Guided by Spirit Not Driven by Ego - Part 1
“The important point of spiritual practice is not to try to escape your life, but to face it — exactly and completely.” Dainin Katagiri Roshi
My two sisters and I changed into dresses and donned our little chapel caps and biked over to the local Catholic Church. It was Saturday, the day we always went to confession. I would enter the small dark booth knowing that as I knelt down a little light would go on over the door letting people know that someone was inside. The first time I ever went to confession Raymond Wolf, the troublemaker of our class, went up and down up and down on the kneeler knowing that it would make the little light flash on and off and bring the nuns scurrying up to see what was amiss. I chuckled to myself thinking about it. Waiting for the priest to open his side of the door I could hear low mumbling but no matter how hard I listened I could not make out the words. As I waited I practiced my lines “Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been a week since my last confession.” The little door slid to the right and all that was between us was a thick mesh to give us the impression of anonymity. I started “I lied to my Mom three times. I hit my brother once.” Sometimes I made up sins so I would have something to tell him. The priest absolved me “in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit” and gave me a penance. The little door slid closed and I would shuffle out of the confessional. Not meeting anyone’s eyes I would go back to the pews and say my six Hail Mary’s, two Our Fathers and sometimes if the priest was in a bad mood, an entire rosary. Jumping on our bikes we would head back home with clear consciences and clean souls.
The next morning we would begin our Sunday rituals. Leaving the house hungry - for we had to fast before getting Communion - we would head to Mass.
A stop at the the donut shop on the way home where we always purchased a dozen donuts - perfect for a family of six, two each. My favorites were the jelly donuts and the ones covered in peanuts. Once home we ate breakfast and read the Sunday comics stretched out on the living room floor, each of us with a page that we shuffled around and traded until we all had read every piece. Back in the 60’s and early 70’s stores were not open on Sundays. Sunday was the “day of rest” so we were not expected to go shopping or do any hard labor. I clearly remember how shocked we were when the first stores began opening their doors on Sundays at first for only a few hours and then eventually just as they did for every other day of the week.
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When I went to college I continued to go to church for quite awhile. They had a more progressive church in my college town and I enjoyed going. It gave me some structure to my spiritual growth and God and prayer still gave me comfort when I was hurting. I remember very distinctly, having broken up with a long time boyfriend, going to the church in the middle of the week, something I hardly ever did. I sat in one of the pews and cried and cried. I prayed for him to take me back, I prayed for the strength to get over him if he did not. I prayed for happiness and love. One of the young priests approached me and asked if he could help. I said no and he left me alone but just having someone ask made me feel better. Once I was out of college and living on my own I went to church less and less. Although we were married in a Catholic Church neither your Pop nor I were particularly religious. I had wanted to be married in our backyard as I had planned from the time I was in third grade but was told the Catholic Church did not allow it. This hit me kind of hard. It was probably the first time I really thought about what being religious and what being spiritual really meant. The “rules” didn’t make sense to me anymore. My marriage and the decision to have children got me to really thinking about how I wanted to raise my children. Catholic? Perhaps but more importantly I wanted to raise them to be spiritual. To understand that there is something bigger than all of us. But, how to do that?
I believe there is a big difference between being religious and being spiritual and I believe there are a lot of religious people who are not spiritual and a lot of spiritual people who are not religious. Over the years I have come to believe that spirituality is one of the most important things to develop in myself and it is a path that for me has taken a lifetime and I am still working on it.
First I started thinking about myself, how I was raised and what being raised Catholic meant to me? Did being raised with a specific religion help me become a spiritual person or did I become a spiritual person in spite of my strict religious upbringing? I had no idea. What I did know is that believing in something bigger than myself had helped me get through a lot of hard times. I believed in prayer. I believed in putting out good karma by being kind and thoughtful. I believed that what goes around comes around. I believed in the afterlife. I believed that we were not humans having a spiritual experience, but that we were spiritual beings having a human experience.