It's The Only Thing That Makes Sense To Me

It was one of our first conversations and we were each offering up the kind of information one gives when wanting another to really know them. I asked about her spirituality and she replied, “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.” Her plainly stated answer imprinted on me instantly, and I knew that I’d hear her words, spoken in her same soft declarative tone, in my mind a thousand times in the years to come.

She went on to tell of explorations of different paths and traditions over the course of her life. Each was still dear to her, each layered reverently upon the one before it, so that now she could draw from a deep well of the sacred for comfort and expansion.

Later, reflecting on her statement, I marvel that I’ve never framed my own spiritual journey that way, at least to myself. I can feel the quiet certainty of this simple phrase deep within me, and know that this lens will now forever be one through which I view my own spirituality.

I too have explored myriad paths and practices since childhood, and along the way collected many inner lenses to peer through when I find myself once again pondering Spirit, and why its exploration has always been so necessary for me.

Once on a road trip to a meditation retreat with a friend, both of our minds in the free float musing of long highway miles, I asked, “What do people who don’t have God do?” He jokingly quipped, “Drugs, don’t you remember.” I laughed that I did.

As a child of the 60’s, my spiritual questing had included psychedelics, though not instead of God, as much as in search of Her. And decades later at a transpersonal psychology conference in the Brazilian rain forest, I heard a a respected speaker present a professional paper entitled 'Might the Gods Be Alkaloids?' just before I was invited to experience ayajuasca with the Santo Daime people.

Spirituality seems to have always been a guiding principal in my life. My teachers have been the Sisters of St Joseph, the red rocks of Boynton Canyon, the bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, the Sikh seatmate on a flight from Frankfurt. Ammachi, Ram Dass, Myrtle Fillmore, Poonjaji, Gangaji, Tensing Gyatso, Pir Vilayat Kahn, and Demeter all sound like names of relatives in my ear. The license plate on my car says MYSTERY.

Each sage and saint has shaped my way of seeing, each teaching has built upon what came before it, and never has the mix brought discord or dissonance. While the Sufi’s say you can’t cross a river in two boats, their God-drunken poet Rumi says, “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

I like traveling around on Rumi’s field. I take comfort that there is no map to be had, and that sweet encounters with fellow field travelers can happen at any time.

And now comes another field traveler – a lovely woman who says that her spirituality is the only thing that makes sense to her. I receive this as a teaching, one to add to the mélange of personal scripture that I carry tenderly around inside me.

Here is another one like me, another who knows of Spirit as both a quest and a place to rest, a journey and a destination. In offering me a glimpse of her heart, she gives me a new way of understanding myself, and of knowing a little holiness.

I give thanks. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.