P52 Week 5 - Inspired By

"It's not where you take things from, it's where you take them to." - Jean Luc Godard

I have taken my spirituality to a different place.

I was raised Catholic. I attended twelve years of parochial schools – the whole nine yards. I memorized healthy doses of the catechism. I learned about the ‘one true Church,’ the Pope’s infallibility, mortal and venial sins and the sacraments. I heard gruesome accounts of martyrdom, and how the devil tempts us all the time. I received punishment at the hands of a nun who rapped me on the skull with her silver ring and who called me insolent, impudent and cheeky for lying. Actually – that particular time – I was telling the truth.

Don’t get me wrong. There were many things I loved about my Catholic school experience. There were nuns and teachers who inspired me. Their influence led me to pursue medicine, to soak up literature, to begin to question and discern, and to listen soulfully. I loved the structure of my schooling: the Christian foundations of love and service and the educational discipline have served me well.

My first marriage was in the Church, but I never thought twice about using contraception. Long ago, I stopped going to Mass.  According to the Church, I have accrued many mortal sins for this lapse, but I don’t believe that, and I have felt no remorse.

Still, I have kept pieces of the Catholic tradition in my spiritual core. I loved its rituals, have felt in awe when receiving the transubstantiated body of Christ in Holy Communion. Now I also commune with the sun and the moon, with mountains and trees, and with the ocean – as I wrote about in a previous blog post a couple of weeks ago.

My heart soars with Church music. I have sung in choirs and still like to attend an occasional evensong and compline service, but I no longer limit my sense of the sacred to religious repertoire. I sense spirit moving in music of all kinds: from Roy Orbison to Pink, Mozart to Verdi, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole to Angélique Kidjo.

I have resonated with bible passages – the Wedding of Cana, the lilies of the field – but I have also found inspiration in the sacred texts of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist Eightfold Path and the poems of the Sufi mystic, Rumi. And I have appreciated religious figures like Thomas Merton and Paramahansa Yogananda who so beautifully bridged the commonalities of all faith traditions.

I have prayed the Our Father and St Francis of Assisi’s sweet supplication: ‘Oh Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace…’ but I have also found solace in the sayings of indigenous cultures and in quotes from secular literature. My prayers are now meditations, where I allow moments of silence to permeate my being, and where I sense the sacredness within and without my physical body.

I have explored the links between science and spirituality, between quantum physics and the energies of healing. I have studied neurobiology and somatic psychology and am captivated by the miracle of our own amazing physiology. At my core, I have felt the essential resonance of spirit in my physicality: my body is the final common pathway for how I experience the sacred.

I believe I have taken the underlying beautiful intent of the Catholic Church and run with it.

Inspired by a brilliant 5 year old artist, Iris Grace, who also happens to have autism.