It IS all About the Journey, ya know.

I really DO NOT enjoy going tit for tat with anyone as far as religion and politics are concerned. Especially with someone who cannot see past their own nose. Apparently some Baptist preacher did a quick Google search ("all about the journey" spiritual blog ~according to my stat counter) and came up with my blog title and decided it would do to prove his point to a thorny commenter on his blog. Me, being who I am, cannot just let someone sling my blog around without any type of defense. So, here goes:


This is where preacher man, as I like to call him, is coming from:


"Your rescue from sin, death, and the wrath of God comes, not from inside of you, but from outside. Nothing that happens inside of you—no breakthrough, no epiphany, no resolution—can save you from your current situation. For that, you need something that happened outside of yourself, on a hill outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago..."




This is wrong on so many levels...I don't even feel like starting to go there. Don't get me wrong, this guy can write a convincing piece. I like his sense of humor and some of his ideas about life, but when it comes to religion, he and I are on two totally different planets. 

I cannot imagine that he's read the JOURNEY from the beginning of this blog to now before summing me up…or dare I say, “judging” me so quickly. He must have read the title, some old posts, and categorized me as the "college sophomore" with the “empty, vague, ‘all about the journey’ Spirituality” (I actually doubt he's even read any of my posts, to tell you the truth).  

I was/am one searching, piecing God together from the fragments that made/make sense. I’ve been lost. I've struggled and rebelled against life, but I decided a long time ago to stop trying to run the show and to just let God/the divine, whatever you want to call it, guide me. I’m in a very good place in my understanding of God. 

Preacher man is wrong on the "feeling emptier than ever part" as far as I'm concerned. Dead wrong. I think people like Deepak Chopra and Robert Moss threaten every thing on which his belief system is based. Our basic human instincts are fight or flight when we are threatened, and we often seek to destroy (as he is doing to Chamblee54 who brought this dialogue to my attention) what we fear or do not understand. 

I understand this fundamentalism “by the book” mentality as I was raised by people just like him. They have to go to church, put on a good front, judge anyone that does not understand the world in exactly the same way and tell him or her they are going to hell because of it. He seeks to refute anything that does not fit into his predetermined by the Bible mold. 

That we could actually have our own journey with the divine that we don't need the institution of the church and the blessing of the preacher to mediate between the divine and ourselves. That there is such a thing as the “collective unconscious”, that we can connect directly with Source, without permission from anyone. Is it so unfathomable that we could journey to "heaven" and to "hell" in our own hearts while we are still living this physical life? That we are on this earth on a quest to learn certain things, to come full circle? To become more wise and pure through each lifetime? That we could communicate directly to God and angels without the interference of a Baptist preacher or dogma? Does he actually believe that when we die we will all go to a city in the sky where our every human whim is fulfilled? 

Yes, I'm often vague and searching in my writing.  Anais Nin eloquently explained it this way,

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.  Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. 

If you stop looking for the truth while you are breathing you might as well lie down and die. What I found to be truth yesterday might be discredited tomorrow, as new insights are formed. At one point in time we have all thought we had it all figured out, only to be put dejectedly in our proper place by someone much wiser than ourselves or through our own trial and error experiences. 

If he thinks he has all of the answers as a mere human, he's deeply flawed. And he probably thinks dinosaurs didn't exist because they aren't in the Bible (despite the evidence of fossils). I had to go there based on his simple-minded (or calculatingly controlling) arguments. And, just so he knows, God is not a man in the sky with a white beard watching to see when we are bad or good like Santa Claus. When you say “he” and “him” you are minimizing what God is and equating God to nothing more than a human with superhero powers. That is not what God is, sorry. Thanks chamblee54 for including me in the conversation...and distracting me from getting any work done tonight.

I’ll end with two profound quotations about life. These somewhat allude to what my blog is about (besides the totally obvious journey of my every day life) and why it’s aptly named “It’s all about the JOURNEY”.

Robert Frost said, In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life.  It goes on.” It does, and on and on and on. (Even if some mean-spirited, judgmental preacher man wants to belittle a completely random person on the Internet).

Nancy Willard said, Sometimes questions are more important than answers. I could go on and on about this one, but I’ll leave it at that.