Reading & Reflection & Doubting
After this experience of seeing the light, through reading, study, and seemingly endless discourse with friends and mentors, it took five years for me to prove intellectually to myself that God existed.
As I reflect on this period of my spiritual journey, it seems that several streams of thought and experience converged to become the foundation of my belief and faith. In my early childhood, I remember my mother dressing my brother and I up in our Sunday best and sending us to the closest church of whatever denomination, usually within a block or two of our home.
My mother was estranged from the Roman Catholic Church and my father, a Protestant, never attended church regularly since he was usually leaving on Sunday to drive to his Monday morning appointment out of town. Since our family moved frequently with my father’s sales executive job, I recall being baptized in as many as five different churches.
During my teen years, I don’t recall attending church at all. However, after the mystical experience in my eighteenth year and being in the military service, I found much more time for spiritual reading and reflection.
Two books, in particular, had a significant impact on my early formation. Francois Mauriac’s, The Viper’s Tangle, taught me that it is never too late to come to God and Thomas Merton’s, Seeds of Contemplation, introduced me to a world of inspired spirituality, apart but not wholly separate from religion and the secular world, that could be entered by meditation and meditative reflection.
Yet, I still struggled with the intellectual proof that there was actually a Supreme Being, God, who existed apart from me, yet could touch me directly.