I’m edging towards the end of my life and coming to terms with the truth: I won’t get to see or know God if there is such a thing in my lifetime. When I set out on a spiritual path years ago, conventional wisdom had the idea of spirituality as closely associated with religion; for Thomas Merton, it was a simple idea, if not easy. Spirituality was loving God.
“The only certainty is Faith in Jesus and love for God, ” said a priest I knew as a friend when I asked him about God. “I go back and forth on other things, but I am certain of that.”
Well, that let me out, and in my floundering, unhappiness, and research, I realized that spiritual life was not just about religion but the desire to know myself, to be kind, and to help those with nowhere else to go. Jesus said that without requiring membership for people like me.
Many of you have shared my spiritual journey from the beginning; I thank you for that.
The kind people—Sheila and Jim—wrote to thank me for extending the love of Jesus through my work (see message below) at the local food pantry. They called me one of “God’s angels here on earth.” I can’t say I was displeased by the message hanging on my office wall, but I couldn’t entirely accept the praise.
I don’t want anyone of any faith telling me what to believe. I can take advice, though, and Jesus inspired me to do so. I’m done with other people telling me what to do.
Lately, I’ve been deep into the works of Evelyn Underhill, a famous mystic who saw a spiritual life as wholly connected to Christ and faith and accepting him as a God. I doubt she would be as rigid today; she was a brilliant, thoughtful, fantastic writer and radical philosopher. She didn’t preach dogma and witchcraft.
“The life of this planet, and especially its human life,” Underhill wrote, “is a life in which something has gone wrong, and badly wrong (she died in 1941). Every time we see an unhappy face, an unhealthy body, or hear a bitter or despairing word, we are reminded of that. The occasional dazzling flashes of pure beauty, pure goodness, and pure love, which show us what God wants and what He is, only throw into more vivid belief the horror of cruelty, greed, oppression, hatred, and ugliness…Unless we put on blinkers, we can hardly avoid seeing all this, and unless we are warmly wrapped in our interests, we surely cannot help feeling the sense of obligation, the shame of acquiescence, the call to do something about. it.”
Sounds familiar in modern-day America. Underhill, like many mystics and free thinkers, called the future.
Underhill was an activist who challenged people of faith to put up or shut up. Jesus, she wrote, was really only about one thing—worshiping God and helping people who needed help. Those were brand new ideas of his time, and his plea swept and changed the world.
Here’s where I fit in: not in a Church or Temple but in my own life. Time passed, and religion changed in one way; spirituality became a journey of the soul, not something in a Bible someone else wrote. That’s what my priest friend told me—go inward, not outward. So I did.
“The action,” she wrote, “maybe almost anything: from the ceaseless, self-offering of the enclosed nun to the creation of beauty or the clearance of slums. “Here am I! Send me!” means going anyhow, anywhere, at any time.”
The Church, she wrote, is a tool to save the world, a tool of Good especially for that purpose, wrote Underhill, not a comfortable religious club established on grand historical premises. Love is a tool for everyone.
I don’t need a Church, Temple, or Mosque to do what Jesus said or what I believe to be good and even sacred. And I want to be about much more than me.
My spiritual life is internal and private, and I understand enough about myself to do good for others. I did it alone, and no rab or priest was there to guide me. I see my God in the touch of my wife, a cat’s eyes, and a dog’s loyalty.
Evelyn Underhill is guiding me in new and different ways. The challenge, she said, is not dogma or glorious buildings; the challenge is to be self-given to the purposes of the Spirit, to be passed not by stained glass but by the Divine passion of saving love, on the danger of fading away in her time and now. The challenge is to take my place in the grand army of rescuing souls. That was the call of Christ.
A famous Christian philosopher wrote that every quality or virtue the Holy Spirit produces in (women and) men’s souls is also starkly simple: Tranquility, Gentleness, and Strength. It’s a tough challenge; I’m still working at it, and it will probably be for the rest of my life.
The call I hear in our country now is the rescue of love and souls.
I can love and admire Christ. I don’t need to be worshipping him. I like to think of him as the God of Good; that’s all he stood for. That’s enough for me.
