If we come with the will to understand. We will.
If we come with the will to deny and reject. We will.
What we want to see, we will see.
What we pray for, we create.
Over the past 15 years of deepening my spiritual path, here is what I have seen.
Seekers who reject religions, those who embrace one, and those who embrace them all. Spiritual people who are very intolerant of religions, religious people who are very biased towards spirituality. Different people but the same pain same fears. Just different ways of expressing it.
I have also met an incredible rabbi who sat in prayer with the priests and non-believers, pastors in the church who had us pray for Jews and Muslims, shamans who pray to Christ and Mother Mary, and atheists who came to mass to support their community.
I have met people who do not believe in any "spiritual" higher power but are angels in disguise, always in service to the greater collective, and capable of holding a love wider than most. I have also met spiritual practitioners full of tightness, conditional love filled with sarcasm, judgment, prejudice, and "know better" than others.
The seekers who embraced the diversity of humanity with kind, soft love could hear and see the Truth behind the dogmas and took the time to sit and understand the texts with open hearts and compassion.
They seemed to hold less pain, anger, judgment and more love and joy than others; they had a greater capacity to unite with their own unresolved pain and seek the good in everyone, from atheists to believers, from pastors to rabbis or imams. When I inquired and got to know them, I discovered that something powerful and profound had broken them, and they transformed into magnificent, humbled humans.
In today's world poised with individualism and over-activated nervous systems, and as we all carry unfinished work and pain, we must stay vigilant to our short reactions and deeply anchored beliefs, especially when those create elements of "othering" and separation. We must be even more attentive to places where empathy and compassion have left, where the mind's logic has taken over the heart's softness.
We cannot really say that we are spiritual, in the light, awakened, or awakening, if the belief of another human being, whatever this belief is, is taken as a hold to justify separation, judgment, power relating, denial, or oppression.
It's okay to not understand. It's okay to question. In fact, it is where the most troubled questions are, and the most evasive or impossible answers might keep us awake at night.
So yes, we might judge, but we shall hold the judgment in our places of self-inquiry and curiosity, places of sacred discovery, long paths of necessary turmoils where separation has taken root. We should use this to guide our path, expand our hearts, and humbly, slowly try to bring love into all the places our pain tells us to fear, reject, and harm. We must take the mystic's path into this great unraveling of the self. Our salvation depends on it.
As we do this more often, with more discipline and commitment, we will see how reconnecting to our pain and our capacity to love more than we ever thought possible will open our hearts and souls to an eclectic, often tricky, always messy, yet expanded family.
Grace will always flow more abundantly from that deep and more expansive well of relations; the Great Mystery will appear more often in unexpected places, and that, I believe, is the Truth that keeps us sobbing like babies at night.
We might never feel whole; we certainly won't feel perfect but shattered in that well of grief and grace, we will have found a home in our hearts.
❤️ Angell Deer
"Navigating Spiritual Landscapes: Beyond Conflict and Towards Unity"
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