Introduction

This is the story of my personal, gnostic spiritual journey, repackaged into a format that I hope gives you inspiration and hope so that you can then find and build your own meaning out of your own experiences.

The God of My Childhood

I was raised in a religion called The Unificaiton Church, which is a modern, second-coming-of-Christ cult (not to be confused with Unitarianism, which is a very different religion).  Unificationism originated in Korea, where a man named Sun Myung Moon received a vision at the age of 15 where Jesus asked him to complete his mission.  Rev. Moon centered his entire life around completing this mission, establishing the Unification Church, and developing a global following.  At the time of this writing, Rev. Moon has transitioned to Spirit, and his widdow, Rev. Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon is the spiritual leader of the Unification Church, though there are now several fractured factions.

I mention this background, because this was the spiritual environment I was raised in: restrictive and controlling, where there was exactly one "correct" path, which was narrow and difficult.  At the same time, this religion/cult preached a God who IS Love, and whose love is expansive enough to extend to all of humanity.  Their response to the obvious logical fallacy (if God is all-loving, why does Hell exist?), is that it is us who will pass our own judgment in Spirit, when we stand before God and account for our own life; there, where we can see Truth, we condemn ourselves to what we think we deserve.  So, of course, I set my sights on Truth and on Love, devoting myself to understanding them as fully as possible during my physical lifetime.

The God Who Walked with Me

I began to journal when I was 12 years old, and continued without missing a day for about 7 years.  In these journals, I would write a letter to God about my day and whatever was on my heart.  I no longer have those journals, but I remember well the God who read my letters, who walked beside me, and who held me in unconditional love at every moment, through every grief and every celebration.

As I developed this relationship with Divinity, I began to recognize that this Being was not the same as the one described in Unificationist texts.  Unificaitonism claimed a God who was the perfect union of masculinity and femininty but who always had to be referred to with masculine pronouns.  The Deity that I was writing letters to didn't really care about gender, since it was a very physical experience and They didn't have a physical body.  I addressed them as Heavenly Father or Heavenly Mother, or God, or Love, depending on my mood.  Today, I usually call Them Love, or Spirit, unless I'm offering a public prayer and context dictates a different title.  They know who They are anyway.

When I graduated high school and went to college, I started exploring faiths outside the one that I was raised in, and meeting people from more diverse backgrounds, and listening to them more carefully.  There were a few who took the time to have conversations with me about religion, gender, sexuality, and how all of it fit together.  I remain deeply grateful for their patience and their willingness to hear me and to meet me based on where I was coming from, because that helped me recognize the flaws in what I had been previously taught.

The Gods Who Sent Me Signs

One day, when I was pregnant, and going through one of the most difficult periods of my life to date, I noticed doves/pidgeons, owls, and peacocks all showing up around the same time.  If they weren't physically in front of me (pidgeons), then they were in my phone, or on advertisements, or on notebook covers in shop windows, or someone brought them up in conversation.  My academic field of study is Classics, so I immediately drew a connection to Venus/Aphrodite (doves), Minerva/Athena (owls), and Juno/Hera (peacocks).  I had been used to being visited by spirits and angels by this point in time, and was actively working with some of them, but I had never before been contacted by any deity besides Love.  Jesus and I had been having conversations by this point, too, but he always felt more like a spirit to me than a deity.

Several years passed, my son was born, and my husband and I were slowly building toward external stability.  Finally, having arrived at what felt like a spiritual brick wall, I gave myself permission to explore paganism and witchcraft, just to see what it was.  The signs and symbols had continued to pour in.  I had learned how to read Tarot cards, and I had found that Love and my spirit team were using them to help guide me.  Love had patiently shown me every reason that I needed to walk away from structured faith and strike out on my own.  The structure just wasn't fitting anymore.

So, on Halloween of 2015, I gave myself a year and a day.  It was as if I had spent my entire life inside this one cramped, restrictive spiritual village with a wall all the way around it, so high that I couldn't see anything beyond it.  Giving myself that permission to explore was like walking outside of that wall, and finding an entire world waiting for me.  Spirit is so vast, so expansive, so vivid, so real, so soft, so harsh, so complicated, and so perfectly, beautifully simple all at the same time.  I'll never go back.

Deity and Divinity

A Deity has a personality, and can hold a conversation.  They have their own Will, their own Purpose, and their own Intention.  Divinity is the abstract essence of "God-ness", and therefore occupies a different position in spiritual geography, or, more accurately, every position in spiritual geography.  It's like appreciating beauty whether you see it in a living organism or a painting.  Both are beautiful, because you have some inner sense of what "beauty" is.  I learned about this framing of concept from Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which is worth searching up if you're interested and curious.

Meditating (sitting still, closing my eyes, and activating my spiritual senses) with a Deity feels like having a conversation.  Meditating with Divinity feels like soaking in a spiritual bath, rebalancing all that I am in my own spirit.

We are all divine.  You, me, your neighbor, your hated rival, your best friend - all of us.  We all have divinity within us.  When we recognize that Divinity is Love, and we reach into that core, we begin to unlock our greatest potential.

Spiritual and Physical

The spirituality community is flooded with the idea that we can "vibrate our way out of suffering", or that we only have to be concerned with our own wellbeing, or that it's a good idea to eschew the "3-D" in favor of the "5-D".

But if we had been meant to be disconnected from the physical world around us, why do we incarnate into physical bodies that require interaction with the physical world?  To abandon that context is to abandon our full experience.  We are not human without our physical context.  Everything that happens in the so-called 3-D impacts the so-called 5-D, just as much as the other way around, and there is always an impact.  The two do not exist in separation.

It is imperative to be aware of your position within your social, political, economic, and geographical contexts.  It is imperative that you interact with these contexts intentionally.  To do otherwise is to abdicate the reality of your spiritual experience.  You cannot place an anchor in the heavens.  Ever since I first became aware of Spirit, I have continuously seen spiritual experiences impact my mundane life, and I have also seen my mundane experiences impact my spiritual life.  The two are interwoven, indellibly connected, and to ignore either one is to move through life without half of your whole self.

Gender and Identity

I am of the opinion that the gender binary is harmful and that Twin Flames are a scam.  No one is half of a whole.  You are whole unto yourself.  I have also found, in my interactions with Spirit that masculinity and femininty are human concepts, not spiritual concepts.  Human beings, living a socially gendered experience, have associated certain energies and qualities with these two inadequately binary genders, and therefore, when we approach Spirit/spirit, we force Them/them into the shape of masculinity/feminity.  The only time Spirit has ever used gender with me is when I have needed it in order to understand something in a certain way.

Instead of talking about "masculine" energy or "feminine" energy, I find it far more helpful to name the quality instead:  "assertiveness", for example, or "boundaries", or "receptivity", or "caretaking".  This allows me to see all of the energies and qualities that are present, and all the ways they interact with each other.  It helps me separate the question of gender/sexuality, deserving and worthy of its own space, without the pressure of spiritual expectation or personal development.

My Prayer

When I was a child (between the ages of 8 and 10; I no longer remember exactly when, but it was definitely within that period), I was having a very bad day, and ended up going to my room, slamming the door, and throwing myself on the bed to cry.  My parents had put a visual reminder of God in my bedroom, and when I looked up and saw that, I remembered that I could reach out to God in prayer at any time.  

I remember pausing briefly to consider asking God to prove Themself to me in some way, but I realized quickly that this would be a waste of time; if I called on God sincerely, and God answered, that would be all the proof I needed.

My prayer went something along these lines:  "Dear God, I'm not going to ask You to prove that You exist or to prove that You love me.  I know that You are real, and I know that You love me.  I'm just having a hard time feeling it right now.  So, please, show me Your Heart."

My Answer

What happened next suprises most people.  It felt like a black hole opened in the pit of my stomach and tried to swallow me whole.  I don't remember screaming or crying, but the next thing I remember was my mom rocking me in her arms trying to get me to tell her what happened.  I calmed down, and explained what I had experienced.  I told her it felt like there was no love.

She looked me in the eye and said "now you know how God has felt for all of human history, because He has been loving us and loving us, and we have never loved Him back."  I vowed that I would spend the rest of my life trying to ease God's heart of pain and suffering, because no one deserves to feel like that.

That same evening, I began to have visions and see spirits and angels.  I mark this experience as the one that opened my spiritual senses (claires) and allowed me to interact with Spirit more directly.  I asked God to show me Their Heart, didn't I?  God responded by opening my ability to See.

My Meaning

I have spent my entire life using this experience to build meaning and purpose.  I have interpreted it many different ways over the years based on where I have been in my own personal journey.  Today, what I understand is that God opened my clairs when I didn't even know that I had them.  God gave me the ability to See, but I didn't know that I needed to open my spiritual eyes.  They did open gradually, on their own, and now here I am.

I sometimes wonder if that moment was similar to what it feels like when a catterpillar emerges from the cocooon as a butterfly.  At some point, all of that goo becomes solid, and I'm sure the confines of the sturdy cocoon are very uncomfortable when your wings are supposed to spread out and catch the air.

God opened my ability to See as an answer to my prayer, because God's Heart has always been all around us, and in order for me to See God's Heart, I had to have that clair.  There has never been a moment when God was not present with us, nor will there ever come such a time.  We are made of the stuff of God, and even all objects radiate some of this Divine energy, because to exist is to have some spiritual substance.