The long and winding road of spiritual progress in this life is the path of seekers of God in Daydreaming on the Porch

The spiritual life is a long and winding road, for sure, with many twists and turns, dead ends and forked paths.

But steadily following the main road will bring you to the place where the veil is lifted, and you see the beauty and truth of the discovery that “the journey is the destination.” It has always been and continues to be.

In my journal writing and correspondence with others over a period of almost 50 years, I have written about my spiritual journey, one that has been fitful at best, but which is finally reaching a more mature stage as I have entered old age.

Twenty-four years ago in my journal from May 14, 1999, I recorded these thoughts:

“My paper journals from years back used to sit in boxes unread sometimes for years until I started this online journal. Now I find myself going back over them and trying to uncover clues as to why I am the way I am today, how I’ve become the person I am, and how I’ve changed or not changed over the past 30 years. It is a daunting task.

“I realize I wrote pretty selectively about myself in those past journals, as I’m doing now with this one, but still, it’s all I care to reveal at this point.

“My first journal was written in a black ledger book with lined pages, starting in 1970 when I was in my freshman year of college. A few days ago, I wrote about a journal entry from 1971 in that ledger journal, concerning my observations of a family at a bus stop in New Orleans. I noticed how similar my writing style was then to what it is now, and how I could easily record just such an entry in my online journal today. The same things fascinate me, and I’m comfortable with my writing style. I don’t feel the need to go off on wild experiments with language, sentence, structure, or syntax manipulation for a literary effect. My object is to get my point across as clearly as I can.

“What has changed about me are some deeply personal things, such as the way I generally avoid writing about, or exploring, aspects of my spiritual journey. When I was recovering from depression in 1979, I realized that I could no longer continue to put off the question of religion in my life. I had been away from any organized system of beliefs for many years, since before high school, and I was swept up in my 20s with youthful preoccupation with just about everything, except those things that matter most in life. I was young and too wrapped up in my journalism career to deal with whether to join a church, or whether or how I should seek God (I had been brought up in the Presbyterian and Lutheran Churches).

“That depressive illness, however, smacked me in the face with the realities of death, evil, manipulation and paranoia, and caused all my previous, shaky foundations of self to crumble, so that I was alone on a windswept field (literally at one point, years later), struggling for answers to why I had experienced what I had gone through and how I could it even begin to explain the emotional turmoil that had raced over me like a firestorm at the beginning of that episode of depression.

“The only answers I could find came from the church and from reading the works of spiritual writers and guides who, a year or so before, I would not have a imagined could have had such a profound impact on me.

“It was a gradual conversion, not a blazing epiphany one night. As I found peace again in the aftermath of that months-long emotional storm, I honestly felt my life guided and directed. That is how I got a teaching job in 1980, after I had been floundering about concerning what to do with my life, and, despite the fact that I had no teaching certificate or previous training. This teaching job lasted for three years. I joined a church, I went to classes, and I read and prayed daily.

“Then in 1983, I left the teaching job and embarked on a series of misadventures and failed work experiences that laid the groundwork for my next fall, years hence. But a foundation of faith was built permanently those many years ago, and nothing can change that.

“Progress has been stalled by my stubbornness. Seemingly intractable inner conflicts, which I have alluded to in my journal, and which caused me much pain, keep me hovering along the coast, just offshore from the safe Harbor. I know it’s there. What prevents me from going in? It’s a very complex and intricate story, as most faith and spiritual journeys are, and I keep adding chapters when I know, deep down, how to satisfy the longing in me.

“I don’t know where it will take me, this journey across the seemingly endless plateau of the present, but the pain of recent suffering has subsided, and I’m putting together the pieces of the mystery once again. Sometimes when coming out of church, I see the flowers just outside, and the sunlight on the roofs and houses in old Charleston, and I think of what might be, and I have fleeting moments of deep spiritual insight, but they tend to disappear, like dreams once you awaken.”

Twenty years before I wrote the above, I recorded this in my journal on April 24, 1980, when I was 29. I was immersed in Catholicism to which I had converted in 1980. That part of my spiritual path was to last only a few years, as I left because it was no longer a viable option, for many reasons, but it did set me on a radically different path than the one I had been bumbling along all my life prior to my depression and religious conversion.

This entry, written 44 years ago, provides a glimpse into the seeker of God I was becoming. I will not say I was devout at that point, but coming closer to it certainly than I had ever been before.

“I guess the term “spiritual dryness” expresses the feeling well enough. It comes upon me when I dwell upon my difficulties, or decisions which I must make, which seem to be centered on my well-being alone. I have had more time to myself now that I have left my job, and will be concentrating on school for the next few months. It is a confusing period, though..

“I look for and need graces from God, not only so that I may know more of Him and the supernatural order of things, but that I also may know why it is that I long for those graces.

“Sometimes it seems that I am inert in my spiritual progress, flung about here and there by caprices and unpredictable circumstances, trying to be content with explaining this away as the inevitable process of God’s will for me. But then I say, how do I come to this conclusion when I have so little real faith?

“At this time of Spring with its renewal and rebirth, when all is green and alive again after a barren winter, I should be rejoicing in the newness around me. And I am. From my balcony overlooking the woods, I watch the trees as they cloak themselves in rich, new green. On Thomas Jefferson’s “little mountain” near Charlottesville, Virginia, recently, and later amidst the serenity and delicate Spring colors of Dumbarton Oaks Garden in the middle of Washington, DC, I sensed the presence of God and knew that the special feelings of awe and reference I felt beholding such beauty as was before me, could not spring for my naturalistic and materialistic, perceptions and desires alone. I am learning to see God in Nature because there is such order and grandeur, such sense of purpose there. But how much more difficult is it to see Christ in other human beings, to the extent that we love them as we do ourselves. That is so much more difficult because loving others involves a response or action toward them, as well as sacrifice, while Nature is neutral and objective, and we cannot reach as deeply into her as we can the soul of a person.

“I must also ask, what among my actions, desires, and inclinations constitutes a really charitable response to others? My own grievous ineptitude and intransigence in this area causes me continual concern. Fear of disrupting my own well-being hinders me mightily.

“Our actions should go far beyond meeting, obligations, or justifiable ends, and into the realm of purposeful and caring response to others. I missed an opportunity to show my concern yesterday in a most unusual circumstance that was a clear test for me. I did not meet it well, and for that I am truly sorry, for myself, and for the other person.

“I’ve been reading the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux. She writes: “This is how God looked after me. He cannot always offer me the nourishing bread of outward humiliation, but from time to time he left me the crumbs under the table of the children. How great is his mercy.” And, she cites the words of St. John of the Cross: “All good things come to me, since I no longer seek them for myself.”

Moving forward to the present, June 2023, I have been commenting back and forth with another writer about her own spiritual journey that she has written about in a series of letters to a friend and which she posted online for others to read and comment on.

What resulted was a most revealing and insightful glimpse into the spiritual progress of one individual, younger than myself, who has clearly articulated her beliefs. In some ways it reminded me of what I had written in my journal four decades ago.

I commented: “This is a remarkably candid and searching first letter to JG exploring the origins of your faith journey, and also its shaky twists and turns as your spiritual path opens up to you in ways you are not even aware of, and later even baffled by.

“The description of your family’s religious inclinations and practices when you were young was quite interesting because, I think, a majority of Christian parents were, and are, like your parents — obviously more than nominally Christian, but, as you wrote, ‘…faith wasn’t at the center of our lives then. God was real, but He wasn’t what I would call a constant presence…’

“I think it’s quite rare in the busy, endlessly distracted lives we live for even retirees like myself to have God at the center of our lives, and to experience Him as a constant presence. What does this even mean? That our every thought, word and action is vetted by our constant looking back over our shoulder to see what “Jesus would do,” think, or model in response to every given situation involving our lives, and the poor choices and decisions we often make?

“I always tended to think only the saints, mystics, monks and gurus were capable of truly immersive faith, meditation, and the daily quest to not only find God but seek to be one with the source of our being and the creator of the universe. I saw these persons as so deeply devout, disciplined, and even beyond comprehension, that I considered them to be a distinct type of enlightened being, not anything like me at all. That was when I was younger. I now realize this is an incorrect view. Ordinary mortals can be saints, mystics, and spiritual leaders.

“As I have advanced in age, my spiritual path became clearer, even as it continued to twist and turn and run into dead ends. I still struggle with my faith, but I have more clarity about the place and role of Christianity in the vast scheme of things that are most important to us human beings.

“I have always been the type of person who, thankfully, used, and continues to use, his mind as much as he could, while at the same time being aware of his limitations and shortcomings. That included a voracious appetite for reading, and a deep curiosity about all forms of knowledge and experience including religion, belief systems, ancient wisdom traditions, psychology and parapsychology, art, humanities, science and history, and how finally, nearing the end of life, I see how all of this is interrelated and how we are integral parts of creation and the working’s of God’s limitless universe.

“Thankfully, I am no longer afraid to explore areas where other Christians may fear to tread because it upsets their tidy and complete, end-of-inquiry belief system and proscribed way to living. To me that’s very sad. I believe completely in lifelong learning, and exploring paths that may diverge for a time from the central winding path we are all on.

“This is a key passage in your essay, and I want to say a few things about it.

…I can’t know for sure if things would have unfolded differently…What I do know is nothing happens by accident, and there are no coincidences. I can see as I look back how God worked to bring me through pivotal waypoints on my life path to bring me to where I am now…

My reaction to what she wrote, reads as follows: “Anyone who has read any of my journal entries on depression that I sent you, will see how God is, by choice, and later by circumstances, absent in my life in the midst of the worse struggles and mental suffering imaginable. I was at those times capable of very little mental activity, and had only minimal powers of concentration left, let alone the mental resources for contemplating what God was doing in my life, and what He could do to help pull me out of an ever-widening downward spiral.

“But as I emerged miraculously into a world transformed by the buzzing life and beauty of Spring back in 1979, I entered at that point a remarkable three-year stage of spiritual and religious growth. This gave me my first real knowledge of God as an adult (I was 28 at the time), and what the constant presence of God in my life could, and even would, be.

“God does work at pivotal “waypoints” to urge us forward as we seek to come closer to Him and discover what our lives and purpose are in the fullest and most complete sense.

I later sent her these further thoughts:

“All the striving for worldly success, power, even temporal ‘happiness’ is ultimately futile, though it may bring a short-lived sense of personal victory or achievement.

But my happiness was never found in the outward trappings of life, and in materialistic ambition. It was found in the love of family, friends and those strangers who seem to have been destined to cross our paths here on Earth.

And for me also, it is found in the unending beauty, mystery and complexity of Nature, which we humans have put at great peril. We have not been good stewards of the Earth’s resources, and this is why there is so much poverty and suffering in the world. But God has provided the path away from this temporal unhappiness and suffering. We must strive in whatever way we can to make this Earth a better place to live. And our work, careers, free time, retirements all have a place in this goal to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

More and more the devotionals from Unity Ministries and the writings of Henri Nouwen have been guiding me along my late-in-life spiritual path, along with many other writers and schools of religious and spiritual thought.

These words from Unity express what true freedom involves:

In everyday life, it’s easy to identify with my earthly roles—parent, sibling, employee, volunteer—and remember these are only part of my life. I am foremost a divine being, a living expression of God. This truth frees me and lifts me above the concerns and obligations of daily life. 

“I feel free as I release myself from my expectations of what I should do or be. This perspective liberates me. As I live from my divinity, I see myself as in the world but not of it. 
Now unencumbered, I direct my attention to what really matters—freedom to breathe, connect with God, and be nurtured by the calming energy of nature. The roles and rules of the world may continue, but I am not bound to them. I am free.

When the great writer, Victor Hugo, was past eighty years of age he gave expression to his religious faith in these sublime sentences:

>I feel in myself the future life. I am like a forest which has been more than once cut down. The new shoots are livelier than ever. I am rising toward the sky. The sunshine is on my head. The earth gives me its generous sap, but Heaven lights me with its unknown worlds.

“You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of the bodily powers. Why, then, is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses as at twenty years. The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.