Read an Excerpt
A Real-Life Christian Spiritual Journey
A Story of Real Life Spiritual Experiences on the Way Back to God
By Richard Ferguson iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Richard Ferguson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-1672-3
Chapter One
In the Beginning: Our Prehuman Existence
Slowly, I became conscious of my surroundings. I was being born into a place of magic, love, and complete harmony among all beings who were there with me. The most gorgeous golden light I would ever encounter in my existence came from what seemed every direction. Somehow this light nourished me at my very young age—that is, I would have been young, had time had meaning where I was, and had age been something real. Neither was space real, as I was formless; I had no body yet, no arms, no legs. I worried about none of this, though, for I intuitively knew it would all come later.
But now, as the beautiful light sustained me in complete security and happiness, wrapping me in its warm embrace, loving me with an indescribable intensity, I could see in all directions at once. I felt immense love within every particle of my being from God's golden light and from all my brothers and sisters. I was extremely happy, knowing nothing negative, for it did not exist here.
The other children felt the same. There were millions of us, but we were in unity such that we could know one another's feelings and thoughts. We all knew we were in an exalted place of wonderment, a sacred place of joy and endless bliss that went in all directions for as far as we could perceive. We moved around our world effortlessly, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with friends.
We children all knew and deeply loved one another just as we loved ourselves and God the Father and God the Mother. Though much the same, each of us was different, too. Each of us was unique, as God had already bestowed the gifts of individuality and free will. Out of the love of our Father God and our Mother God, we became ourselves, each unique, yet each reflecting an image of Father and Mother.
To emphasize our individuality, God gave us each the gift of a holy name, which was to be ours for eternity. My name, Joseph, will be for all time. All other names like Richard that I may be given throughout the ages are temporary, for I am Joseph.
I was grateful and humbled He chose this name for me, since millions of years in the future, it would be the name of the father of Jesus Christ when He would go to earth. We all knew what was to come, and we all would participate in the wonderment of creation with our Father and Mother. We would become co-creators with God.
We knew, too, that infinite potential lay before us in other realms, but we did not want to venture that way, for fear of leaving the love and security of our sacred home. As time passed, however, we slowly began to see what we could become in those realms. It became clearer that if we wanted to fulfill God's original intent for each of our lives, we would have to journey outside our wonderful home to explore the other areas that God had created. We realized that our doing this for Father and Mother would bring them joy, as they watched us gain all different kinds of knowledge and experiences, and reach our full potentials.
Even then, we were still hesitant to leave, but as in all divine communication, God infused us with what we needed to know before we set out on our journeys. He promised to be with us each step of the way. We would never be away from Him, He said. He would be closer to us than we each were to our own breath.
He told us we would experience trouble and pain for the first time in our existence. And although He promised to help us when we were in trouble and to freely give us what we needed, He said he would not give us everything we wanted. If we succeeded in handling our troubles, all the while loving Him and loving our neighbors as ourselves, He said that not only would He be very proud of us, but also that we, upon our return to heaven, would grow to enjoy the higher realms even more than before.
He assured us that our free will would allow us to make the right choices, to avoid dangers in our path. Each journey we took gave us the opportunity to gain more knowledge about God's creation, the least part of which was not ourselves. It was then we began to understand that His creation was infinite and that in it our little place of love and security was but a very small part.
Before it was my time to leave, God told me that He created a special female person for only me. In this life her name is Marilyn. She and I would be married multiple times during our many journeys together in different places and various eras. And after our journeys were finished and we had achieved our full potential, we would spend eternity together, our souls intermingled in rapturous and unending love for each other. We would then be free to roam all of creation at our pleasure, enjoying and learning together.
When came the time to begin our journeys, millions of my brothers and sisters and I used our spiritual wings to fly to the Earth and other places within our Father's creation, keeping in mind that we must always remember the rules God had set forth, which were quite simple actually: focus on and love Him first, and then love others as ourselves. To follow these rules, we were to use our inborn talents and free will to always choose the right path. He would always be with us in the form of the Holy Spirit to help and guide us along our journey.
As so we came to Earth, born into different situations, cultures, and geographies, beginning our human lives and personal adventures complete with emotion, joy, struggle, pain, and pleasure.
Our Common Spiritual Journey
I invite you to come with me on a fantastic journey. It's a spiritual journey of real life that all of us are on right now whether we realize it or not. Although this book has many stories of my personal journey, much of these experiences are ones that you will be able to identify with from your personal journey. Our life experiences and stories are signposts along our collective spiritual journey ordained by God.
Chapter Two
The Journey of Faith, Spirit, and Self
My spiritual journey began with a shock.
I was young, still feeling the afterglow of the sacred place I came from. We lived in a yellow brick apartment building on the corner of a busy street in Chicago. To get to our unit in the basement, we had to go down some steps, turn left, and go down another set of steps. There were also steps on the right, but they went up to somewhere I never went.
I was happy, crawling on the kitchen floor, playing with my favorite yellow plastic truck. Bare, silver-colored pipes crisscrossed the ceiling. They must have been pretty old, because they groaned and squeaked a lot. High on the wall above the sink, there were windows, small and right up by the ceiling. I could see the snow piled against them now, and because our apartment was in the basement, the floor was cold to the touch as I played. But I didn't care. I was fascinated watching the little wheels on my truck turn as I zoomed it across the floor, making motor sounds. I was in my own little world of make-believe where my toys were as real as everything else and where I felt all was well.
From time to time, I saw people's legs walk by our kitchen windows and heard our upstairs neighbors. The ceiling would creak and groan as they walked across the floor, and small snippets of conversation would occasionally float down through the vents: "Harold, did you pick up my dry cleaning?"
Mom was cooking as I played, and I could smell the gas burner and hear its hissing. The smell of food told me eating was not too far away. If I was lucky, Mom would give me a taste of what was on the stove before we ate.
Mom always wore a white apron when she cooked. If she spilled something, the apron protected her. And no matter what she spilled, her apron was always washed clean on laundry day. For me, in time, that white apron would come to represent the warmth and resilience of home.
Suddenly, my dad came home from work. There he was in the kitchen, and he immediately started to scream at Mom. His voice was so loud and frightening; I hid behind Mom's skirt and started to cry. My body quivered from fear as I held tight to her white apron.
I remember very clearly him yelling, "I told you he is not to play in here!" right before he kicked my toy truck across the room, smashing it to pieces. I began to sob. I cannot begin to describe the terror I felt in that instant as the broken parts of my truck scattered across the kitchen floor. My little world was shattered. To this day, I can still feel the soft cloth of my mom's skirt on my face and the terror I felt when I looked up and saw the rage in my dad's face. Pain was seared into my heart's memory, where that evening's thirty-second moment would last a lifetime.
A child's trust for the mother of the house is very important. It is where the child forms a basic trust of the world. My mom was always there for me. Whatever I needed, I could always count on her.
Likewise, the behavior of both parents toward the child affects the young one's rudimentary images of God. And so for me, because of what my father did that evening, this was the day I walked through a new spiritual portal. That portal was the threshold of a new stage of my spiritual life, the beginning of new understandings and experiences of which I had never before been capable. On the other side of that threshold, the little boy that had existed just a few minutes earlier was no more. My developing brain was now tainted and my nervous system bumped off-course down a new, damaged path. My innocence and perceptions of trust were forever changed.
I viewed the world differently after that, becoming much more aware. I began to grow up and recognize just the kind of reality I had been born into. It was a painful awakening, but an awakening no less. And it was an awakening not only to the dangers of what this life could hold for me but also to the potentials.
And so it was, that on that linoleum floor in a basement apartment on Mango Avenue in Chicago, my journey to God began.
Not until I was an adult, of course, did I know the changes that took place in those few minutes. I did not know that I had indeed started a new spiritual chapter. And this is the way it is for all of us. Not only are we changed by our experiences and perceptions throughout life, but each of us can also refer back to a starting point for that change—usually in our early childhood. For some children, that starting point may be a positive memory, full of love, warmth, and good feelings. However others, such as I, were not so lucky. Though I realize I am not special in this regard; millions were worse off than I in their early childhood experiences.
Decades later, when I confronted my father about what he did that evening, he acknowledged remembering it. I was actually surprised. He told me he'd known that all I'd wanted was a hug, but he never expressed any kind of regret. He didn't even try to give me a reason—even a poor excuse—for what he'd done to my mom and me.
It was not until my teenage years, after putting up with behavior like this for what seemed hundreds of times, that I finally concluded my father was just plain mean. He had a lot of rage stored within him, which he apparently felt he had the right to take out on others whenever he wanted, as, afterward, he always felt justified in doing so. This was, and still is, terribly sad to me.
The Beginning Stages of Faith
According to James Fowler's book Stages of Faith, basic feelings formed by children around the age of two or three will stay with them their whole lives. It is at this age when children are just beginning to form ideas of trust in the world. Is the world a place that you can trust to meet your needs or not? Little vulnerable brains are answering this question based on their experiences, either for better or worse.
In fact, from infant age until about seven or eight, children develop all sorts of ideas about relationships and attitudes about the world around them. During these years, the brain is "wired" as to how it should relate to the world.
When the event with my father took place, I was around age two or three, and just beginning to form my ideas of trust in the world. So with this one crucial moment, I began to feel the world could not be trusted. Even though my mom took excellent care of me, the violence that occurred that day, not to mention on a multitude of days that followed, rewired my brain for good.
The fragility of a child's mental and emotional state is not a new idea. Even the Romans recognized that treating children well was vital to their development. As Juvenal, the Roman poet and satirist, put it, "Be gentle with the young ... Refrain from doing ill; for one all-powerful reason, lest our children should copy our misdeeds; we are all too prone to imitate whatever is base and depraved."
This moment in each of our lives, the moment when we set in motion a basic trust or mistrust of the world, marks the beginning of both our faith and what I call our "mode of existence." Basically, it marks the beginning of our spiritual journey back to God and to discovering who we are as His children.
You, too, had a beginning point in your personal journey back to God and the discovery of yourself, even if you are not yet aware of it. It is a journey we all travel, a journey of healing from past hurts, a road to discovering God and our true identities. But most of all, it is a fantastic journey toward the knowledge of just how wonderful and peaceful our relationship with God really is, no matter how dreary or filled with suffering this world can be.
Each of us is a unique creation of God, and as such, each of our journeys on this planet is different. We are each on our own path through life. But even as we are unique, we pass through identical stages of faith and psychological development as we walk our way back toward God.
In the remainder of the chapter, I will walk you through two different aspects of these various stages of development, which we all share: the spiritual aspect and the psychological one. After all, our spirits and our minds are interconnected, each affecting the other intimately. This is what makes us human.
Psychological Development
Erik Erikson, known as the father of psychosocial development, says we pass through eight stages of mental development as we age from infancy to maturity. Psychosocial development refers to the ways in which our personal psychology affects our interactions with other people and God. Each stage has its own set of challenges to master and dangers to avoid. He also says we will never notice our passing from one stage to the next, and that trying to notice it would be like staring at a wall of wet paint, waiting for it to dry; the process is just too slow, not to mention the boundaries between each stage too blurred. There is no definite moment where a cosmic diploma descends from the sky announcing we have now graduated to the next phase of development. As Erikson put it, "Transitions represent an upheaval in one's life at any point and can be protracted in its process for five to seven years or longer."
As mentioned, Erikson also thought that each phase of life had its own set of challenges and dangers, and that it was up to the individual to meet those challenges. More, he thought that if we did not overcome those hurdles, we could not progress to the next phase of our development, even as we aged. Intuitively, this is a truth we all know: we all change as we get older, and those who do not, we often call "immature." As Henry David Thoreau said very simply, "Things do not change; we change."
Take a look at the eight stages that Erikson categorized, along with their defining characteristics and challenges.
1. Infancy. This is the stage where we form our basic trust or mistrust of the world we've just been born into. Our level of trust depends on whether our infantile needs were met. The mother's role is vital in this stage. Healthy children are the result of a mother who is always there to provide for their needs, such as those for physical comfort (hugs, for example), cleanliness (bathing and grooming), and hunger (feeding). Otherwise, children end up mistrusting the world as they grow through succeeding stages.
2. Early childhood. Here, we form our self image. Depending on our experiences, that image can be one of self-worth or of shame. We pick up on what the adults around us think of us, and we believe that defines our value to the world.
3. Childhood. As we begin to work with others to achieve things during this phase, we notice we have certain individual talents. We then display these talents in our individual social groups—for example, showing our friends that we can throw a baseball the farthest.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Real-Life Christian Spiritual Journey by Richard Ferguson Copyright © 2011 by Richard Ferguson. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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