My foot had become so painful that I was becoming nauseaus. I had gone to the podiatrist and had come down to my car. The church next to the medical building's sunday service was called, "I am the Way the Truth and the Life". It brought tears to my eyes. It took me back to my boyhood church and the church I considered part of my family. When the church and I parted ways because I was too 1960s and my friend was kicked out of the church for playing in a rock'n roll band that opened for "Chicago" at the L.A. Forum we stayed friends throughout our lives and went to India and Nepal and climbed many mountains together in the U.S.
I thought back to how I was in my 20s and tried a couple of times to join other churches and found I just wasn't suited to that because I just wasn't traditional enough and just too much a Californian and very experimental in Asian and New age ideas in addition to being a Mystical Christian. However, a part of me longed for the extended family that churches often bring.
However, I was through being burned by churches by the time I was 30. I decided to never again join a church. This didn't mean I stopped my spiritual path. I studied with Medicine men and women, Tibetan Lamas, East Indian Swamis. This path worked for me but in some ways I found it a much more lonely path than my early mystical Christian upbringing. However, I just found I couldn't be contained in small concepts of the universe. I needed to be able to communicate with educated people and people of all kinds worldwide. And I found that the small minded and closemindedness of belonging to a church prevented that for me. For some of you can do both but this didn't work for me. And so I find myself sad now at age 60 to have my wife and kids but no longer do I have a formal church. However, if one is not true to oneself one can never be true to God and Life.
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