Sharon Salzberg, a seasoned teacher and author on meditation and grief, said “Do not make the mistake of thinking of the traumas of your life as gifts. They are givens.”  Suffering has and always will be a part of the human experience. These events that we all face weren’t masterminded by some benevolent force to prepare us for future storms, as if to suggest they will be a net positive event in our lives. Sometimes things just happen. No rhyme. No reason. But we can imbue those events with purpose and meaning if we can heal enough to move past them, embolden our character with the lessons learned, and help others walk through similar circumstances.

In November 2017, I lost my father to suicide after 3 very hard years of hospitalization for a particularly unrelenting season of bipolar depression. In the next twelve months I would also go on to experience the hardest breakup of my life and an ACL tear that rendered me immobile for a period of time. The months and years since have included countless therapy sessions, tears, and mental health challenges as one might imagine would follow such a string of events. However, a totally unexpected and absolutely essential byproduct was a total reconstruction of my spiritual worldview to process and make sense of all that had happened. 

I wasn’t new to the classic quandary of “why do bad things happen to good people” in my Christian faith up until that point. I had also given more sermons than a vast majority of people my age, so I felt pretty well equipped to avoid the trappings of commonly misinformed interpretations of the Bible that promise a comfortable and pain-free life as a result of following “God’s plan.” However, my worldview under this ideology still did not have an adequate model for suffering. And frankly, it felt like the rules I was told to follow weren’t just not helping me, they were actually hindering me from recovery and finding full life. Quite simply, my God wasn’t BIG enough. After my father passed, something in my body wouldn’t let me go back to my old church. Part of that was just needing time to rest my body and mind before tackling such large philosophical ideas that were tied up in trauma, but part of it was needing to ask bigger questions, that just would never be a part of a regular Sunday morning curriculum. I found myself drawn to meditation and mindfulness, and redefining my own understanding of who or what I even am. From an ego centric “soul” waiting for an absent God to intervene in tragedy (or at least absent in regards to the incarnation of God in the world as it had been explained to be at every church I had ever been to), to a free and conscious being that feels more union with the divine than separation.

Romantic Age poet William Blake said, “Jesus Christ is the only God. And so am I. And so are you.” Another favorite quote that one of my recent influences Pete Holmes likes to say is “Christ IS what’s looking out your eyes right now.” Jews wouldn’t speak the name of God, “Yahweh”, not because it was too sacred, but because to speak the word is to make it something that is other, that is separate from you. If you whisper yah as you inhale and weh as you exhale, you will hear that this name, this divine entity, is the sound of your breath. It isn’t a Burger King king in the sky that gave you your breath. It IS your breath. Your life force. You.

Now, I don’t care what words you use to describe the great mystery happening around us, if you even like to use any at all. And I can genuinely say that I feel absolutely no compulsion or dogmatic obligation to make you into a carbon copy of me with my newfound beliefs. I DO however, hope to share some intriguing ideas about whatever all of this swirling around us might be as well as some healthy ways to process the tough emotions that accompany the storms that lie both behind and ahead of us all.