Spiritual Autobiography
by Jim Burklo 1-12-08
Last week, I gave you a suggested assignment – to write a short spiritual autobiography. I don’t think it’s right for me to make an assignment I don’t complete myself! So here goes.
The earliest experiences of the spiritual dimension of my life that I can remember were at age 3 or 4. The first five years of my life were spent in Los Gatos, California. At that time, the Santa Clara Valley was still the Valley of Heart’s Delight. There were still thousands of acres of prune and apricot orchards, and the smell of the blooming trees in springtime still haunts me. I remember looking up at the Santa Cruz Mountains, glowing in the late afternoon sunshine, when I was very young, and having a powerful sensation of awe. The mountains beckoned my soul toward them. That sight is engraved in my consciousness to this day, and I can still feel that feeling of reverent wonder.
The lesson that stays with me from those tender years is that the essence of spirituality is awe. Libraries are filled with books about who God is and what God want. Heresy trials and pogroms have been waged about such matters. But there’s no arguing with the experience of humble, reverent, slack-jawed wonder that fills us when we contemplate the everyday miracles that surround us. Awe is about all the religion that we need!
I grew up going to Presbyterian and later Congregational churches, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that I began to connect the dots and begin to understand that God had anything to do with the many incidents in my childhood in which I was overwhelmed by the beauty of nature. I recall having a very fun childhood, with lots of playful happiness, but I also recall being a pretty serious guy when it came to studying and trying to understand the world. Our family had library night every week, which I cherished, and on my own I did a great deal of reading, mostly about natural history. I took Sunday School very seriously, too, and asked my teachers a lot of questions. Because I was so fascinated by nature and science in general, and by geology in particular, I had a lot of trouble dealing with the creation story in Genesis, and later I was bothered by the story of Jesus being born from a virgin. Science and religion weren’t lining up together very well and that disturbed me. I think I was about ten or eleven when I realized that my church was telling me that my status in eternity depended on my ideas. I thought I believed in Jesus, all right, but then I wondered if I believed in Jesus the right way. I knew that sometimes in school I thought I had the right answer, but then the test would get graded and I’d have got it wrong. What if that was how I believed in Jesus? Since I was just a kid and didn’t understand the Christian religion very well, how could I be sure I believed in Jesus the right way? And if I didn’t believe in Jesus the right way, I’d surely go to hell and have my skin roasted off my body for eternity! I talked to my parents about it. My mom said, “Jamey, don’t worry, honey, you are a Christian and you are going to heaven. It’s okay!” But it still bothered me a lot. What did my mom know, really? I was old enough to know for sure that she couldn’t read my mind. Only God could read my mind and know what and how I really believed. And God must have know that I was not sure that I believe correctly, so that must have been evidence for God that I really didn’t believe correctly. So if I died then, I’d go to hell.
Thank God, life provided me plenty of happy distractions from these existential questions. I had a lot of pals in my childhood, but one friend became the most important. Bruce Urbschat and I would talk for hours about religion and science and philosophy. We’d walk home together from Sunday School and talk about our questions about religion. I think this friendship had a powerful effect on both of us. We’re still very good friends and correspond to this day. Our friendship emboldened us to think for ourselves, study for ourselves, explore on our own outside of school and church. Our friendship gave me the confidence to question the religion in which I’d been raised. Bruce and I concluded that one day, there would be one world religion that would replace all the current ones. We had concluded that God was bigger than any one religion, including Christianity.
My friendship with Bruce has taught me a spiritual lesson that I want to pass on to those who come after me. To grow in my relationship with God, I needed the companionship of a friend; someone who would be a mirror for me, and for whom I could be a mirror, so that we could validate our experiences for each other, give each other courage and motivation to explore and discover. To draw closer to God, you need the help and company of friends. Which is why I’m a member of a church, which is a company of friends who help each other in their spiritual journeys.
Our family moved to California when I was thirteen. It was the 60’s and quickly I found myself taking great interest in social and political issues. In high school I got involved in anti war activity, and at age 16 I was appointed to a federal advisory board of students, focusing on environmental issues. I was still going to church; I was the president of my church youth group. But I was increasingly frustrated that my church had nothing to say about the great issues of the time – the war, the environmental movement, the civil right struggle, the problems of poverty. Religion was, to me, another subject for debate. It was still a matter of ideas.
Until I went on a backpack trip in the Sierra at age 16. I had signed up for this trip through Mount Hermon, a Christian retreat center about which I knew nothing. I had no idea that the leaders of this backpacking trip were hard-core fundamentalist Christians who believed in the Bible literally. Every time we stopped along the route of our hike, one of the leaders would pull out his floppy Bible and start talking. I was outraged by the stuff they were saying. I argued with virtually every word they said. No wonder, I suppose. At that time I was the star of our high school speech and debate team. The other boys on the trip kept telling me to stop debating with the trip leaders. “The more you talk, the longer they talk! Just be quiet so we can get it over with.”
On the top of Kearsarge Pass, a spectacular place where I was stunned at the beauty of the lakes and mountains, sure enough, the leader got out his floppy Bible again. I groaned at the idea of him spoiling this beautiful experience with dogmatic nonsense. This time, he read the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. “Love your enemies”, said Jesus. And when I heard those words, I had a very sudden and powerful sensation, very physical, almost like an explosion, leaving me with a sense of peace and calm and awe all over my body. I was sure it was God. I was sure that God was the kind of love that even extends to one’s enemies, and I felt that love in my mind and body, and I was sure that practicing that love was what life was worth living for. It was overwhelming. And I knew this love was also what was behind and within all the beauty that surrounded us from that pass in the Sierra.
I was speechless, something for which I’m still not well known, and didn’t say anything for a day and a half. Finally I knew I had to practice what I had just discovered. I had to love my enemies: the leaders of the backpack trip, with whom I still disagreed about practically everything. I went up to the main leader of the trip, looked him right in the eye, and thanked him for helping me discover the reality of God.
I learned a powerful spiritual lesson that day, which I want to pass along to those who come after me. God is love, and love is something you do and feel, not just think. Love that extends even to those we don’t like and can’t stand and even to those who do us harm. We may not be any good at loving our enemies; I’m still very far from living up to this ideal. It’s very difficult, sometimes seems impossible; it gets me into thorny and confusing situations, puts me between a cross and a hard place. But the challenge of trying to do so is supremely worthy of one’s life. The path to reconciliation in our private lives, families, communities, and world is to go beyond the kind of love that we share with folks who are easy to love, and dare to love those who seem unlovable.
That incident in the Sierra set the course of my life. It is what set me on the path of becoming a minister. In college and seminary, I sought to put it all together, to find the universe in the university, to connect the dots of my spiritual experiences, the discoveries of science, the wisdom of philosophy and theology, and the insights of art and literature and poetry. I served as an aide in a nursing home for a couple of years, making money to get through college, and I learned that changing bedpans for sick elderly people could be a form of spiritual service. That job helped me put body and soul together, to understand more deeply the way that our spirits and our substance can come together or fall apart. Being with people as they were dying, I lost a lot of my fear of death. I realized that life after death is not so much a matter of belief, or of positing an objective place in the universe that you go after you die, as it is a powerful and vivid subjective experience. I deepened in the awareness that God is not a being out there who intervenes in the world, but rather that God is the divine quality of nature, that God is one with the universe, the essence of the universe, and that this divine essence is by its nature always beyond our complete knowing. Certainly God is experienced beyond the confines of any one religion.
In seminary, I was assigned to live with a roommate who had spent a year and a half in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal. He taught me how to meditate. This was a major discovery for me. In silent meditation I experienced what I had read about in so many books about religion and spirituality. I felt at one with the universe and with God, though that did not mean I understood or could describe God. I experienced that eternal life is not about the afterlife; it’s about experiencing eternity in the moment, while we are alive.
I met other spiritual explorers when I was in seminary and learned much from them. The spiritual lesson I learned during that time is that our potential for seeing the world in radically different ways, our potential for creativity and insight, is enormous and largely untapped. I want to pass along the lesson that while changing our minds doesn’t necessarily change the world, the potential is huge for changing the world for the better by opening our minds to new, positive ways of seeing and understanding the world. The future of humanity depends on our willingness to set aside our usual way of defining and describing things, and make room in our minds and hearts for radically different points of view.
Being married has been a profound spiritual practice for me. From my relationship with Roberta I have seen so many sides, discovered so many rich dimensions of what love is all about, and thus known more of God, who is love. We have been to the top of the mountain and down to the bottom of the swamp together, and back up again. I’m so grateful for her in my life. You know, our culture gives us plenty of sex education. But it gives us hardly any sense education: it gives us hardly any education in the art of loving. I want to pass along the lesson that by telling the truth to your partner, no matter how hard, by sharing your heart, and not just the ideas or opinions of your mind, the way to the bliss of intimacy will be opened.
My daughter has been my spiritual teacher from the moment she was born, 21 years ago, and we gazed into each other’s eyes for the first time. Nobody has been able to get me out of myself more completely than Liz! Years ago, a friend of mine, Dan Rauker, said a wise thing: “I am not here for me.” Those words stuck with me, but it wasn’t until I was a parent that I felt the full truth of what Dan said. All the accomplishments of my life pale in comparison to the privilege of loving and serving my daughter as she has grown into the lovely, bright, caring young woman she is today. St. Paul said of Jesus that he “emptied himself” to become a servant. I have emptied myself, so many times and in so many ways, in the course of parenting. For this I am very, very grateful, because the emptier I am, the closer I feel to God.
I have cherished my years as a pastor in churches, on the streets with homeless people, and on campus at Stanford. The many moments I have spent at the side of people in crisis, at death, in illness, and also through joyful passages, have opened my heart. From you and so many others I’ve served as a pastor, I have discovered that my walk with God is not so much about those mountaintop experiences, those sublime moments of rapturous union with God, nice as those times have been. My walk with God is most importantly about the divine quality of the relationships I have had with people, those amazing moments when the soul’s truth is revealed, when tears flow and hearts break open, in the hospital, at weddings, at memorials, in counseling sessions, and in tender encounters in everyday life. Just having the privilege of being present at so many sacred moments in people’s lives has made my career completely worthwhile. Yes, there are hard parts in my profession: fractious internal politics, budget crises, and the like. But the spiritual rewards of this work are overwhelming. I am so grateful to have this job. The spiritual lesson I want to pass along from my career as a pastor is that if you want to find God, you don’t need to look any farther than the people around you. Pay close attention to them, be emotionally and spiritually and physically present for them, honor the turning points in their lives, and you, too, will enter the kingdom of heaven on earth.
I expect I have many more spiritual lessons to learn and pass along as my life continues. Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing and reading the stories of your spiritual development and the lessons you want to share from them!