I was raised as a Christian. However, I don’t cling to my religion the way many Christians do. I don’t feel superior to those who are not Christian, nor do I feel that Christianity is the only true religion.
Many Christians believe that their religion is the only way to heaven, the only way to salvation. And because of this belief, they tend to view other religions and spiritual paths with skepticism and distrust, as something other than the word of God.
This applies to Jews and Muslims as well. Virtually anyone who follows a religion believes, whether they admit it or not, that their religion is the right one. All the others are distorted or misguided in some way.
I said I was raised as a Christian, but I did so rather reluctantly. In fact, I stopped going to church when I was sixteen, for reasons I will get to shortly. The point I would like to make here is that I am not a typical Christian, and I do not want the fact of my Christian upbringing to alienate those readers who grew up following a different religion, or none at all.
The purpose of this story is to present a wider view of spirituality, one that encompasses all religious beliefs. In order to do so, it is important to emphasize our similarities rather than our differences.
Despite outer appearances, we are all very similar to one another. And because of that, my story applies just as much to you as it does to me. Sure, the surface details might be different, but what goes on underneath is remarkably similar.
My life has been one of repeating patterns. So has yours. And the sooner we realize this, the sooner we can begin to pay attention to such patterns and to choose, for perhaps the first time, to change them. Unless, of course, you are perfectly happy with every single aspect of your life. But I suspect that this is not the case.
As we grow up, we encounter influences and experiences that remain with us throughout our lives. Patterns are set into motion which play out over and over again. If you look carefully at your life, you will see these patterns. And without too much difficulty, you can identify the circumstances in your childhood that set these patterns into motion.
The easiest way for me to show you how this works is to share with you one of my own patterns and how it was initiated. I’ll just give you a few relevant details. I promise to be brief.
First relevant detail: I was adopted. I found this out at the awkward and difficult age of twelve. Perhaps God planned it that way, I don’t know. But the effect it had on me was profound. For the first time in my life (though definitely not the last), I was faced with the realization that I was not who I thought I was. Everything I had previously believed myself to be was incorrect. And the person whom I loved and trusted more than any other – my mother – had the unfortunate task of confirming that fact for me.
According to Mom, I was found in the narthex of a church in Chicago. At the time, Mom was working with child protective services in the city, and her duties sometimes brought her into the hospital emergency room. So she happened to be there the night I was brought in, and she claims to have fed me my first bottle. I had found my way to the woman who would be my mother.
A wonderful and touching story, to be sure, but not to a twelve year old boy finding out for the first time that his mother is not actually his mother. And to make matters worse, my younger sister was not adopted. Another bitter pill to swallow.
After the initial shock wore off, I settled into my new perspective as someone who had been abandoned as an infant and was now a stranger in his own family. My mother seemed different now, my Dad and sister seemed different. Everything seemed different. I felt out of place. Like a black sheep.
I began pulling away here and there, avoiding certain functions and outings and spending a great deal of time alone in my bedroom. Dad noticed, and we eventually had a long discussion about the whole adoption thing. I knew he couldn’t understand what I was experiencing, and God bless him for trying, but empathy was not his strong suit. He eventually grew frustrated and told me that whenever I was ready to return to the real world, he would be ready to be my father. Which I appreciated, at least a little.
We were a well-off, upper-middle class family. My grandfather had accumulated a great deal of wealth, though I don’t know exactly how. The bottom line was that Mom had been given a trust fund that kept us financially comfortable. So my sister and I grew up in a neighborhood of people living comfortably.
This had been quite fine with me growing up, but once I found out I was adopted I felt like I didn’t belong in such surroundings. I assumed that my birth mother had been poor, otherwise she would have kept and raised me. The more I thought about it, the more I began to identify with the less-fortunate. I also began to resent, to a degree, the privilege with which I was surrounded.
The shallowness and elitism that I had often detected but had never understood now became more obvious to me. The tendency of wealthy or moderately wealthy people to view themselves as better than the less fortunate, though they would vigorously deny it, was always there. It was in their tone of voice when they complained about welfare, about urban crime, about taxes. It was always there. And it was becoming very obvious to me.
So a pattern had been initiated, one that would repeat itself in various ways throughout my life. Periodically, I would find myself feeling out of place, like an outsider. And I can see that although the circumstances were different each time, the underlying feeling was similar. It was the same feeling I had as a twelve year old boy who didn’t belong in his own family.
I encourage you to look back at your life and to identify where such patterns might be playing out for you. The idea here is not to feel like a victim, not to blame an abusive parent or tragic circumstance that has forever doomed you to repeated failure or unhappiness. The point is to become aware of these patterns. It is only through awareness of them that we can change them. And changing them is what we’re after.
I began this discussion by talking about religion, and it turns out that our religious upbringing (or lack of it) is a very powerful pattern, one that affects virtually every area of our lives. We tend to package our spiritual beliefs into tidy little boxes – this one for Sunday mornings, that one for when a loved one dies. However, our spiritual beliefs actually provide the foundation for everything else that goes on in our lives.
I realize that such a statement may seem a bit of a stretch for some people. Most of us give very little thought to religious matters. And atheists will surely recoil at the assertion that our spiritual beliefs lie at the core of everything we do and believe and experience.
But I intend to show you, through this story, how our spiritual patterns and beliefs actually influence everything else in our lives. And by the time we’re done, I hope to leave you inspired and motivated to examine your own beliefs and patterns and to begin the process of unraveling the mystery that is your life.
Okay, enough background information.
Time to get to our story.
