Into the Mystic

When I walked away from God and the Catholic Church at the ripe old age of 12, I was too young to realize that there is being religious and being spiritual, that there is blind faith and there is belief, and there is a world of difference between those things and sometimes there’s no difference at all. Consequently, when I first headed down the road of my life after wishing God well, I called myself an atheist and wondered how others could allow themselves to be so fooled by religion. 

Now, despite being adamant that there was no God, throughout my early teens I spent a great deal of time searching … at first I couldn’t have told you *what* I was searching for, I just knew there was something missing or lacking, and I needed to find it. I read books on different religions, on spiritualism, on the paranormal, on reincarnation. I found tenets here and beliefs there, philosophies and ideas I could accept, adopt as my own. I soon realized that I was far from being an atheist, so began to call myself an agnostic, using this definition: one who did not believe in God but accepted that there could be “Something Greater” out there.

You know, after her death I’m not sure if I placed mom in “Heaven” – being so young it was hard to discard everything associated with my old religion, and I certainly associated Heaven with God. I know it gave me comfort to think she was an angel, although I certainly didn’t make her into an angel complete with the halo, harp and wings! I just always felt that my mom existed somewhere … beyond. I would talk to her, share worries, ask for guidance … so through those early years Mom was the one I spoke to. She took the place of God in my life.

As the years were passing and I was maturing & evolving in my thought processes, I never once abandoned the thought that my mother was watching over me. She was there, but there was still a need within me for something more ... and somehow I knew I would recognize it when I finally found it.

One beautiful spring night when I was 17 my boyfriend was walking me home and we cut across the town’s golf course. We lived in a small town and this was many, many years ago, so it was very quiet and the sky was a gorgeous midnight blue black with billions of stars strewn like diamonds across it. We were walking and talking when we heard a sort of fizzing sound, like you’d hear if you put your ear next to a glass of pop. We stopped and looked around. There came a faint crackling from overhead, so we looked up. Above us and just behind us, magnificent curtains of Aurora Borealis stretched out from horizon to horizon and seemed to reach from just above our heads to a thousand miles into the night. I’d seen the Northern Lights lots of times; they were common where we lived. But these … these were so close it felt like we could touch them! They rippled and swayed to some cosmic breeze, crackling here and there. They were a phosphorescent green with areas that flowed into yellow or purple and then back to green again. We stood there, absolutely spellbound!

As I looked up into that amazing phenomena, I knew with every fiber of my being that there most certainly was Something More … the connection was re-established, the one that began somewhere in the stars at the beginning of time, and that continues to call to that part of us that remembers it, even today. In that instant I felt as if I had been given Divine Knowledge! Almost simultaneously I had a rush of fear, thinking this vast cosmic curtain was going to split apart and take me through to the Other Side for daring to look in, for daring to see and to realize I’d seen this Great Thing! But instead of taking me this vast, undulating vision suddenly began to rise into the sky, and almost as quickly as it had arrived, the light faded and the sky was empty save for the billions of stars. What felt like an eternity was probably only a few minutes in real life, but they were minutes that transformed me. This was the something I’d been looking for. This was the moment when I understood that there truly was a Higher Power, and it gave me a sense of both connection and completion.

So many years down the road of Life, I can look back at that event, feel the intensity of it, and know that it’s the exact moment SOULshine began. But being a mere mortal, it took me a lot of years and a lot more life experience to gather the rest of the pieces together!

Let the Journey continue!