Religiosity: To Be or Not to Be

My earliest memories include laying on my mother’s lap in a church pew, somewhere in Hayward, CA.

It was Sunday. I was not quite 2 years old. I remember little about the church service. I do remember staring at the light fixtures hanging from the ancient acoustic tile ceiling, walls painted light green, and a dark green carpet runner in the aisle. People were singing. No musical instruments.

I just can’t remember as a child when my family didn’t faithfully attend a fundamentalist church. Do your Sunday school homework. Memorize scripture. Dress up for Sunday. Every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening you would find us at church. These were the rules and, as a child, I followed them.

Later on, when I started school, I learned the evils of smoking, dancing, and having any musical instruments in the church. I don’t think anybody in the bible smoked cigarettes. If they did, they likely smoked Camels. The preacher’s notion of God’s love always took a back seat to the promise of an eternity in the lake of fire if I smoked cigarettes, or used a swear word, just to name a couple of a myriad of possible hellish infractions.

When I turned thirteen there were many other teenagers to know at church. None of them were particularly fond of all the rules, and it was as if we were together yoked to the “big Christian burden.” We didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter, at least not at church. Those were rules too.

During all that time, I knew there was a God, but the God that we worshipped was remote and looked something like the explorer DeSoto. God was love, but God also seemed sort of vengeful and mean. If you committed a scriptural infraction or discovered masturbation early in your teens, it was all over. You might as well just skip the rest of your life and jump into that burning lake. You’d be toast any way you look at it.

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I left home at 17 to attend university at UC Davis, and as soon as I did, I quit going to church. It just didn’t add up. If there was a campus ministry, I never found it. Of course, I wasn’t looking for it. It was the late sixties and the war in Viet Nam was raging. So were drugs. There were just too many distractions to worry about biblical dogma anymore.

The truth is, my spiritual journey never really stopped. Life is a spiritual journey no matter who we are, or how we were raised. It’s a journey with baggage, guilt, shame, fear, and hatred, along with moments of sublime love.

In my twenties, I discovered paperbacks about Edgar Cayce, the well-known trance medium. I found them in a bookstore in Berkeley and I bought all of the Cayce books I could get my hands on. I devoured them. His revelations about Atlantis led me to believe that it had existed, somehow, some way.

At about that time, I also discovered Han Holzer the “Ghost Hunter.” He was a prolific writer who was interested in so many different psychic phenomena. At the time, he was traveling around Europe with a medium, visiting haunted houses and researching poltergeist activity. Again, I bought some of his paperbacks and his hardcover book on psychic photography.

I didn’t share my keen interest in the mystic with anybody. It was the 70s. Nixon was president, and the whole world, except for hippies, was straight arrow. Who could I talk about this stuff with? Surely, I’d risk appearing as if I were a refugee from the lunatic fringe. My upbringing informed me that all this was just fantasy, and yet, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

It was during these years I first read “Seth Speaks,” channeled by Jane Roberts. I didn’t hear any of the recordings until recently, but her husband kept copious records and recordings.

The irony of all ironies, a few decades later, I returned to church as a United Methodist. It was just a matter of timing, along with a near-death experience that pushed me forward into a new chapter of the spiritual journey.

I eventually went to seminary and became a pastor. I also learned that I could hear a voice in my head, if I listened carefully and quietly. Although I served as a pastor for several years, part of me was still dealing with the guilt and pain of growing up with parents who were zealous fundamentalists.

I was listening to a podcast and heard Sheila Gillette, the famous channeler, being interviewed. The wisdom of Theo, a council of 12 Archangels, whom she channeled, rang so very true.

In the next two years, everything just exploded. Yes, I was psychic. The journey took me to study with a few different psychics and channelers. So I’ll cut to the chase:

We live in a duality. Yes we are spiritual beings having a human experience, but we are also living as humans and are experiencing lots of emotions, along with our free will. We are also in a period of expanding human consciousness.
Modalities like churches or synagogues have some of the answers, but many of these are more concerned with dogma and doctrine than they are with respect to the nature of our spirituality. Sometimes churches can go horribly wrong, as in the case of Jim Jones, who once was considered a wonderful member of the church community in San Francisco. “The great shift” is underway and the universe is waiting for “us to arrive.” Churches are busy looking backwards for answers. While our history is important, our task as human beings is also to look forward and move forward, co-creating with the divine.
The more we are able to integrate the things that cause us pain and fear, the more readily we are able to move forward. Learn who you really are. Learn how central the heart is to this expansion process. We are not meant to be followers as much as we are meant to be explorers, and co-creators.
Integration is really the most important thing we do in life. There is a vibration of truth that rings true. The more we integrate, the more genuine and deep our heartfelt love for self and others becomes. Life can become so much more beautiful when your heart takes the lead.