Spirituality Without a Script

There was a period in my forties when I became frightened by what I felt growing inside me.

I was carrying an enormous amount of stress. I was angry. Not irritated. Not having a difficult week. Angry. There were moments when it felt closer to hatred, and I didn’t like what that was doing to me.

One night, I couldn’t carry it anymore.

I cried out to God.

I don’t remember having an eloquent prayer prepared. There was no carefully constructed spiritual language. I was overwhelmed by the darkness I felt inside myself and afraid of what would happen if I let it keep growing.

I needed help.

I needed to be saved from it.

What happened that night remains one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

And more than twenty years later, I still can’t tell you exactly what it was.

Something happened that night

I remember a divine presence lifting me from the floor.

I remember golden rays entering my body on both sides of my abdomen, just beneath my rib cage. I felt something I can only describe as pure light moving into me.

And then I remember the darkness coming out.

It was black. Thick. Almost like tar.

The golden light entered, and the darkness was pulled away.

Was I awake?

Was I dreaming?

Did I experience something divine?

I don’t know.

I can tell you that it felt real. I can tell you that the memory remains extraordinarily vivid. And I can tell you that when I woke the next morning, my abdomen was incredibly sore in the same area where I remembered those golden rays entering my body.

Make of that what you will.

I still do.

For a while, I felt different

For at least the next year, perhaps longer, I felt extraordinarily light.

Not physically. Something inside me felt lighter.

I felt connected. Good. Blessed. There was a sense of purity that is difficult to describe without making myself sound considerably more spiritually evolved than I have ever actually been.

But I felt it.

And for a while, I lived differently because of it.

If this were the kind of spiritual story we’re accustomed to hearing, I could end it there.

I called out to God.

God came.

The darkness left.

I was changed forever.

It’s a hell of an ending.

It just isn’t mine.

Life came back

Eventually, I lost my job.

Then my house.

My savings disappeared.

I moved to Virginia to be with George, and what followed was a long, extraordinarily difficult period of my life.

The lightness didn’t last.

Neither did the person I thought perhaps I had become.

Over the years that followed, depression became part of my life. Eventually there were three suicide attempts. I survived all three, including the last one, which involved a gunshot and a physical recovery so brutal that I still struggle to put parts of it into words.

So what happened to the golden light?

I’ve wondered that.

If something divine really happened to me that night, why wasn’t I permanently changed by it? Why wasn’t whatever had been taken out of me gone forever? How could someone feel that connected to something larger and later become so disconnected from life itself?

I don’t have a satisfying answer.

Maybe that’s part of why my spirituality no longer requires one.

I’ve tried a few scripts

I was raised Southern Baptist.

Later, in my thirties, I found my way into Wicca and nature magick, though God never actually left the picture.

Apparently my spiritual journey was not terribly concerned with brand consistency.

By my forties, I was attending a Unitarian church. Over the years, yoga and mindfulness became important to me too. So did nature. So did the idea that connection itself might be sacred.

Some beliefs stayed with me. Others didn’t. Some changed shape.

Today I believe in God. I believe in a higher power. But I don’t experience God as something existing only somewhere outside of us. I believe there is something divine within us and throughout what surrounds us. Whether someone describes that as spiritual connection, energy, God, the universe or something else entirely matters less to me than it once might have.

I believe we’re connected.

I don’t pretend I can explain exactly how.

And I’m increasingly comfortable with that.

For a while, I couldn’t speak

After my final suicide attempt, there was a period during my physical recovery when I couldn’t talk.

When you’re unable to participate in conversation the way you always have, you start noticing things.

At least I did.

I watched people.

I watched how they approached me. Their expressions. Their mannerisms. How they interacted with one another. What they said when they were uncomfortable. What they didn’t say. Who seemed genuinely present and who seemed to be somewhere else even while standing right in front of me.

I had spent much of my life communicating.

Suddenly, I was observing communication instead.

And somewhere in all of that watching, I became intensely aware of something I hadn’t thought about quite the same way before:

How does another person experience me?

Not what do they think of me.

Something different.

When someone finishes a conversation with me, what have I left behind?

Did I really listen?

Was I present?

Did I make them feel seen?

Was I kind?

Did I make their day a fraction lighter—or did I add weight to something they were already carrying?

For a while after my recovery, I was incredibly conscientious about those things.

I paid attention.

I tried to be fully present with people.

I understood in a way I hadn’t before that seemingly insignificant interactions can matter.

And then, eventually, I screwed that up too.

Apparently enlightenment has terrible retention rates

Life resumed.

Work got busy. Responsibilities returned. Stress returned. Irritation returned.

So did my temper.

I’ve said things I shouldn’t have said. I’ve been impatient. I’ve reacted when I should have paused. I’ve hurt people’s feelings. I’ve been selfish. I’ve been distracted while someone was talking to me. I’ve known exactly how I wanted to show up in the world and then behaved in a way that bore very little resemblance to that person.

This is particularly inconvenient when you have spent years studying mindfulness, teaching yoga, coaching people and thinking deeply about how human beings relate to one another.

I have had a divine experience.

I have also lost my shit.

Apparently both can be true.

For a long time, I think some part of me expected spiritual growth to work differently.

Learn enough.

Practice enough.

Heal enough.

Become self-aware enough.

And eventually perhaps I’d arrive at some upgraded version of myself who remained calm, connected, compassionate and wise under all circumstances.

I have yet to meet her.

Maybe being flawed isn’t evidence that we’ve failed

I’ve started wondering whether I had the whole thing backward.

Maybe spirituality isn’t supposed to remove my humanity.

Maybe the fact that I still get angry doesn’t mean I learned nothing from the darkness I lived through. Maybe losing my patience doesn’t erase the moments when I have been deeply present. Maybe becoming disconnected doesn’t mean the connection wasn’t real.

Perhaps these aren’t contradictions I need to resolve.

They’re parts of being human.

I believe kindness matters deeply.

I am not always kind.

I believe we should try to see one another fully.

Sometimes I’m too busy thinking about what I’m going to say next to really listen.

I believe we’re interconnected.

And occasionally another member of this interconnected universe leaves a mess for someone else to clean up and I have considerably less spiritual thoughts about them.

There it is.

Still human.

What I believe now

My spirituality doesn’t fit neatly into the tradition I grew up with, nor does it require me to reject everything that tradition gave me.

It contains God.

It contains questions.

It contains things I cannot explain.

It contains the experience of golden light entering my body one night and the memory of blackness being pulled away.

It also contains years when I couldn’t find that light at all.

It contains yoga and mindfulness. Trees. Water. Energy. Connection. Prayer. Gratitude. Doubt.

And increasingly, it contains something remarkably ordinary:

trying to be a good human being.

Not achieving it.

Trying.

That distinction matters to me.

Being good isn’t a permanent state I finally attain after enough spiritual development. I get another opportunity every time I’m with another person.

Sometimes I get it right.

Sometimes I realize afterward that I could have listened better, been gentler, paused longer or kept my damn mouth shut.

Then I get another opportunity.

I don’t need to explain the light

I still think about what happened that night in my forties.

There are explanations someone could offer me.

Spiritual ones.

Psychological ones.

Physiological ones.

I’m not particularly interested in arguing for one.

Something happened to me that I experienced as profound and sacred. It changed me.

And then I changed again.

Life did too.

Maybe that’s the part of spiritual transformation we don’t talk about enough.

We transform.

Then we forget.

We connect.

Then we disconnect.

We become incredibly conscious of how precious other human beings are.

Then someone annoys the shit out of us in the grocery store.

And we begin again.

I don’t know whether spiritual growth is supposed to lead somewhere. Maybe it does.

But at this point in my life, I’m less interested in becoming spiritually evolved than I am in remembering how I want to live.

I believe there is something divine within us.

I believe we’re connected.

I believe how we treat one another matters.

And I believe we’re going to screw that up sometimes because we’re human.

The question, for me, isn’t whether I can finally become the person who never does.

It’s whether I notice when I have—and whether I try again.

Maybe that’s my spirituality now.

No script.

Still God.

Still flawed.

Still trying.