The Long Road

I was born a poor Presbyterian.

Ok, that's using a little dramatic license. Although, my grandmother was born in the Kentucky hills and moved west by horse drawn carriage, and my father in a logging camp in central Washington State, by the time I came along my father's hard work ethic and ingenuity made our family far from poor. I was however, born a Presbyterian. I remember attending church and Sunday school regularly at a very young age. That stopped around age 5, not long after we lost my older brother in a car accident when he was a freshmen in college. It seemed that my parents had lost "faith". As a teen I struggled with the dogmatic idea of god as I perceived it from christian based teachings and questioned how one group's beliefs could be the one truth and path to heaven or hell, when there were so many others in our world. I did not believe in GOD.

Sometime when I was about 14, I was in the High Sierra back country on our family's annual spring camping trip. One day while sitting naked and alone on a riverbank, next to a natural hot spring which looked over a large open meadow, I felt the warm sun drench my skin, and that's the moment I discovered God. You see, at that moment I felt the warmth of the sun, I looked at the pure beauty that surrounded me from the grass I sat on, to the trees and the majestic mountains beyond on the horizon. I listened to the wind blow through the surrounding forest, the sound of the stream flowing beside me, and the birds calling at each other from vast distances. It was at that moment that God was released, for me, from the dogma. God was not a being, a spirit, someone pulling the strings, deciding who lives or dies, God was a place, the place I was at that moment, God was surrounding me.

Fast forward 30 years

(more on my journey to Judaism another time)

At high holiday services this past fall (2009), Rabbi Kipnes spoke of a place in one of his sermons. HaMakom the Rabbi explained was "The Place", was God.

http://rabbipaul.blogspot.com/2010/04/unchain-your-faith-one-rabbis-radical.html

This was a revelation to me. Although a few years prior our children had brought Judaism and spirituality back into our lives, I had never revisited that initial connection I had with God on that day 30 years earlier. On this day, in the Calabasas Community Center, "The Place" came back to me. The thoughts this provoked were profound, however short lived, I soon reentered the daily grind of the job, and our family's hectic schedule, leaving little time for spirituality. On February 27th that all changed, when I lost my soul mate and wife of 20 years to a tragic accident in the very same mountains that I had first found God. In the days, weeks and months that have now passed I have been on an amazing spiritual journey that started at "The Place", with HaMakom.

Today I find my heart and mind in a very peaceful, accepting place, where I can feel the loving presence of Erica and the joy that she brought to mine and so many others' lives, because she is now part of "The Place", of God.

Every day I wake with the rising sun and look forward to my continued path of spirituality, learning, sharing and understanding more with every step. I anticipate this to be a life long journey which will continue to bring joy and peace to my life, and hopefully our children's, in our place here on earth.

I find HaMakom within.