My spiritual journey
Epoch 1 – Awakening (Birth): 0-6 years
Epoch 2 – Striving I: 6 years-22 years
Epoch 3 – Cleansing: 22 years-25 years
Epoch 4 – Striving II: 25 years-41 years
Epoch 5 – Awakening II (Rebirth): 41 years-Present

In epoch 1 I became aware of a spiritual need in my life.  At a young age, I knew there was a God and that I wanted to know him.

That led to epoch 2, Striving, which was the start of all the efforts Christians usually make to know God. Prayer, Bible study, commitment to church attendance, journaling, etc.  I did this for years with considerable intensity and a sense that it was “working” – that I was really coming to know God.  Though it had some good effects, I am embarrassed now to think about how unlovingly I was often able to treat people, while seeing that behavior as being completely consistent with my faith, since “the Bible says” this or that.

Cindy’s death in November of ’90, and my diagnosis with MS a month later, brought epoch 2 to a close.  Though I tried to hang on for a while, I began to feel like my life experience had outgrown my faith.  What I had learned didn’t make sense anymore in light of the brutality of the world that I was experiencing.  I gave up.  For about three years I identified as an agnostic.  I stopped reading the Bible, stopping going to church, stopped doing the things “good Christians” are supposed to do.  Though I used to identify this as “the falling away,” I now realize that those years were important for me because they helped me think through what I really believed.  I realized during those years that I just was not ultimately capable of living as an agnostic or atheist.  Faith ran too deep for me to be able to do that.  But I tried!  This does not mean I didn’t continue struggling with doubt.  But I left epoch 3 when I decided to take up the struggle again and begin striving once more.

And striving it was.  When I reengaged actively with my faith in epoch 4, I naturally took up all the means of knowing God that I had previously tried and then dropped.  Only now it wasn’t “working” for me.  So I tried harder.  The harder I tried, the more discouraged I became.  So I’d give up for long periods – months at a time.  It just took too much energy.  The striving that I had previously done willingly and that had been fulfilling was now a huge burden that I not only could not do anymore, but that I finally realized recently I don’t even really WANT to do anymore.  In short, that way of knowing  God was not actually helping me know God.  Instead, it was helping me know guilt, self-criticism, frustration, failure, and loneliness.  Over the past 16 years I have rarely been able to find God in the mix.  My ministry was oftentimes a ministry of what I knew and deeply believed to be true for others, but struggled to actualize in my own life.  I could not accept God’s love, God’s grace, or the mystery and suffering of life.

Period 5.  In the past year, this has come to a head.  It took many years to move from, “I can’t seem to ‘get back’ to where I used to be ‘with God’” to “I don’t even want to go back to the way things used to be.  I don’t know how to know God in that way.”  And so I have been in a new period of awakening.  If I called the first one birth, this one could only be called rebirth.

Fr. Tom gave me a book to look over that described St. John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul.”  The dark night is a time of intense spiritual dryness that is experienced as a separation from God, but during which a person is actually brought to the end of him/herself in preparation for the beginning of a new, deeper, and more vital union with God. The dark night is characterized by three things:

a. Dryness and impotence in prayer/life
b. Lack of desire for the old ways
c. Simple desire to love God

I realized this is where I have been.  This, for me, has been epoch 4.  I have spent nearly 16 years in the dark night.  I am on this retreat having just begun to emerge from it into this simple desire to love God and to know him, not just in my head but daily – moment by moment.

Question: How do I live in love when the world presses in?  How does one learn to remain in the place of love and not be thrust again into ego, into striving, into one’s own insufficient efforts to “fix things,” born out of one’s own brokenness and desperation?

5:35 pm.  Managed to finally sleep for 30 minutes.  Time to go to dinner.

6:32 pm.  Dinner was fantastic.  Tilapia fillets, beer bread, broccoli & cauliflower, pasta shells w/ sauce, coffee, cookies.  Sat in a much bigger room, at a much smaller table.  Alone most of the time, but last ten minutes sat directly across from a perfect stranger and said not a word.  Ten minutes is the most I can stand right now.  I never knew there is an art to living with others in silence.

7:16 pm.  Prayer and meditation for 30 minutes.  Set timer for 45, but I just don’t think I’m capable of that right now.  Finding that my attention is starting to drift and all I want to do is set this aside and watch some mindless TV.  I cannot stop thinking about my family.  Knowing I can’t call them is extremely stressful.  I find myself again just wanting to go home.  I want to talk to Steve and ask if it is normal to feel this way, what it means, and if I just continue w/ it or at some point find it so distracting that I should just call them.  I feel like I’m not that guy that intentionally goes someplace where I cannot call home.  Should I be?

8 pm.  Suddenly this passage in Is. 43 takes on new meaning.  As I feel myself sinking into depression, alone, bored, missing my family, I read again about God’s love for me.  And isn’t it in this place that I need to know that?  Isn’t it in the darkness that I need to remember about the light?  Isn’t that what I have come here for?  Even here – even now – I belong fully to  God.  Even in my discouragement and frustration.

When you’re in over your head, I’ll be with you.

That is now.  You are here now.  You love me now, and call to me now.  You tell me now not to fear.

Saturday, – 2:21 pm.
The evening finished well last night. I listened to Ashton/Becker/Dente and went for a walk.  Sat for a while in the chapel, then meditated for another 20 minutes.  Grabbed a candy bar from the commissary and headed back to my room.  Went to bed.  Woke up and went to breakfast, then meditated and prayed before coming back to my room and sleeping another hour.  Then up, in the shower, and off to lunch. After lunch, read Manning for a while, then met with Fr. Tom.

6:35 pm.  Perhaps nothing demonstrates how much better today is than yesterday more than the infrequency of journal entries today compared to yesterday.  Chicken a la’ orange to tonight. I find myself physically hungrier here than I ever am in the world outside, I think because the intensity of the prayer work here (and the aloneness) takes a toll physically.  Today I ate two lunches, but still had to get a snack before dinner.  Then I ate two dinners, then went to the commissary to buy candy, expecting to be hungry again before bed.

Mass is tomorrow.  Not sure yet if I will go.

Then he gave me a tour of that building, the central building on the grounds, though by no means the only one.  He showed me two special prayer rooms, concluding our tour and leaving me alone in the second one.  I took a few pictures and texted my family to tell them my only communication with them would be a daily text message to assure them I’m well and still love them.  Then I got comfortable and began to read the first of Fr. Ryan’s suggested scriptures, Is. 43:1-7.  “I have redeemed you, and you are mine.”  (God guide my pen as I write, and may my words be a prayer.)

This reminds me of Paul’s words in 1 Cor., “You are not your own – you were bought with a price.”  I often feel my greatest struggle in life is to “keep belonging” to God – to cling to him.  I forget that I belong whether I know it or not, feel it or not.  It is not clinging to God that is the struggle.  It is not belonging to God that is difficult, it is NOT belonging to him.  As Catherine of Siena said, “Hell is hell all the way to hell, and heaven is heaven all the way to heaven.”  My worst moments are when I function independently from him, acting like I in fact AM my own.  Indeed, this captures much of why I have come.  I have come in obedience to God, in recognition that I am his (and have always been, like Christy has been my girl from the start).  I have come to soak in it, to “get it” a little bit more.  I have come, maybe, to dream of what it would be like to not only know that truth, but to make my home in it.

Fell asleep in that prayer room, meditating on this passage, so left there, stopped to get coffee, stopped by the chapel where they were doing the Mass, and finally came back to my room to unpack and make my home here.  As boring as unpacking was, I was aware of not wanting to finish, as it was really the only thing to “do.”  There is probably not one TV on this whole campus (blows are obviously being struck here for freedom).  I have been encouraged to listen to worship music, but I do not trust myself not to abuse my iPod, so I have left it setting.

I wanted to get this first leg of my journey written down so I do not forget it.  I am growing more and more tired, and am going to nap until dinner.  Of course dinner is in 2 1/2 hours.  I take 20 minute naps.  What will I do when I wake up?  I will be in the presence of God.  Why isn’t that enough?