian community. But I know that I have. This is the first place where I have shared how my deep spiritual awakening happened and I wanted to use my freedom here to do so. I have never "fit in" anyplace. My whole life has been like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I have wear spots on my edges when I tried forcing myself to fit wherever I was at. Later on, in this blog, I want to talk about how I ended up rejecting contemporary "church" structures because I have never seen them produce good fruit in terms of building a place that had worship, community, and mission and, hopefully, what to do about it.. I believe these are 3 absolutely essential elements of what the New Testament calls church, and I have never found it, anywhere in a quarter of a century of looking far and wide. All I ended up finding were religious country clubs that called themselves churches. Some have the idea that if you have a public building somewhere and you hang a sign that says "so-and-so church" then that is what you have. You are sadly mistaken. I would like to discuss what leadership in the New Testament looks like. After spending many years thinking about this I ended up rejecting the Protestant pastoral model of leadership. Just about all of the "pastors" I have been with have acted like a religious CEO with a Moses complex. "I am here to lead these people into the Promised Land and if anyone dares to question me there are really questioning God". They put people under their thumbs because they believed the people were there for them and their religious fantasy.... err, I mean vision from God. I can't find this attitude in Jesus or the apostles. I found some good things in what was called the "emerging church". But I really liked what I read with those who identify with the missional movement (thank you Alan Hirsch). I also have come to see myself as "post-charismatic" (much thanks and appreciation to Rob McAlpine!). That phrase does not mean post-Holy Spirit or not believing that all of the spiritual gifts are meant to be in current operation. It means "post-hype" to me.
That last paragraph had a lot in there that, I hope, will be unpacked with greater definition and explanation. I am a lonely pilgrim. My path has, at times, paralleled the path of other followers of Jesus but, as of late, my path has been away from there. I see a path where I am walking but it has not been walked on by many in a long time. Maybe there are others like me out there and maybe we can see our individual lights shining and find each other. Maybe we can walk with each other for a ways. I hope so.
