When I was a Christian, I would read a Psalm every morning and pray every evening before bed. I would spend my months digging into study books taking me through Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians. I would write long lists of the things I was thankful to God for: jasmine tumbling over the neighbour’s fence, the relentless and unconditional love of Christ, the gift of God-fearing parents. I felt like a Good Christian when I upheld these scheduled practices, and that my connection to God was at its strongest, most authentic.
When I left the Christian Church and later, the Christian faith, one of the most frequent questions I was asked was, ‘so what do you believe now?’.
The true dichotomy of life is that everything is both painfully meaningless and astoundingly meaningful. Spirituality is what lies in the liminal space between the two. For decades I believed that Jesus was the gatekeeper of this spiritual realm and that by leaving the Christian community, the doors were no longer open to me. As my attitude became more latitudinarian, so did my understanding of who claimed to be custodians of this sacred and unknown territory.
Many of my friends turned to atheism when they left faith. In their bitterness and resentment, or simply in their quest for truth, they deduced that a higher deity was not scientifically possible. I purchased Sam Harris’ ‘The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason’ when I formally made my exit, approaching atheist literature with the same binary vision for belief as I had when I was Christian. Unfortunately, I was too afraid to read beyond the first chapter, and it still sits on my bookshelf, with its uncracked spine.
A couple of years after leaving the church, on a cool spring morning, I found myself in a state of reflective prayer when I was alone in the bush, surrounded by eucalyptus and wildflowers. It was the first time I had consciously prayed in many years. I had spotted an orchid beside a walk I frequented, with its small white flowers and its lonely salute to the brown undergrowth. It was beautiful and unfathomable in its size and delicacy. As I couldn’t thank the Christian God for this little orchid, I was forced to stop and question this thing of beauty a little longer. Where was I to direct my reflective gratitude, if not to a singular, Biblical being? I shuffled the backpack from my shoulder and placed it on the ground, before taking a seat next to the orchid and watching her for a while. I whispered a prayer of thankfulness and had to be comfortable allowing that thankfulness to be filtered out to the community of soil and sunlight and fungi that allowed her to grow.
Spirituality is more than just carving out space to pause and give thanks. Spirituality can be sex. It can be pain and heartbreak and loneliness. It can be meditation and the act of emptying one’s mind. Spirituality is finding ritual in the mundane, and ritual in the extraordinary. It is simply practicing awareness of the sensory arrangement of the world.
I have a small handful of friends, artists mostly, who experience life a little differently from me. They see things, often before they happen. They sit on ocean shores and wait for strangers they know for certain will visit them. They paint works of unknown events that are yet to come. They feel the energy of people and their histories. The subtleties of their gifts are not something I would have once considered a gift. In honesty, I wouldn’t have taken their stories seriously enough in the first place to call them anything other than happenstance or illness.
For years I was demanded respect for the spirituality I practiced, while refusing to extend that same respect to others. Now, I must be open to consider experiences that fall outside the definition of what I was taught spirituality to be. As I practice this, I am humbled by the diversity of human experience, and the potential for alternative spiritual engagements in a complex and beautiful world.
I had a dream, once, when I was lying in a tent out on Arrernte Country, a few hundred kilometres outside Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. In the dream, I am sitting in a pew inside a huge church. The isles are woven with vines, growing from the ground with vibrant green tendrils. There are hundreds of people sitting in the church, with sections reserved for schools and big families. The flimsy pieces of typed paper taped to the back of pews flap in the breeze.
The priest approaches the stage to welcome the congregation. He is a heavyset man, who walks with his head bowed and a limped shuffle. He apologises to the crowd, announcing that he needs to set the stage before he begins preaching. He pads off to the wing and the people return to their quiet chatter.
After a while, the sun begins its gradual descent. The priest hasn’t appeared again and people are beginning to mill out of the pews and into their cars. Soon, I am the only person left. The sun doesn’t set, despite the fading light and the arrival of the golden sky. I remain in the pew with my hands in my lap. Hours tick by as hours in dreams tend to.
Finally, the priest trudges onto stage. He takes no notice of the empty pews. He wipes the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist. After gathering himself, he reaches down and, without saying a word, pulls the lever of a small, wooden box that had been on stage the entire time.
Suddenly, hundreds and thousands of fairywrens erupt from the tiny box. They cover the sky, and the pews become a blur of blue breast. I remain in my chair, my mouth agape. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
The dream ends.
I have looked into the symbolic nature of the fairywren, to see if I can decipher more meaning from this dream. The internet tells me I can ‘access the energy of a fairywren in bushland, and its messages are often short and to the point, teaching you through their actions’. The preacher was a facilitator, but he didn’t need a key. That little box was unlocked. The answers were with the birds.
When I was a practicing Christian, my relationship with God was an intellectual one, a connection that was felt firmly in my head. But my newfound connection to the Divine is different. It sits with my body. The intellectual component has been stripped away and it is simply down to feeling. And feeling doesn’t seek to make sense. It just is.
Now I greet my mornings with a short prayer not out of duty, but out of respect for the gift of the day. I give thanks to the flowers I can suckle from on my afternoon walks, and the raging seas that threaten to sweep me out on dark and stormy days. I sit in the bath every evening, in a pool of hot water, and put my head between my knees and let go of the stress and the weight of the day. I share food with friends, who speak of what they’ve seen and the angels they’ve met and all the things they’ve learnt from them. It is visceral and whole. This form of spirituality is without boundaries, without boxes and without limits. I am free to learn and delight in all that is not owned, in a place that has no doctrine. Praise be.
Header image by Tomoaki
Also published on Medium.
Some here might be interested in checking out Karen Armstrong’s book, The Spiral Staircase.
Found this blog today. I appreciate the thoughtful comments and posts. Bravo.
Joseph Campbell had more than a few words to say about religion – he exploded the commitment to ideological literalism through comparative mythology.
Belief has never had anything to do with anything (except control), as spirit and matter are not separate. We are not separate, but distinct. All is interdependence.
I don’t know anything about this blog. I’ve only just read this post. Your words explain how my life has changed after letting go of Christian beliefs to take up less specific spiritual ones. Even though these new beliefs are maybe not as clear and collected as those from a religion, they seem more powerful and better connected to reality. Sometimes I just wish I could relay them better.
Anyways, this is the passage I’m referencing: “When I was a practicing Christian, my relationship with God was an intellectual one, a connection that was felt firmly in my head. But my newfound connection to the Divine is different. It sits with my body. The intellectual component has been stripped away and it is simply down to feeling. And feeling doesn’t seek to make sense. It just is.”
Thanks for giving me better words to use to explain myself. I hope you are enjoying your day.