David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

spiritual

Separating religion, spirituality makes it harder to find the Truth

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I had a spiritual experience Wednesday evening, but I was nowhere near a church or a religious service.

I was looking through beautiful trees at sunset near my house and as I saw the sun break through the clouds and shine brightly through the branches, I was filled with the awe and joy which I experience so often when I’m close to Nature and the God of Nature.

I felt close to the Creator. I felt the joy of being connected to the Divine. I felt God’s presence in a powerful way. But there was nothing religious about the experience.

One of the saddest and most awful realizations of my adult life has been that religion and spirituality so rarely intersect in a direct way. I grew up immersed in religion and occasionally having spiritual experiences, but I’ve seen modern culture doing its best to separate these two things — and that hurts everyone who’s genuinely searching for the Truth.

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‘I know who you are,’ she grinned.
‘Do you know who you really are?’

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Until I dreamed about her Friday night, I hadn’t thought about this woman for more than two years. But as soon as I saw her eyes in the dream — and then felt her hands reach out for me — I knew who she was. She was a stranger who had spoken strange words to me in a store.

It happened in October 2016. I told the story to my Facebook friends at the time, and I looked up my notes about it this morning. I was in the pharmacy section of Walmart when a frail and elderly black lady approached me and said gently, “Would you still marry her if you could?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you must have me mistaken for some other ugly fellow,” I said, trying to make light of it, “because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She put her hand on my arm firmly and pulled herself close to look up into my eyes intently.

“I know who you are,” she said with a sweet smile. “Do you know who you really are?”

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Psychiatrist’s insight might be link between spiritual, material worlds

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For my entire life, I’ve struggled to bridge the gap between two worlds. I’ve had one foot in the scientific, material world and another foot in the mystical, spiritual world. They both felt real and true to me, but the two worlds seemed to be at constant war with one another.

I feel those two worlds come together when I experience beauty and when I create art. When I see the trees of a forest in front of me and feel their color and light and shadow hit me like a pounding symphony, I feel as though I’m been transported to another world while I photograph it and then create the finished piece.

This place (in the photo above) exists in the material world. I saw it with my own eyes when I photographed it Friday afternoon. But my rendition of what it looked like and what it felt like to me — that’s something which didn’t come from the camera. That came from something mystical which I can’t explain.

I experience the collision of the material and spiritual worlds when I create something. There have been a few other times I’ve experienced it, too, through transcendent spiritual experiences which thrill me and frighten me. For years, I’ve needed to find a way to unify these two worlds — and an elderly Czech psychiatrist might have just pointed me in the right direction.

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