volume 1
Reflections
by Judy Schulz
I am standing at the river, gazing across the flowing water. There is an
incredible sense of peace here on the bank. It is a sense of having, at long
last, come home. Within the river is the All; the answer to every question
I have dragged along behind me for all the years of this life. I drop the
string that pulls these questions--I need not hang onto them any longer.
The river has my answers, but I don't need to ask the questions yet. I need
only to see the water, to know it is accessible, available, to me. The path
that ended here, at the water's edge, has had many turns, many hills and
valleys. They made my progress difficult, because I didn't know then that
the river existed. I could never have dreamed it or fantasized its existence,
because my feet were stuck firmly to the ground. I didn't know how to soar;
I didn't know I had the capability. I trudged, dragging my burden of earthly
baggage, not knowing how to release it.
My mother is fond of relating the story of how religious I was as a child. None of her other children, she claims, took to Catholicism the way that I did. I remember some of the stories she likes to tell: about the cherished iridescent blue crystal rosary--a gift from my godparents--that hung on my bedpost for many years; about the May alters my sister and I constructed every spring to the Virgin Mary, and kept filled with fresh flowers, lighting the votive candles every evening throughout the month; about the yearly pilgrimage to church on Good Friday at precisely three o'clock so that I could be there at the exact moment that Jesus' soul was being given up to heaven. They are the stories of my childhood, and the memory of them recalls to me the awe the rituals of the church inspired in me, and the comfort I derived from them.
But it's not maternal pride or even a shared sense of faith that compels
my mother to tell these stories now. It is fear, a fear I can read in her
eyes every time the subject of faith comes up between us. My path of self-discovery
has diverged so completely from hers over the course of my lifetime that
she is afraid for my soul; afraid that what awaits me when this life is over
will be the damnation her Catholic faith assured her was the fate of all
such lapsed souls.
In looking back on the many incarnations my faith has undergone, I am at last able, like Siddhartha at the end of his journey, to understand each stage; to know each was useful and necessary to allow me to arrive at this moment, on the bank of the river where I hope to hear the voices that will direct me to the next level, the next stage of enlightenment.
Indeed, I think of my own development as paralleling that of Siddhartha's. The journey of his life took him from spiritual childhood and his contentment with the authorities in his life, through his stage of questioning adolescence, to the materialism of middle age, and at last, to the wisdom of the river in old age. What he was able to accomplish in one lifetime, I believe will take me many more to achieve, for I have only just arrived at the river recently, and there remains much more for me to learn and understand. Yet, the parallels remain.
My spiritual infancy and childhood coincided with my chronological one. I was raised in Catholic schools, and was content to believe everything my elders--both in my personal world and that of the Catholic church--told me to believe. Like Siddhartha, I didn't question the rituals, didn't seek any answers beyond what I was told. It was enough for me just to be a part of traditions that had been in place for centuries. Their very longevity suggested that they must be right, must be true, or how could they have survived so long? The role models in my life were convinced of their relevancy, and that was enough for me.
Like Siddhartha, I entered my spiritual adolescence about mid-way through my teens, when I began to question those very rituals and traditions I had found comfort in as a child. In a moment of clarity that signalled a shift of awareness, I wrote the following journal entry after attending Mass one Sunday. My sister Lori had been explaining how her choral group prepared for a competition, and I was reminded of her words as I sat in the hard wooden pews, observing what was to be my last Mass for many years.
Lori says they have to be so well rehearsed that when they get on stage, even if their minds become paralyzed with fright, their bodies will take over, and will perform their act without them even being aware of what they are doing. Mindlessly, was her word for it. To act without thinking. This thought comes back to me as I sit in church this morning. Stand, sit, kneel, stand, recite a prayer, throw up a conditioned response, hide a yawn behind a hand. Or don't hide it. What difference does it make? I look around me at the mostly grey-headed congregation, searching for a light in an eye, a shred of emotion behind the moving lips. But there is very little. We spent our entire childhoods rehearsing, just so we can stand, sit, kneel with mindless precision. Those old men who wrote the Bible sure knew what they were doing when they likened us to a flock of sheep. We live up to our billing. Stand, sit, kneel. Just another pathetic sheep following the herd. "The Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace..." the congregation intones in one flat voice, and the shuffled sound of five hundred pairs of knees descending upon padded kneelers ensues. For one wild moment I consider remaining on my feet. A vision of me, the lone hold-out, standing like a defiant sentinel in a sea of conformity crosses my mind, bringing a satisfied smile to my face. It lasts for a mere second before I sink to my knees with the rest of the slaves to ritual. In my own mind I am many things, but a rugged individualist is not one of them. I didn't have the courage, at that point, to be that voice of individualism, so instead, I simply left the church, and everything it stood for, behind me.
It was at this point that my mother began to tell her tales of my early devotion, for what followed for me was a period of about ten years in which a total lack of spirituality became my creed. I knew my profession of atheism scared her, and she waited fearfully for the consequences of my blasphemy to come crashing down around me. Her stories were meant to remind me of my roots; a reminder of what had once been reality for me, and, in her mind at least, could be again if I just stopped questioning the world around me and simply turned my life over to her God once again.
The irony here is that, even then, I knew her to be bitter about the role the church had played in her own life; I knew that it had controlled her in ways that I could only imagine. She was raised in the 30's and 40's under the ironclad rule of a church that demanded--and got--perfect obedience from its followers. Thus, she married young and had children until the time came when her body could have no more. Even when there was no money, when my father was out of work for the fourth time in five years, when there was little food to put on the table, the babies came. It was the, "will of God," she was told when she appealed to her pastor for spiritual guidance, and she should be ashamed of herself for even thinking that she and her husband should exert any control over God's apparent desire to fill their house to overflowing.
So she obediently accepted us all, but the bitterness of her lack of control in her life did not escape me. In some ways, her unspoken anger did much to propel me away from the very institution which had robbed her of her free will. And yet, she implored me to stay. She had yet to break the grip of the church; she had yet to move out of that spiritual childhood of obedience.
In Jean-Paul Sarte's story, "The Flies," his protagonist, Orestes, describes to Zeus the moment he lost his faith in the gods, and his "youth"--that spiritual childhood--disappeared with the wind.
"Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down on me and swept me
off my feet. Nature sprang back, my youth went with the wind, and I knew
myself alone, utterly alone in the midst of this well-meaning little universe
of yours. I was like a man who's lost his shadow. And there was nothing left
in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders."
I identified with this, for this is how it seemed to happen for me, too. The
world as I knew it had crashed down around me, leaving me with nothing to hold
on to.
Thereafter, Sarte, Albert Camus and the existential belief that God was dead--or
rather, had never truly existed to begin with--replaced the priests, the church
and the faith of my "lost youth." I felt almost superior to everyone
around me who still blindly followed the old men of the Church. I saw myself
as one of the few brave souls with the courage to look at the reality of the
universe and accept it for what it truly was--to understand the futility of
man, the uselessness of life, the empty black void of death. I didn't hang
my life on the hook of religion in order to avoid taking responsibility for
where life led me; I knew there was "nothing left in heaven" to "give
me orders." I was on my own.
But there was nothing spiritually uplifting about this newly discovered sense of freedom. On the contrary, it came as an incredible burden. As William V. Spanos puts it in his "Casebook on Existentialism," this freedom opens up the "terrible possibility of the existence of the irrational, the possibility that life ends meaninglessly and is absorbed into the void of Nothingness."
In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that the years I spent pursuing this existential philosophy were also years of incredible, suicidal, depression. Like Siddhartha during his time with the Samanas, I had attempted to shut my "se1f" off, becoming a five sensory personality that could conceive of nothing beyond what I could see. I truly believed there was nothing else.
Eventually, Siddhartha realizes that by following this path, he lost himself on the way (pg. 31). It is a thought that I echoed in an early journal entry, written at the height of my
atheism, in which I realized that, I too had lost something along the way; I lost something I couldn't quite put my finger on:
There is something lacking in my life,
Some unfulfilled dream
Some unknown source of pleasure.
It passed by me when I was not looking
And left a cold, empty shell
Where a person is supposed to be.
Like Siddhartha, I came out of my "Samana" period feeling unfulfilled
and hungry for experiences that I had denied myself of when I was immersed
in my years of denial and depression. I, too, sought to fill that void in
the material world. I acquired every outer trapping of what we, in the material
world deem a successful life: marriage, children, a house, several cars,
vacation property and all other kinds of "stuff." I allowed the
material world to become my reality. And like Siddhartha, I found the material
world to be empty and devoid of meaning.
My awakening began when I finally decided to follow what I have often heard
referred to as "the whisper of your heart." I had long known that
I wanted to return to college, but found all manners of excuses to keep me
from taking that first, frightening step. No school, I argued, offered courses
in fiction writing, which is what I really wanted. Besides, we couldn't afford
for me to quit work. And how could I possibly squeeze in classes around taking
care of two young children?
One day, as I systematically ran through each of these excuses to my husband, I opened the Sunday Tribune and, in what was to be the first of a series of coincidences, found a cover story in the magazine section on Columbia College, prominently featuring its award-winning Fiction Writing Department. That same week, my job was eliminated, and my husband landed a part-time teaching job that would easily pick up the slack. There was no way that even I, the master of pessimism, the true believer of the total randomness of life, could avoid recognizing the implications of all these seemingly unrelated events.
In James Redf ield's The Celestine Prophesy he refers to this phenomenon as coincidence. As the central character in the book explains, "We build our energy and center ourselves in our situations, in the questions we have, then we receive some form of intuitive guidance, an idea of where to go or what to do, and then coincidences occur to allow us to move in that direction (pg. 175)." Certainly, the events that led me to that article that day, and ultimately back to school and to my spiritual path, were just such a series of coincidences.
I have had many teachers over the last five years, both in and out of school. All have given me something helpful on my journey, but the one who truly opened the door for me was a teacher whose class I had specifically sought to avoid. I had heard negative things about her from fellow classmates, and went out of my way to take classes she didn't teach. But on the first day of the Spring semester of 1995, she walked into my class--a last minute replacement for the scheduled instructor I had registered for. I thought immediately of dropping the class, but for some reason, though I had all the paperwork filled out, I didn't follow through. And because of that, with her assistance, I was able to take my first, halting steps onto a new path that has come to dominate my present life.
I learned many things from her, but probably the most important was to pay more attention to what was going on around me. She liked to say that the gods take many forms around you, and that if you listen, they will always be there to guide you. I've heard the gods speak to me often since I started to pay attention; they led me to the things I needed at the precise moments in which I needed them.
Buddhists refer to this state of awareness as "mindfulness." In his book on meditation entitled Wherever You Go There You Are, Jon Katab-Zinn says this of the concept: "Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgementally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality. It wakes us up to the fact that our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation" (pg. 4).
Learning to become mindful. Recognizing coincidence. Listening to the gods. Hearing the whispers of my own heart. All of these lessons have led me, step by step, to the place I am now. I have made it to the river. I know there is still much for me to learn, but just having gotten here, to the bank, was the most difficult part of the journey. Everything I need now to continue on the upward path is right in front of me.
My mother need not worry about me any longer.