If we awaken. Now.

Human development is a slow process that happens in stages of more or less regularity. We call them infancy, early childhood, pre-teen, adolescence, adulthood. As we move through one at a time, each of them a task from birth to death, we keep an eye on the charts that tell us what to expect in each.

 

Spiritual development, on the other hand, is slower than that. And not guaranteed.

 

Spiritual development depends on the way we deal with one phase of life after another—with whether we deal with them or not, in fact. There are no rule books to describe the process for us, no time charts, no defined hurdles to conquer—just one small internal mountain after another to reckon with.

 

The soul is tested from one challenge to another, from one experience to another, from one wisdom figure to another. Literature is full of figures who meet the obstacles of every stage and prevail. Or not. In the end, we begin to understand, our “lives” become what we ourselves fashion out of both those wins and those loses. Of which there are many.

 

My own development attests to them all. The death of a young father, the struggles of a young mother, the continuous reshaping of family, the shock and isolation of personal physical limitations, the discovery of the internal self—and the need to come to terms with its wretched character—the tenor of effects of life in the monastery, the meaning of “belief.”  Each of those chapters of life draws the contours of how life develops for everyone. And yet, though we all face the same kinds of questions, wrestle with the same attempts to avoid them—in the end we all face a series of trials, of tests, of triumphs.

 

The truth is that we each play the music of our lives in distinct and distinguishing ways. We can learn by listening to others, of course, but in the end, it’s not about the overarching melody of life so much; it’s not about someone else’s answers. No, it’s really more about the way we ourselves choose to play every single chord of it that will determine the sounds we leave behind for others to hear as they go.

As this book implies, for me those choices have returned again and again to three areas: the nature and place of God in life, the meaning of spirituality in a secular culture, and the demand to understand what it means to be a woman. In a man’s world, in a man’s definitions, in a man’s church.

Those chords—the presence of God, the call to spiritual insight, and the rejection of sexism—have carried me through life. I have run into walls, not bridges, to those ideas everywhere, yes, but there has also been a drumbeat of truth under all of it. In the face of every obstacle I heard the call of God to wake up, to speak out, to leave some melodies behind. Then, perhaps others could sing new songs of truth within them, too, so that generations to come might also wake up.

If we awaken. Now.