I was sitting in a room about the size of small bedroom. Within the confines of the empty room I could see clearly from the light of a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.  Without warning the light bulb went out leaving the room completely dark. After several moments of being engulfed in what seemed a suffocating  void, I began to notice a small glow coming from a window. The first traces of dawn were breaking. I realized to my immense relief that soon the room would be flooded with a light much more intense and complete than the light bulb had provided.
Call it a waking dream, a subconscious message to myself, whatever you like. But at the time it seemed to be a vision, perhaps from God. And I had immediately understood its meaning as though the words had been spoken:
“You have seen the universe as though lit by a dim light bulb. That is about to change. The artificial light is being deliberately extinguished so that you can see with the much more powerful light of the truth.”
Now wait, don’t go running for the exits yet! Notice I didn’t hear that I was going to receive the truth. My vision only suggested that I had been seeing through a very limited mindset. My mind was being opened to new possibilities, truths that I had refused to accept to that point.
This vision has worked itself out in dramatic and completely unexpected ways over the last 15 years. I doubt that a person called God personally dialed me up and sent me this message. But I do believe that a part of me had reached a threshold in my quest for spirituality. It was like hearing my voice change in adolescence. Over a fairly short period of time I went from sounding like a child to sounding at least a little like a man. It wasn’t conscious, but all of the building blocks were there to transform me from one stage of life to another.
Such it was, I believe, with this vision. My mind, my spirit, my soul: whatever it is that makes me uniquely human, had reached a point of transformation. The difference is that I did not see this coming. Physical changes happen to everybody and are predictable. But changes in how we experience spirituality vary greatly from person to person, and sometimes those changes do not occur, are very subtle, or are suppressed over the course of a lifetime. Many people experience epiphanies when they attend college and are removed from the self-reinforcing cocoon of the community in which they were raised. I did not go off to college and exchanged one cocoon for another similar one.
In my case, my lifelong identity as a committed fundamentalist Christian was about to be radically altered. I began to question everything I had ever known about God, Jesus, the old testament, the new testament, the apostles. It’s not that I hadn’t asked questions before. But I always accepted the answers as explained by Bible scholars, with the Bible being the inerrant word of God. There is a circular logic in answering questions about Christianity by stipulating the absolute authority of Christianity’s handbook. So I started asking questions and seeking answers through other sources with surprising results.
I will share some of those results at a later time in this forum. But the overall effect has been “constructive” disillusionment. The imagery associated with my “vision” clearly illustrated the real meaning of disillusionment: the loss of an illusion. Some illusions may be necessary for our survival. But others prevent us from seeing the much bigger picture. I had the illusion that I was one of God’s chosen who was predestined for salvation. Christianity, and especially my wing of it, held the true answers for all of humanity. Unfortunately most of the poor saps were in deep trouble because they didn’t know they had to say some magic words (and really mean them) that would let them enter into the kingdom. Oh well, I’d get to spend eternity with a kind benevolent God who took mercy on me when I (like all of humanity) had no intrinsic value whatsoever. Lucky me! Too bad for them.
Of course, I never really felt that way exactly. I just didn’t know what to do. If God didn’t open the eyes of the Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, Baha’i, Gaia and Catholics there was nothing I could do about it. Oh yeah, the Catholics. Well, you see, the Catholics had special problems. Some of them were going to sneak through the door because they did know something about the magic words. But they also had embraced pagan practices and worshipped Mary (isn’t praying to somebody a kind of worship?). Now I have to say that I had grown out of that particular prejudice in my mid-twenties. I had been good friends with some Catholics who seemed much more in tune with God than my fundamentalist friends. But that prejudice isn’t uncommon among fundamentalists. … And we think Shia vs Sunni is hard to understand when both are Muslim.
If my descriptions seem a caricature, it is somewhat deliberate. It seemed that way to me, too. My identity was interwined with my relationship with God through Jesus. I took my beliefs very seriously, even memorizing a whole book of the new testament (II Timothy) at one point. But one day I realized that when I boiled it all down and took my emotional attachment out of the equation, I couldn’t get much past the caricature. Not coincidentally that day was a short time after the light bulb imagery. At least I had been warned, though I had no idea at the time that this would be the result. It was inconceivable to me that I could go from a fervent believer to a skeptic in such a short time. That a system of beliefs that made complete sense to me, and for which I was a very able apologist, suddenly seemed like just another in a long, long line of attempts to make sense of the unknowable.
Though my fundamentalist illusion of security has long turned to ashes, I am still uncertain if it will ever really be replaced by a deeper understanding of the eternal. But I do believe that humans are intrinsically valuable. Some may be more valuable than others in the long run (the Dalai Lama vs Ted Bundy) . I am now willing to accept that I have no special truth and no special standing with God or whatever force drives the universe. Most of us are decent hard working people trying to make a place for ourselves and our offspring and maybe leave a legacy where future people remember us fondly.
Beyond that I know almost nothing. And that realization is, perhaps, the faint glimmer of dawn breaking.
Oh those Catholics…
Being a recovering Catholic myself, I really feel the need to comment on this post. Forgive me for my delay but I was a little busy with the Primary, Primary Runoff, & Local Elections these past couple of months.
First, I too had a very spiritual moment similar to yours on December 12, 2007. I was sitting outside disappointed with myself and I was trying to clear my mind though some basic meditation and breathing exercises. Since the sun was out, I closed my eyes and faced the sun. With my eyes close, soon I started to feel the sun get more intense on my face, then slowing start to surround me. My senses were hyper-attuned to the warm sun and then the intensity started increasing. My mind cleared and then one single thought ran through my head, “forgive yourself.”
That was my moment.
Secondly, by the very nature of the Catholic church, guilt and forgiving are two important emotional pillars by which the foundation of the Church is founded. Within every mass it is repeated, “It is by forgiving that we are forgiven.” Catholic dogma’s very essence is hinged on a power relationship between those who need to be forgiven and those who have the power to forgive. Guilt is the means to the end.
The idea of honoring Mary and Saints in the practice of Catholic faith is fundamentally about example. The stories of the Saints who were killed by the Romans in the Early Church are a way for the clergy and dogmatic elders to convey the message of what a good Catholic is meant to do in their lives.
Defend the faith at all cost- that is living the faith. Again, a line from the mass, “It is in dying that we are born.”
The Latin mass goes even further with this line…The Latin word used for “born” is not the same verb as being born by your mother which is assigned a feminine gender; this “born” is assigned a male gender indicating it is by its very nature a higher “birth.” The word is not used outside of Latin Catholic writing – high Latin if you will.
The Catholic church, while flawed on many levels, is an ever evolving movement of believers. Although I do not attend mass, I still think the the act of traditional worship and prayer is beautiful. I remain intrigued by the early history of the church and the translation of original documents. After Rome fell, the Catholic church galvanized power within the power vacuum that was created. Since I am a student of both the Roman Republic and Empire, I find it interesting to translate and read the generals’ and political leaders’ writing. Really, they hardly wrote about the Christians until about 300 AD (I’m old school).
Oh those Catholics…opportunists at best.