The Spiral Staircase: Where This Blog (and My Spiritual Path) Is Going

I've been on a "long and winding road" for the past....well, my entire life, really. But Until I was 33 years old (I could see that number as a cosmic coincidence, but I don't) I was not on any clearly established trajectory of my own making. I was just floating along, going where the wind blew me. (In another blog post sometime in the future, I might explain why I don't even believe that random trajectory was truly random. Maybe you'll figure it out yourself as you read more of my blog entries.) 

But in year 33 things changed. It was a personally and spiritually cataclysmic year for me. I had come to the end of myself in a variety of ways, which caused me to do some serious re-assessment of my life, my purpose, and my theretofore non-existent path. 

In my search for meaning and purpose, I explored Buddhism for a while. It didn't have all the answers I was looking for, so I never took the plunge which would have set me on that path alone. I rejected the idea of returning to the religious tradition of my culture and upbringing (Christianity), because I believed I'd "been there and done that," and hadn't found what I was looking for there either. 

Then I stumbled upon Joseph Campbell's audio series, "Transformations of Myth Through Time," which was a sort of historical survey of the major religious traditions of the world. My brain was set on fire. I listened to that series so many times I can't enumerate them. All that is important about that is this: Joseph Campbell set me back on a spiritual path which began with the religious tradition of my culture and upbringing.

What he said that caused this about-face in my spiritual life was something like this: No one can fully grasp any religious tradition outside of the one in which we have been culturally immersed since birth, because every religious tradition is made up of symbols unique to our own culture. While it is true that there are universal archetypal symbols that transcend all religious traditions, we can't really understand those until we truly understand our own cultural symbols. 

This made sense to me, and even felt like a life-ring thrown to a drowning person from a rescue boat. I grasped onto it and allowed myself to be drawn back to the religious tradition of my cultural upbringing: Christianity. (That is a long story, and one that may be revealed piecemeal throughout the course of these blog entries, so I'm not going to tell it all here and now--subscribe to my blog and become a "follower" if you want to get more installments in this story.)

So I went back to the Christian tradition, starting in the United Methodist Church (since that's where I left off), then going to a Foursquare church, and then a Calvary Chapel before finally returning to the United Methodist Church (UMC), where I am extremely content and satisfied. I am not stagnant there, however, because the church I am a member of and the pastor of that church are not stuck in a biblical reality that stopped growing 2000 years ago. In fact if the UMC that I am a member of was not so progressive, I would likely have moved on to the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church by now. 

(One of the reasons that I have not joined the UUs and am so content in the UMC I belong to is that it bears a striking similarity to the UU church, the only real difference being that Jesus is the way in which the Universe is experienced and revealed, rather than all of the great religious traditions. Having said that, the UMC I belong to is extremely tolerant of and un-threatened by the Universal truths revealed through all religious traditions. Though Jesus and the Bible are what is preached from the pulpit and and taught in Sunday School and Bible studies, it is not all that is explored, shared and discussed by its members, and we are not admonished for having curious minds. If a day ever arrives where that ceases to be the case, I'll join the UUs.)

The new spiritual path on which I embarked 13 years ago set me on a renewed journey through the Bible. For eight years I read the Bible faithfully every single day (two Old Testament books, one New Testament book, one Psalm, and one Proverb). This took me through the Old Testament eight times in eight years, the New Testament 16 times, the Psalms 32 times, and the Proverbs 96 times. I have a pretty good grasp of what's in the Bible and what it means. 

That changed. I believe in the power of prayer. I further believe that every single thought we have is a prayer. As I began to wonder "What's it all about, Alfie?" around my 33rd birthday, looking for some meaning and purpose in my life, I "stumbled" upon Joseph Campbell, who set my feet on the next phase of my journey. Some would call that an answered prayer (I would): I asked for direction and received direction. 

Then I got bold in my prayers. I asked for understanding. What's more, I wanted answers to the same questions countless millions have asked over the countless millenia of human existence: Why is there evil? How can a just and loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? Etcetera, and so on. But I didn't just ask for answers, I asked for understanding. 

I started to understand. Every trip back through the Bible revealed new things I had not noticed or grasped before. Example: when I began working on my Masters degree in Native American Studies (NAS), I began to notice similarities between the books of Genesis and Revelation. Native American cultures and spiritual understandings are rooted in a cyclical reality, which is ubiquitously represented by the "sacred circle." As I began a new trip through Genesis and Revelation after beginning my NAS coursework, I began to understand that the book of Revelation is not a story of ending, it is a story of completion. Genesis describes the beginning of one cycle of creation. Revelation describes the completion of one cycle of creation. 

At first I saw this cycle as a circle, and was disappointed: does that mean we're all on some cosmic merry-go-round? But on the next trip through the Bible I saw the cycle differently: a spiral. For whatever reason I made the connection on this second trip of understanding cycles back to John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." It occurred to me that a circle is the view of a spiral from either the top or the bottom--from that angle I cannot see the height or depth of it, only the one-dimension of either top or bottom. But if I change my perspective just a little bit, I can see the path I've been on (the spiral below) or the path I'm headed toward (the spiral above). 

This is still an extremely simplistic way of looking at the "spiral staircase," but my point is this: if I am always looking at things from the same perspective, never adjusting my perspective with new understanding, the view gets old.  I believe this is what Isaiah and Jesus meant when they said, "Learn, learn, but never understand; you see, but you do not perceive." 

Unfortunately, I didn't "understand" or "perceive" this difference when I stopped reading the Bible every day about 5 years ago. On trip #9 through the Bible, nothing was making sense anymore. Passages that had comforted me in the past no longer comforted me. Things I thought I understood no longer made sense. I did not lose my religion, but I did lose any sense that reading the Bible over and over again was doing me any good. My understanding of God (who I now refer to as the Universe, or the Creator) had evolved, but it seemed to me that I had gleaned all of the understanding the Bible had to offer me. 

I experienced a crisis. Not because I had stopped reading the Bible (although my still somewhat superstitious mind had to be continually reminded of this), but because not only did the Bible not seem to "speak" to me as it had in the past, but prayer and the spiritual practices of Christianity no longer seemed to "work" for me as they had previously. Nothing had really changed, except that my familiar and comfortable guideposts were no longer communicating anything meaningful to me anymore. I had no explanation for this. 

Fast forward...After a five year hiatus from the Bible I experienced another crisis. This time it was not spiritual, it was physical and came in the form of a major rift in a family relationship. There was one thing about this experience that was familiar, though: I found myself asking why, when I was doing all of the "right" things, was this happening to me? 

This turned out to be the right question, because I immediately started finding answers in the forms of every book I randomly selected from the public library, and every movie that I received through Netflix. I also would go through my book shelves looking for a book to read, only to find a book that I'd read before but forgotten about. I re-read "Women Who Run With the Wolves," "The Chronicles of Narnia," and "Harry Potter," all of which had pieces of answers to my questions. The books from the library and the movies I watched underscored these themes. Finally, all of the answers that I received led me back to the Bible ("how" is a much longer answer than I care to go into in this blog post, which is already too long).  

In short, I got all of the answers I wanted to the question I had asked. Believing that thoughts are prayers, I understood that this was not a coincidence: Jesus said to "ask and you shall receive." I asked. I received. 

Today, I re-embarked on journey #9 through the Bible. It was a profoundly enlightening and satisfying experience. The cycle was completed, and this morning I began the next spiral in the cycle. Today's reading included Genesis 1, Psalms 1, Proverbs 1, and Matthew 1. The understanding I gleaned from today's reading was extraordinary, and I couldn't have gotten it if I had not taken the 5 year hiatus and broadened my reading material and horizons to other traditions.  I'll tell you what I discovered in the next blog post, if you care to find out.