1992 was a pivotal year in my personal spiritual
journey. Historically, it was the commemoration of the landing in
the Americas of Columbus and his three ships, which had devastating
results to our Native American way of relating to the natural
world. Politically, it was the year of the first international
meeting on the environment. Religiously, The World Council of
Churches declared justice, peace, and the integrity of creation as the
new Trinity for Christians. It was the year I discovered that
while my spiritual grounding is in Christianity, the traditional church
teachings no longer seemed relevant to my experience. Anglican
Bishop John Shelby Spong calls people like me, Exiles. Perhaps
some of you can resonate with that term. Exiles. It means
that the traditional faith we learned as children makes little sense to
our adult lives.
We know there is no separate Grandfather Almighty God
out there watching over us. We know that good and bad things
happen, and we reject the idea that God somehow intervenes with good
for some and bad for others. Yet we still are unwilling to
abandon the teachings of Jesus. Especially those that speak about
how the realm of god is all around us if we just use our eyes and ears
and look and listen. Or the teaching that we should love our
enemies. So I began a long and varied journey. I began to
create ways for other religious Exiles like me to return to their
ancestral roots, whether Native American, African, or European (Celtic)
and listen to the natural world for a revelation of the nature of the
Creator, and even of the Christ. I studied feminist
theology. And I discovered the work of the Jesus Seminar, which is
a group of scholars that is determining who Jesus was, and what he may
have actually said, and how the early followers of Jesus began to
define themselves and interpret what they remembered about him.
And I ventured into new millennium physics, where I learned that the
very nature of the universe is Relationship, even Communion.
