I'm still thinking about my March 8th entry, where I touched on the discomfort I feel when confronting my personal religious background. It's sometimes hard to handle those old voices that nag at me, reminding me of the rules and doctrine I absorbed growing up. Childhood's imprints are never erased, and no matter what our adult minds endorse, our child-selves tend to speak up with an insistent stubbornness. As I consider my faith today in contrast to what I grew up believing, how can I be sure that I haven't thrown out the baby with the bath water?
 
At the same time, we all know New Agers who seem to accept any and all religious ideas, a huge, mixed-up sea of theology. When I commit myself to inclusiveness, that is not the way I've chosen.
 
I think the answer to my dilemma is summed up in the word "discernment." It's a word I've run into several times recently, one of those serendipitous coincidences Karl Jung called synchronicity. (Check out the concept of synchronicity further.)
 
The first occasion was a visit I made last month with my oldest daughter to Church Divinity School of the Pacific, one of the graduate schools she's considering for next year. I had a wonderful few days there, attending Eucharist and Taize services, talking with intelligent, intellectual people who are passionately engaged with their faith, and going for long walks on the Berkeley campus. (The redwoods and eucalyptus trees are amazing!) During the meetings I attended and the conversations I had, the word discernment was used often, a process the community there takes for granted as an integral aspect of the spiritual life. How do I discern what is the next step for me in life? How do I discern what God's call is to me? What is my vocation? How and where am I to live that out? Not only was the assumption made that my twenty-two-year-old daughter needs to engage in this process as she considers graduate school and her life's work, but that discernment is also a necessary ongoing process for all of us, no matter the stage of our life.
 
I came back from California, and a few days later, I was going over a chapter from the Anamchara author who is working on a book titled Song of a Christian Sufi—and there again, I encountered the word discernment. The author describes discernment as an often-painful process, a lonely and bewildering time where we lose our sense of what we thought were the very foundations of our life. She relates the process to both purification and liberation, and adds:
 
Whichever term one chooses, it is a painful process. Within the Christian tradition, this process is often referred to as the “dark night of the soul,” a liberation from everything external we think will make us happy, as well as from everything within us that obstructs our happiness. Purification helps us to dis-identify with our culture, nation, occupation, family, religion, education, and a host of feelings we have about ourselves, God, and the universe. Nothing is left unquestioned. It is a terrifying practice. But unless purification is undergone, we cannot advance spiritually. . . .
 
The experience of the “loss” of God at this time is pure anguish. We feel abandoned, lonely, empty, alienated. . . . Nothing seems to help—neither prayer nor spiritual directors nor religious practices. Alone in a universe that neither helps nor understands, we wait it out—alone.
 
What finally results is a freedom from everything that held us back in the past. We’ve been freed to walk the path in a new way.
 
That is, until the next time.
 
I've experienced those times in my life. And what the author describes here reminds me of another Anamchara book, The Awakening Tales, and a recent interview I did where I talked about the process of ongoing "dying" as it relates to one of the Tales. (Clearly, my mind is a constantly intermeshing mish-mash of Anamchara books!) From this perspective, discernment requires a willingness to to be both purified and liberated, to die to our old conceptions, our familiar mental constructs.
 
But what does all this have to do with the inclusiveness to which I've committed Anamchara? When I first began using the word, it sounded like such a pleasant, good-natured attitude, with little in common with the anguish we've been describing here.
 
And yet as we work to make Anamchara's goals real and tangible, the inclusiveness we're espousing is not an easy, oh-whatever! kind of outlook. Instead, it's a determined and sometimes painful commitment to step outside our preconceived notions, our personal backgrounds, our cultural blindness—and walk naked and uneasy into the presence of the Other, believing that there we will find the Divine presence as well. When we let go of our own ideas and opinions, our certainty about what we SHOULD do, what we SHOULD believe, we allow room for God. What comes next may be startling, and at first, even uncomfortable, but if it leads us into a greater ability to live out God's love on this Earth, then we can trust we have discerned the next step in our spiritual journey. As Jesus said, the fruits are the proof (Matthew 7:16).