I have been on this spiritual journey for over 30 years now. Admittedly it has not always been clear to me where it is that I’m actually journeying towards. Heck, let’s just say that most of the time including right this moment of now, I have no clue what this journey is all about. I just know that we are all on this journey, yes even those people who are skeptical, cynical or down right too dense to even know how to spell spirituality let alone have an opinion about it. We are all on this spiritual journey and there are no two journies that will look exactly alike. It is for this reason that I am writing to express what spirituality is to me.
I started my spiritual journey on one very ordinary day. I remembered it still very clearly in my mind. I barely got out of university and I was walking to work one sunny evening in the Summer over 30 years ago. It had been a rough year for me. I just got out of school and I had a tough time finding work. I didn’t know who to turn to ask for advice because there wasn’t any role models in my family that I could turn to. Eventually, after months of struggling on my own I finally found something that had some signs of not being a completely dead-end job. Yet still things were far from ideal. It was with this back-drop that I walked towards my place of employment in the evening just as the sun was on the verge of sinking behind the horizon. The sun touched my heart. I must have seen a thousand sunsets but this sunset at that particular evening touched me deeply and I had a profound sense of relief. It was as though the sun managed to whisper into my ears that evening that everything was going to workout, don’t even sweat it. I still remember that feeling as though it had just happened 5 minutes ago.
Fast forward a year. I was singing in a church choir. I loved singing and I had been taking vocal lessons for a few months. However, because of my work schedule the only choir that I could get in was a church choir. Little did I know that that was my hook into religion. I felt an inner peace when I was in church so becoming a baptised Catholic was a logical next step. Never one to stay on the sideline, I jumped all in. I was in the choir, in the Legion of Mary, visiting hospitals, evangelical activities, the whole nine yards. I did the religion thing full on until my own marriage started to fall apart. I remembered a still small voice in my mind admitted to myself that I didn’t know who I was any more after 5 years of marriage. How did that happen? By then, the stage was set for me to dive much deeper into my spiritual journey.
Fast forward twenty years to now. Spirituality to me is that longing to go back to Source. It is feeling the excruciating and ecstatic bliss of the pull of the First Cause. It is the call to remember why we chose to incarnate. This remembrance renders me completely emotional and exceedingly peaceful at the same time. It is the reason that I bothered to get out of bed in the morning. It is the reason I love going to bed at night. It is what makes this journey on earth bearable at times when it is the least tolerable. I belief this connection, this call from Source or the Universal Creator or whatever name you subscribe to is innate to everyone. We express it or answer this call in our own unique way. For some it may be expressed as their love for music, or their love for their family. However we express it we are all on the same journey.
