Being A Spiritual Warrior

Benedicamus Domino!

Ever since I have identified myself as having some sort of spiritual belief-system, I have also described myself as a spiritual warrior. I have never thought of myself as a particularly adept one, but I have described myself as one nonetheless. For me, keeping my beliefs in the face of other ideas has often seemed like a fight, and I have also long held the belief that any kind of spirituality that exists nowadays is under constant threat from a culture which forever seeks to depersonalize life and to reduce it to metaphor and symbolism, or else to state that any experience which we call spiritual really has to do with our brain waves or certain chemicals firing at certain times.

Part of the reason that I'm keeping this blog is to have a place to state my beliefs without apology and without relativizing them to fit my culture's expectations. For me, God is God. God is not a personification of our morals and values, nor is He a synonym for the abstract concept of The Universe. God is not The Divine, or Spirit, or anything else. God is The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, the Triune Creator of all things. Christ is both a real, living man who taught wise things and did miracles, but He is also the uncircumscribeable and infinite Logos, the Word of God who spoke light out of darkness. Do I believe this merely because some authority says so? I'd have to say 'no' to that, because if I did, those beliefs would crumble into dust at the slightest provocation. I know, because I had this kind of belief once.

No, what I have is something more, and I could not create it in myself. It is a knowing that goes beyond intellectual knowledge. It is not an emotion, though it's true that emotions get mixed up with it at times. It is simply a certainty, the same certainty that a child has that only one of two women who look, sound and act exactly alike is its mother. It is a certainty which remains, even through times of doubt, and it came to me by grace alone.

One day, I was riding home from university on a bus, and at this time, I was a Pagan. It is true that I was going through a spiritual dry-spell, but I thought little of it, seeing that they do tend to happen periodically. Well, I was reading a book for school, a Christian book as it happened, and I went to put it down and relax a bit while the bus roled me out of the city in which my university was and home to my parents' house. Well, as I sat and pondered what I had just read, suddenly everything changed. Suddenly, as I thought about Christ as He was being presented in this book, some deep part of myself knew that He was the Son of God and that God was there. It had the ring of truth about it, and it was--well--it was as though I had fallen in love. It was against my own will, to begin with. I didn't want to acknowledge this new thing. I wanted to forget it had ever happened, but I couldn't.

The whole weekend while I was home, I found myself reading bits of The Bible and pondering what all this would mean for my life. As I was going through The Bible, I landed on the passage where Elijah hears the still, small voice, and that voice says to him: "Elijah, what doest thou here?" Elijah is hiding in the wilderness, but God needs him to go and be a prophet again and to speak the truth to Israel. To me, that question rang in my soul. I felt as though I had been hiding in the wilderness, licking my spiritual wounds, (the wounds which made me step away from Christianity,) but now, I was being called again. I was being led homeward again.

August 19th is the Feast of The Lord's Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, or it is the date of the feast for those who use the Julian calendar to date liturgical times and seasons. The Julian calendar is thirteen days behind our modern Gregorian calendar, so that August 19 on the modern calendar is August 6 on the Julian. Anyway, during the Vespers service of Transfiguration, that very reading about the still, small voice is part of the Old Testament readings, and I have always found this fitting. I found that reading during a transfiguring time in my life, and it is used as a reading in Eastern Orthodox circles to celebrate the Eve of the Lord's Transfiguration.

So, after all this, am I still a spiritual warrior? Yes, I believe that I can still call myself this, because I am still fighting against the watering-down of belief and tradition, but I am fighting against it in myself first and foremost. I'm a child of my generation, and as such, I am constantly trying to apologize for my faith, or to soften it or to change it because I am terrified of looking like some kind of unenlightened idiot. Still, I do believe that it is quite possible to have a sincere and unalloyed faith in Christ and to be a thinking and intellectual person, because I know that I am not blindly following what some authority teaches. In fact, there are many times when the authorities of my church drive me crazy with their politics and bickering amongst themselves, but I know that Christ transcends all of that. I know this in my blood and in my deepest being, and it is this knowledge that keeps me going.

We all have our journeys to take, and we all have our paths to tread. I do not believe that all paths lead to the same place, but I do believe that many paths in this world are going in the right general direction. Any path or tradition or teaching which seeks to find the true self behind all the masks we wear is worth fighting for. Any path which emphasizes the fact that we are all together on this journey through life is worth fighting for, so I still call myself a spiritual warrior, and if I can keep the fight alive within my own self, with God's help of course, then perhaps someday I will be able to answer that still, small voice loudly and clearly, with the unclouded and undistorted truth, which I will only see after this life is through. I'm not here to convince anyone else to fight under this banner, but I am here to fight side-by-side with anyone who wishes to stand up and fight for their beliefs amid a culture which loves to create Spirituality Lite again and again. The truth is not always pretty. The truth is not always peaceful, but the truth is always the truth, and we all have to seek it in our own ways.

Deo Gratias!