Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

It would be fascinating, wrote Evelyn Underhill, in “The Spiritual Life,” to know what meaning any person at the present moment is giving these three words – A Spiritual Life.

Countless people use them, she writes. But very few know what they mean. That is true of me as well, at least most of the time.

“Many, I am afraid,” she wrote, “would be found to mean something very holy, difficult, and secular,” a sort of honors course in personal religion, to which most didn’t intend to have.

I understand that I am one of the people she is writing about. She often talks right to me, so I know I’m in the right place.

For some years, I have been on my journey for faith to see spiritually, as some first needed to be about exploring my soul, using meditation, silence, study, reading, thinking, and authenticity. In recent months, I realized it’s time to move past my identity and into something bigger, as Underhill prophesied.

She wrote that both these kinds of individualists—the people who think of the spiritual life as something that is before and about themselves—need a larger horizon within which these interesting personal facts about their identity can be placed, understood, and seen in a more actual proportion. That’s me, too. I think I have always imagined my life; perhaps that’s what made it happen.

I’m reading other books by mystics – my choice of something bigger.

The mystics almost all write that any spiritual idea that puts the human creature with its small ideas and adventures in the center foreground is dangerous until we recognize its absurdity. Something that rings so true —if you watch the news for one hour—can fill my head with junk, an almost violent kind of social shit (apologies, Evelyn).

My friends are all keen to go to war against what they see as the cruelty and danger happening in our country.  They are angry and frightened and righteous.

But I am not strong enough or eager enough to go there. I spent some years with my mental illness and terror before finally being shrinked for decades, and then was diagnosed as living on the Spectrum. I’ve learned to live with it and grow with it, but whenever I hear my friends rage and tremble, I feel I’m being been sucked right back into it.  It’s not what I wish to do with my life in the remaining years.

Mysticism is my way out of all this hatred and coldness. It is a faith in reality and individuality; like the universe, it is grand and endless. For me, it’s a spiritual gold rush.

I used to get bogged down in fantasy and imagination to escape my life, but now I can go there openly as a new kind of religion, one I can fit into naturally. I see myself in the mirror when I read about the odd and longer mystics. Only oddballs who always seem alone, unable, and unwilling to get inside can get in.

All of the mystics I know were strange; probably all would have made it onto the Spectrum in a blink. I’ve been forced by fear and unhappiness into creativity and writing, the place I wanted to be in, but never could get out of my head. How curious the world works.

That’s my place, my country, a space big enough for anyone’s imagination without being choked by politicians, bigots, and religious dogma. That’s my next step.

I am called to at least try to escape the petty notions of people whose imaginations and ambitions are mostly about surviving our harsh and greedy world without money to get to dying. I can’t look at the news without feeling sad, and I couldn’t go there if I wanted to. There has to be something better than that. I’m going to look for it. I may already have found it.

I thought of myself when Underhill wrote that “so many Christians are like deaf people at a concert. They study the program carefully, believe every statement made in it, speak respectfully of the quality of the music, but only hear a phrase now and then.” She could have been speaking of most organized religions.

It was time, I thought, to stop being deaf to what Underill calls “the mighty symphony which fills the universe” and is destined to make their tiny contribution, which is the self-expression of the Eternal God, the one that lives inside of each of us.

I’m looking through a new lens in my head, just as I am doing in my photography, putting aside (trying) the blather, chaos, and cruelty and looking through an actual wide-angle lens of disinterested worship. I want to bring into sharper focus my qualities, desires, fantasies, talents,  and compassion, as much as I can, blur everything else.

I’m excited about it. I feel as if I’ve walked through another door and started another journey without limits that will push me to the wonderful, even Divine world.

Thanks once again for coming along on the ride.