Through the Temple Gate
Where have you found spiritual fruit—and what keeps you from returning there? This reflection explores the experiences, practices, and communities that help us nurture what is deepest within us.
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Through the Temple Gate
Many decades ago, my little brother, Danny, inadvertently became a narc. It happened on one fateful morning before school. How was he to know that a bag of anonymous dried herbs in my car could get me grounded from: my job, my friends, my automobile, and my habit of getting high two or three times a day? Besides homework, there was only one other thing I was permitted to do outside of my parents’ constant supervision. They allowed me to attend a Catholic high school retreat that I’d been resisting. And so, on the last school-day before my weekend away, I purchased enough weed to get myself, and two or three other compatriots stoned a few times. Back then, I knew what I didn’t know (i.e. anyone else that would be attending that retreat). But in those days, and maybe these days too, weed was like a Eurail Pass. With a small stash, and enough to share, you were assured of a ticket to ride with other passengers who wanted to travel through life in the same way. It didn’t take long to identify and assemble a proper cannabis klatch.
We were all set, until nosy Sister Maryanne Runkle, bong-blocked our first attempt at Free Fallin’. My second opportunity was scuttled by a life-altering religious experience. First I wept. Then I beamed for a stretch of time that felt outside of time. Later that night, I snuck out, and gathered with my new best friends. I had to break the news that I wouldn’t be joining them for a nightcap. Their despair almost immediately passed when I passed my stash. I told them that I wanted a good night’s sleep, and a clear head. What I really wanted was more of the good stuff I scored in the chapel an hour earlier. And that’s just what I received over the next two days.
For me, what followed, was not like a tent-revival healing, where I threw my crutches, and miraculously transformed into a totally changed man. Once home, I continued to seek out my clandestine pleasures where possible. But a process was set in motion. Weed use discontinued only after a couple of serious crises, one of my own making, the other, the tragic denouement of my family’s disintegration. With heavy things weighing on my heart, weed was no longer a distraction, but a gateway into debilitating anxiety. For the last time, I gave my stash away to a friend. I haven’t looked back. The question is, why am I recounting a story that happened nearly five decades ago?
From Krogers to Templegate
I think it’s on account of the film I stumbled into last night: The Most Reluctant Convert. It was all about C.S. Lewis’ gradual journey from atheism to his embrace of an explicit Christian spirituality. His sojourn shared almost nothing in common with mine. As you just read, my spiritual quickening was far more experiential than Lewis’ intellectual pilgrimage, as recounted in that movie and in his book, Surprised by Joy. So how did my adolescent faith development have anything to do with this Oxford don?
That answer has to do with a job offer I received when I was eighteen. It caused me to jump ship from Krogers to Templegate, an intellectually avant-garde religious bookstore and publishing company, in the heart of downtown Springfield, Illinois. It just so happened that my newly divorced, previously stay-at-home mom had begun her new job, mere blocks away from my new job. Since I had no car, I’d ride in with her at 7:30 am. Our store didn’t open till ten. That left me over two hours of time to drink tea and read good books. Was it the caffeine, or was it the thrill of reading C.S. Lewis’ Christology, ecclesiology, ontology, theodicy, and epistemology in such works as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Surprised by Joy? One definition of theological study is, “faith seeking understanding.” Lewis provided me with such a delicious way to internalize and understand my experience of Holy Mystery. Next thing you know, I was reading adjacent authors who taught me about contemplative prayer practices, and Beatitude-infused social justice, and more.
Sunday Morning Café Mission, Vision, Values
My later career as a counselor and resilience researcher is most certainly connected to that influential time. For example, what is the central finding of my thirty-plus years of resilience research? The heart and soul of resilience is that Transcendent Core of each person, where they discover Ultimate Concern.
About five years ago, in connection with all of that, a new seed was planted in me to launch the Sunday Morning Café project. A couple of years ago, a team of ten multigenerational colleagues formed around this project. Together, we’ve attempted to nurture and name the sapling that has sprung from that seed. Our mission is to provide a context where the Sacred can be accessed by people of any faith, or no faith. Regular readers, listeners, and gatherers will recognize our handle: “What’s deepest within us is most universal between us.”
Take What You Need & Leave the Rest
I learned from 12-Step meetings that the best way to share what’s deepest within us is with an open hand and heart. In that spirit, I want to share an observation. Please take what’s useful, and leave the rest.
Investing in that deep-down part of the self, and growing it, requires discipline. My religious tradition, like many others, holds that all of reality is shot through with the Divine. The Ground and Horizon of the human soul, and all reality, is “The Sacred,” which goes by many names, both secular and religious. In my experience, nurturing this kind of growth requires habits, rituals, and a community that gathers, at least on a weekly basis. For my money, that community gathers across time and cultures. I hate bad sermons, and have listened to way too many of them. But a bad sermon is better than no sermon because they make me construct a better sermon for myself. My religious tradition regularly makes me grind my teeth in frustration. But it also provides me with a contemplative approach that opens to me the Sacramental nature of all creation, and every moment. Like Blessed Thomas Merton, a Benedictine monk, who felt a kinship with Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhism, I have also found that my regular weekly and daily Sabbath practices lead to a deeper facility to take in other traditions, especially their contemplative, liturgical, and ethical dimensions.
Ignatius Loyola was a big fan of spiritual experiments. His basic criterion for discernment went something like this: “Dwell where there’s fruit." What spiritual experiments have you conducted lately? Where have you found fruit to return to again, and again, and again?
Additional Reflection Questions
Does anything get in your way as you contemplate such experiences?
Does anything prevent you from going back to where you’ve tasted the sweet fruit of a deep spiritual root system?
Research has shown that when a spouse is contemplating separation or divorce, the combination of positive and negative qualities about their spouse gets flipped in their mind and imagination. Where once the positive qualities of their partner appeared most enduring and most prevalent, once the downward spiral sets in, the negative qualities take center stage. Do you think that this metaphor applies to religious traditions as well?
What makes you “grind your teeth” about your religious tradition? What do you do with that?
Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.
My faith and life experience is grounded in my answer to the question “Who is the other? There is no other.” I grind my teeth as I try to attend weekly Mass at a Parish I do not belong to forcing myself to still see the goodness of the Lord within its walls that I believe cultivates, justifies and promotes division and exclusion. In parallel I follow a social justice parish out of Daytona, FL that feeds my soul. I am beginning to navigate a new path to put my behavior where my heart lies to volunteer with organizations such as NAMI. I am also trying to engage my grandchildren in events to help them see “the other”.