Publisher’s Perspective: Surprise spirituality

A handful of new Facebook friends had me searching for my junior high school yearbooks this past weekend. I didn’t find them in the musty box of books at the back of one of my closets. Instead, I uncovered a fading map to my haphazard spiritual journey.

Inside were some two dozen warping books reflecting the perceived deficiencies of my adult life. In no particular order, they included: Loving Someone Gay, Your Perfect Right: A Guide to Assertive Behavior, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved By You?, Creating Affluence, Search For Serenity, The Multi-Orgasmic Man, The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, and The Gifted Boss.

I remember little from these books; they were at best short side-trips. But three, discernible by dozens of earmarked pages and layers of highlighting and underlining, are in an altogether different category. I was exposed to them at just the right time in my life, and each advanced my journey immeasurably.

Twenty four years ago, Alcoholics Anonymous—also known as The Blue Book— helped me get sober. It also ignited a previously dormant spiritual side, and persuaded me that greater control does not correlate with greater happiness.

Soon thereafter, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled taught me an essential paradox: that pain creates the clearest pathway to spiritual growth and happiness. It may take some time to reveal itself, but there’s opportunity in the rubble of all that angst and discomfort.

And in Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch convinced this lifelong agnostic of the possibility—even if only as a useful construct—that we are all connected to something loving, miraculous and divine.

Add to these the books that have been on my nightstand the past couple years, Eckhart Tolle’s inspired The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, and you have the essential—and most often unrealized—goals of my current belief system: relinquish control, learn from pain, channel love, and stay outside of my head (Tolle’s contribution).

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Using the wonderfully thought-provoking
“Belief-O-Matic” quiz found on Beliefnet.com, it turns out my metaphysics are most in synch with Unitarian Universalism. But to this day, and after years of episodic exploration, I remain surprised that I’m spiritual at all.

My father was Mormon (I have 18 first cousins on his side of the family), but I attended my mother’s Methodist church as a child. Neither of my parents was particularly devout, so it was easy to manufacture excuses to avoid worship as I grew older.

But it’s also true that I never felt anything inside the church that would make me want to come back. The clothes were uncomfortable, the sermons were boring, and I sensed early on that it was mostly a show the congregants performed for each other.

The tuna fish sandwiches my mother made afterward were small reward.

Perhaps I already sensed that there was something about me that would confound the church. Whatever the reason, by the time I reached high school I had turned my back on religion. When my parents said a blessing at meals, I held my head high and proudly refused to participate.

I don’t remember exactly what led me to the “Metaphysical Studies” section of the bookstore years later, but it was surely rooted in a psychic pain so profound that it could no longer be numbed by alcohol, or avoided using the rationalization, procrastination and avoidance that I had cultivated in the closet.

I have come to believe that we are all born with an internal sonar system that uses pain to guide us, relentlessly, in the direction of peace, fulfillment and loving connection. It’s installed in the factory, and its operation is annoyingly flawless. But by the time we reach adulthood, most of us have developed effective temporary system overrides. We veer off course, and the journey back can seem impossible.

Like almost everyone at the beginning of their spiritual journey, all I wanted was for the pain to stop. In that pain I discovered priceless, unimaginable opportunity. I rediscovered my sonar—and spirituality—and have since learned to use it, if just a bit.