A Pilgrimage Like No Other

When I was a boy I spent twelve years in Catholic schools. At age 17 I left alienated and angry wanting nothing more to do with religion. Yet at the same time something in me kept pushing me to know more. That thrust has never stopped. At first I thought those religion and spiritual were the same thing, that knowing the Father God was the objective of the spiritual experience. But I soon learned religion as I experienced it was not the same as spirituality. Everyone I knew had a different idea about spirituality. For many the word spiritual is meaningless. For other it means something ethereal. On some level something drove me on to resolve the issue, but I didn't know what I sought. At the end I came to understand that the spiritual I sought is found in the relationships we have with our earth and all the living creatures that have emerged from the earth. Our rootedness in the solid earth is the fact from which true human spirituality emerges. There is nothing ethereal or otherworldly about spirituality. After Eastern thinking the major influence on me as I pursued this search-and perhaps it's been even more influential - are the achievements of science and scholarship especially in the 20th century. For me those achievements shattered any lingering ideas of the supernatural. After coming to understand the natural world and the facts of history through the eyes of scientists and historians there was no way I could continue to give credence to any ideas that could not provide evidence and survive testing.The great discovery I have made after sixty years of pursuing the question is that our spirituality is natural and real. We find true transcendence in the quality of all our relationships and by going beyond our little selves. When we do let go of that little self, that ego role, we can be children again and find heaven just as Jesus advised. Heaven, the spiritual experience, is right here in you and me.