Category Archives: The Spiritual Journey to Wholeness.
From Religion through Agnosticism to Jesus
I became an agnostic but came back to a very alive and relevant relationship with Jesus not connected to any religion. I went back to the Catholic church as a missionary. But Vatican II had changed the church enough that I could celebrate the spiritual journey of Jesus and the Holy Spirit there as our own. Years later I left again, because I wanted to share my experiences of freeing love and women couldn’t preach there. The liberal Presbyterian USA gave me that freedom. Though they stress mostly feeding and housing the poor or broken, more than the transforming grace of a relationship with Jesus that helps us in following Jesus’s life pattern of expanding our understanding of whom God loves. I think every original creator of any religion “got it.” But by the third generation, religion becomes about power…. thanks in a large part to being controlled by men. Fear is the root of all evil. When religion becomes about safety or power it loses the point of being about love. To me we enter a journey from the need of a baby to the freedom to love our unfinished selves and like Jesus eventually to even love those that disagree with us, the friends that abandon us, the enemy, and ultimately even God in those times when we feel abandoned by God also. To me the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is ALL. We are part of God and the Spirit of God is part of us and can along the spiritual journey become a larger influence in us. We are ALL in this together, believe it or like it or not. It’s about love, not salvation or power.
Earth Has No Sorrow that Heaven Cannot Heal
In my sixties, it hit me that most of my misery comes from a misunderstanding about what life is actually about. This life isn’t about being happy, it’s about being transformed. Happiness is the dessert, not the main course. Unfortunately, I ( and probably most of us) don’t change easily. So, it’s the challenges in life that cause us enough pain to accept the need to change and to also admit we need Grace. Later life seems to be about stages of letting go of the many things, pleasures, people, and even achievements that we think we need to be happy. Letting go of these idols is painful. And my desire to protect both myself and even those I love from any suffering often circumvents what God is trying to do in my and their lives. But, Whatever the challenge is: 1. If God is allowing it, there is a purpose. 2. Jesus has been there, experienced it, grown from it, and is in it with us. 3. If it’s happening in this life, it is temporary. 4. There’s a “pony” in it for someone, even if it’s not us. My mother’s fourteen year losing battle with Alzheimer’s was the hardest test in my past life. She came to live with us at the age of sixty-six before we knew what Alzheimer’s was. After seven years, we were in a financial crises so both of us were working, our oldest three children were in college, so we used Mom’s social security to pay for her caregiver during the day. But then she began to run away at night, so we wired our nine doors shut. Then in the middle of the night, she would try to cook and forget and leave things burning on the stove. Finally, we realized that she needed to be in a nursing home for safety. Everything in me protested. The Sunday after we put her in the nursing home, I was driving home in the evening from my job as DRE of Catholic Education at Ft. Campbell, Ky. I had not managed to get to Mass that morning and our church didn’t have a Sunday evening Mass. I felt a great need for the Spiritual and emotional support of Church. Driving home through a poor rural area, I notice people going into a tiny sort of ramshackle church. I thought of stopping and joining them, but they were all black, so I felt a white stranger might make them uncomfortable and I kept going. It had begun to drizzle and I noticed an elderly black man dressed in his “Sunday go to meeting” suit walking toward the church, so I stopped and offered him a ride back to the church. When we reached it, he cordially invited me to join them, so I took it as a nudge from the Holy Spirit and did. The God moment for me was when they sang a hymn about someday understanding their troubles. When I thought of black history in the South, their hundreds of years of struggles put mine and even mom’s in perspective and helped me hang in there with both mom and God in the next seven years of her increased suffering. But shortly after her death I was waiting in my car to meet a friend and her suffering and the sorrow of all those years overwhelmed me. I was shouting angrily at God in my mind, “WHY? WHY?” I didn’t want to be crying when my friend came, so I wiped my eyes and went into a small shop where I was parked. As I walked in the first thing that jumped out at me were the brightly colored words on a card right in front of me. It said, “THERE IS NO SORROW THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL.” God is in the timing. And I cling to these memories as I face my own journey through Alzheimer’s. Neither Mom, nor I knew for many years what was causing her problems. Though knowing is scary, so far awareness seems to be a blessing for me and those who will help me make it through. And I cling to the hope that my awareness may help not only myself, but somehow might help others who are dealing with this.
Accepting Jesus as Savior Takes a Minute. Accepting Jesus as Lord Takes a Lifetime.
I want to explain something about having a relationship with Jesus and about saying the prayer accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord.
For me, as an agnostic, it was a new beginning. Jesus became both a partner with His life as a guide, and a presence as a source of God’s Love that is the grace to grow more loving all along life’s spiritual journey.
I began to recognize the pattern Jesus had of opening up to more and more people as those Loved by God…..until it included not just good Jews, but the Jews that used the power of the enemy government to get rich, the slut at the well, the guy at the pool who wouldn’t help himself, Soldiers of the hated enemy government, his closest friends who abandoned Him, and even the Jews that thought they had a monopoly on God and were instrumental in his torture and death. And as He died, Jesus chose to trust God even when He felt abandoned by Him.
Jesus fleshed out both the Love of God for ALL of us and the WAY for us to become Loving. That Love is the grace for us to grow more loving every inch of the way until we die.
I don’t know what God is… I don’t know what heaven is. Sometimes I’ve felt like this life was hell. But I do know we are all different and have different limits. I’m not sure we all die loving like Jesus, because we are not dealt the same hand. We only have to play the hand we were dealt the best we can with the grace of that Love. I cannot judge ANYONE, even myself. At 88, I’ve realized that I wasn’t dealt as great a hand as I thought I was. But I’m still here, so I’ve got more growing to do. Sometimes when I see really GOOD people suffer horribly, it mirrors Jesus to me. Maybe they love enough to bear what the weaker people they love couldn’t. I don’t know. NO one knows! If we think we know the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, we are claiming to be equal to God. Being human is living and, even by the measure of perfection, dying unfinished.
We want so badly to feel safe, and we think either worldly power/riches or religion will guarantee it. This life is not about safety or perfection. It’s a journey from our own NEEDING to LOVING. Some of us are born better at it than others. It’s a personal journey, so some of us need more grace than others. Some of us, like me, even need miracles among the heartbreaks. It’s a JOURNEY of learning to LOVE like Jesus did to the best of the grace we are given. Though the journey varies from person to person, groups of us start out more like each other than others. The challenge isn’t getting to heaven, it’s becoming the loving person God created us uniquely to be. And often our failures are in what we DON’T do, because of limiting our love to only people like ourselves. And that includes both conservatives and liberals in any society.
I KNOW I am LOVED, but that doesn’t mean I’m perfect or will ever be perfect. And the same goes for every single child of God. I know that by the pattern of the life and death and Love fleshed out in Jesus.
Deconstruction Theology
by Jim Palmer (An Excerpt)
It is okay to feel what human beings feel. We laugh, cry, dance, feel ecstasy, even feel despair. It is how we know the world. It is how we live inside of our hearts and not dissociated from them.
Jesus didn’t theologize or spiritualize people’s suffering. Jesus faced suffering and tasted the depths of it. He leaned into it, endured it, and fully met others in their suffering. Jesus cared. Jesus wept. Jesus felt it all deeply. There’s something between living in denial and being swallowed whole by the pain and suffering of human existence, and Jesus lived there.
Being Jesus means that we go through life embracing it all fully and feeling it all deeply. That we don’t hide and try to protect ourselves. That we live. That we show up. That we laugh. That we cry. That we hurt. That we heal. That we care. That we love. And we wake up the next morning and sign up for it all over again.
Why did Jesus do this? Why do we? Because this is what it means to be human. You don’t get to pick and choose. It’s all of it.
There is a bliss that no amount of ache can steal away. And there’s an ache that no amount of bliss can rescue you from. Enlightenment doesn’t spare you from being human. You are supposed to be here. You are supposed to be human. You are supposed to feel both the bliss and the ache.”
Though I am not a Christian and dispute virtually all traditional Christian theology, I still find meaning in Jesus. One of those ways is seeing Jesus as the wounded healer.
Jesus can be understood as a radical companion, not a distant savior. His wounds symbolize solidarity, not supremacy. He walks with us through rupture, grief, and reconstruction. His crucifixion becomes a symbol of divine solidarity with suffering, not divine punishment. He is the one who bled with us, not the one who demands we bleed for him.
You don’t need to believe in literal resurrection to honor Jesus as wounded healer. You can walk with his archetype through grief, rupture, and rewilding. His story becomes a map for mutual liberation, not a mandate for conformity. His wounds become a vow to walk with the wounded—not to erase them. The cross becomes a fault line, tomb as compost, resurrection as vow.
Jesus can be seen as the archetypal wounded healer not because his suffering is redemptive in doctrine, but because it’s relational, embodied, and symbolic. Jesus doesn’t bypass pain—he enters it fully: betrayal, abandonment, physical agony, existential despair. Jesus experienced a rupture in his own faith in “God” – “My God, why have you forsaken me?” His wounds are not hidden in resurrection. He shows them to Thomas. They become proof of presence, not power.
I walked away from Christianity many years ago, but there is a two-word sentence in the gospels that won’t let me give up Jesus entirely.
“Jesus wept.”
I finally learned why the statement, “Jesus wept” could only be a two-word sentence. There are no words preceding those two words, and there are no words following it. There are these moments in life where there is nothing more to say. Nothing that could be said. Nothing that should be said. It’s just a time to weep. Nothing fits before it or after it. Anything and everything that could be said rolls down you face in a tear and falls quietly to the ground.
I don’t know about a God in the sky who pulls strings, but I can relate to a Jesus who leaned fully into the lived human experience with vulnerability, courage, love and compassion.
For some years I have from time to time been working on the Religion-Free Bible (RFB). I rewrote that two-word sentence like this:
Jesus the Wounded Healer
“Anguish climbed from the bottom of his gut up through his chest and throat, and into his eyes with a power that even he could not contain. A lone tear quietly dropped from his eyelash. As it inched down his face, Jesus grieved the human condition, of which he was now inseparably a part. The heartache of humankind washed through him like cold rain. Jesus drank the cup of his true identity. He felt eternity in his soul, while human suffering coursed through his veins.
Life is beautiful. Life is agonizing. That was the deal, and there was nothing Jesus could ever do to change that. Gravity had it’s way with this solitary tear, and as it fell from his chin to the ground, Jesus was undone with sadness and compassion that stretched across every human wound and scar that had ever been felt. No divinity could save him now from his own human heart.
Jesus wept.”
– Jesus, John 11:35, Religion-Free Bible
The Why of Sharing our Stories
The Rosetta Stone of our Ebenezers
An Ebenezer isn’t a Biblical Geezer. It’s a reminder and a sign of God’s presence at a particular time and place, a reminder to ourself and a testimony to others traveling the same path.
In 1 Samuel 7:12, Ebenezer refers to a memorial stone set up by Samuel to commemorate Israel’s victory over the Philistines. But it also refers to the place where Israel had been defeated twice and even lost the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines. 1Samuel 4:1, 5,1. So, an Ebenezer is not only a witness to Israel’s ultimate triumph with God’s help, but a testimony to the presence of God even in their defeats.
Having been an agnostic at one stage of my life, there was for me a specific conscious moment in which I risked asking Jesus to be my Savior and Lord. I can, in hindsight, see God’s footprints in my life during my times of denying Him and searching for Him. So, my moment of decision appears to me to be part of a lifelong process with God involved every step of the way. It has also become obvious that letting Jesus actually be the Lord of my life remains an ongoing challenge of becoming free of the addictions to idols: the pleasures, opinions, prejudices, grudges, pretenses, people, etc. that I cling to. The list is long.
At eighty-eight, I have collected a serious accumulation of both kinds of Ebenezers, the victories and the defeats. I’ve begun to see that the defeats are how we are stripped of our idol of self-sufficiency so we can learn to live grace-filled lives.
Dying to self seems to be a protracted and recurring struggle in the spiritual journey. It reminds me of a local production of Agatha Christy’s play, The Mouse Trap. My friend had her first part in a theatrical production. Unfortunately, her character was murdered in the first scene. On opening night, the killer was strangling her as she fell back onto a couch. But caught up in the thrill of her few moments of fame, she simply refused to die. Each time she went limp and he started to let go of her, she revived, dramatically gasping and struggling to sit up, prolonging the scene until even the audience began to snicker
I have a strong suspicion that many of our own dying-to-self scenes are similarly prolonged and oft repeated.
Our Ebenezers are our personal experiences of the presence of God in our lives. We are different people, with varied backgrounds and diverse personalities, so our relationships with God and our experiences of grace will not all be the same. God meets us however we are open to grace at different times in our lives. It’s wonderful to find others with Ebenezers like ours, but sometimes we are disconcerted when we encounter people with very different experiences. We need to remember that God is not through teaching any of us while we are still breathing. And only God knows how to bring each of us closer to Himself. When we listen with open minds and hearts to others’ Ebenezers, we can begin to create a Rosetta Stone for understanding each other’s spiritual languages. Then we can be open to the grace of God in the various stages of our own journey, even if it comes differently.
Overcoming an Exclusionary Faith
Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur recalls an experience of a childhood friendship ending because of a difference in faith:
I was in eighth grade, sitting in the library with my very best friend in the whole world. Her name was Lisa. We were working …, but we were really giggling and passing notes to each other and messing around, when Lisa gets really quiet for a moment. She has this far-away look in her eyes and she says, “Valarie, I just can’t wait until judgment day.”…
I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, then it’ll just be us. It’ll just be us. I can’t wait until it’s just us who are left.” I said, “Well, where will everyone else go?” Then she looked at me, very uncomfortable. She said, “Well, you know, down there.” It was that moment that I had to break to my very best friend the fact that I was not Christian…. I could see the blood drain from her face…. How could her very best friend not be saved? Not be good? Not be Christian?…
She had inherited a theology that divided the world into good and bad, right and wrong, saved and unsaved. Her theology severed her from her own deep knowing that her best friend was good and beloved. It’s like her theology stole me from home. She was trying to make it all make sense, try to hold both, but she couldn’t hold both. She had to let me go. [1]
In the wake of that loss, Kaur visits a church where she can confront a Christian about the belief in a God who discriminates against people of other faiths. There, she meets a church organist and recalls saying,
“I just can’t believe that there could be a God who would send me to hell,” I said. There was a pause as she looked at me. I was ready to fight.
“I can’t either,” she said. She saw my shock and explained. “I think that there are many paths. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise….” Her name was Faye and she was the first Christian I had ever met who did not believe I was going to hell. I would go on to meet many more people like her and learn that there are many ways to be Christian, just as there are many ways to be Sikh. Our traditions are like treasure chests filled with scriptures, songs, and stories—some empower us to cast judgment and others shimmer with the call to love above all….
Fifteen years after I thought our friendship was over, Lisa would reach out with an apology. She would still be Christian and I would still be Sikh, but she would have long abandoned the particular theology that had tried to sever us from one another. She had gone on her own journey … and had eventually come back to our friendship. In the end, we learned that love was the way, the truth, and the life. [2]
Good Reminder for our Present Times
Two Sides of Darkness
It is very important, friends, not to think of the soul as dark. We are conditioned to perceive only external light. We forget that there is such a thing as inner light, illuminating our soul.
—Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle
Richard Rohr describes periods of darkness, confusion, and struggle as necessary for our transformation and growth:
Experiences of darkness are good and necessary teachers. They are not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. Even if we don’t experience clinical or diagnosed depression, most of us will go through at least one period of darkness, doubt, and malaise in our lives. I hope during these times we can reach out to someone—a therapist, spiritual director, friend—to support us. And when we feel strong, may we be the shoulder someone else can lean on.
There’s a darkness where we are led by our own stupidity, our own sin (the illusion of separation), our own selfishness, by living out of the false or separate self. We have to work our way back out of this kind of darkness with brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution. It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated.
But there’s another darkness that we’re led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself. In many ways, the loss of meaning here is even greater, and sometimes the loss of motivation, purpose, and direction might be even greater too. It really feels like the total absence of light, and thus the saints and mystics called it “the dark night.” Yet even while we may feel alone and abandoned by God, we can also sense that we have been led here intentionally. We know we’re in liminal space, betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun—filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort—but it is the darkness of being held closely by God without our awareness. This is where transformation happens.
Of course, the dark night we get ourselves into by our own “sinful” choices can also become the darkness of God. Regardless of the cause, the dark night is an opportunity to look for and find God—in new forms and ways. Neither God nor goodness exist only in the light but permeate all places, seen and unseen. It seems we have to “unknow” a bit every time we want to know in a new way. It’s like putting your car in reverse in the mud and snow so that you can gain a new track and better traction.
Periods of seemingly fruitless darkness may in fact highlight all the ways we rob ourselves of wisdom by clinging to the light. Who grows by only looking on the bright side of things? It is only when we lose our certainties that will we be able to deconstruct our false images of God to discover the Absolute Reality beneath all our egoic fantasies and fears.
My Journey from Agnostic to Christian
As a Catholic from childhood, I had four children in the first five years of marriage. Unfortunately, I had to have them by Caesarean Section. Then the doctor told me I would die if I had another C section in the next few years. When I asked the priest what to do since birth control was considered a mortal sin, he said,
“Many children have good stepmothers.”
I decided that men who had never married or had children shouldn’t be making that kind of decision for women. Since I unknowingly had made the Catholic Church my God, when I left the Catholic Church, I threw Jesus and God out with it.
I was not a typical woman who loved to cook and bake, sew and make flower arrangements. In fact, I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother. We were affluent then and I had help and we both enjoyed giving parties. So, for several years we led a party life, and I began drinking even before the parties and on weekday afternoons when we didn’t have parties.
I got scared that I was losing control of my drinking and found a therapy group for alcoholics. After several months of reading and going to therapy, I broke down weeping one night, admitting that I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother and didn’t think I was capable of loving anyone, even my husband and children. The group did not judge me, but rather seemed to hurt with me. Somehow it was a beginning of healing.
The next day as I was vacuuming, I had a sense of someone standing behind me with their hand gently on my shoulder. My first thought was that it was Jesus, but then decided since I didn’t believe in Jesus it couldn’t be. So, I just put the feeling into my “need more information file.”
Unexpectedly my father died.at fifty-two years of age. I closed down my feelings, so I could deal with it intellectually and cope with life. I took a course at Vanderbilt Divinity school on the Christian View of Death and another on other World Religions. Neither made much impression on me, so I began to visit various Christian denominations and reading the bible. The book of Acts was an eye opener and made me a bit wistful that Christians might still have life changing experiences. About that time some affluent friends of ours gave up their lifestyle and his Vice Presidency in his family’s company to be missionaries in a non-denominational ministry, Campus Crusade for Christ. I hoped they had kept some investments for the future for their three children, but I was intrigued by their willingness to change their life so drastically.
Sometime later they came back to town asking our group of friends to give a Christian coffee where several women would talk about how Jesus had changed their lives. I laughingly invited women to come, saying I didn’t know our current gatherings weren’t Christian, but come and enjoy the great food we were going to have.
Several women gave talks about the changes in their lives and relationships when they said a prayer asking Jesus to be their Savior and Lord. Then they invited us to say the prayer with them. I was impressed with the changes they described, but since I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, I didn’t say the prayer. As the other women who prayed the prayer were being embraced, I started washing dishes.
One of the women came in and asked if I had said the prayer. I said I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, so I had not. She didn’t hesitate, suggesting I say the prayer this way, “Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, I want you to be my Savior and Lord.” That seemed like a win/win, so I said the prayer and went back to washing dishes wondering if this would make any difference.
Suddenly, I was simply over come with the feeling of being totally loved with no small print. The joy was so great, I was afraid I’d burst from it. And that began my fifty-seven-year spiritual journey that has had awesome times of joy and very difficult times when I sometimes felt that loving presence even when in great pain.
It has not been easy. And there were times when temptation was so strong that God literally intervened in amazing ways to keep me from screwing up my own and others’ lives.
I have learned that saying the prayer isn’t a magic incantation. For some of us it makes an immediate difference, but it doesn’t make us perfect. And for some it doesn’t make a difference for years. Asking Jesus to be our savior is one thing. Letting Him be Lord is a whole other ball game and for me it’s taking a lifetime. Different personalities experience the Spiritual Journey in very different ways. Some of us are relationship people. Others are worker bees and doers. Some are thinkers and questioners. God did not make His children with a cookie-cutter.
Following Jesus means literally following in His footprints in His journey through the Gospels. And that takes grace in our emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual lives that changes us in many different ways over the years.
We are loved unconditionally, but we are on a journey of change from being needy to being loving. And that is not easy and takes commitment, courage, and grace.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 