The spiritual life is a two-fold experience. First it is your experience of being a beloved child of God—a personal, two-way relation with the spirit that lives within you. This relationship is so mind-changing, so behavior-transforming that your relationship with every other person is changed as a result.
That is the second experience which the spiritual life encompasses: your family relationship with your spiritual parent’s other children. First being a child of God; then enjoying being in a family with your brothers and sisters.
The spiritually mature person is like the paperclip which one might select from a bowl full of paper clips. When placed in intimate contact with a magnet, it becomes progressively more magnetized. Once returned to the bowl, its relationship with every other paper clip has changed. It now draws the others to it, just as the magnet does. The person who experiences God is a changed person. He is spiritually magnetized.
A Personal Experience with God
When I talk about having “experience with God,” I am not talking primarily about a dramatic conversion experience such as the apostle Paul had, although occasionally people have such sudden realizations. The experience with God which I am talking about is not a single event but a living, growing, daily blossoming of your friendship with God.
This experience is one of coming to know the divine as your spiritual parent. Understanding with your mind the concept that God is your parent is an important first step. But experiencing God is quite a different matter.
Try an experiment with me. Imagine right now the leader of your country. You have probably never met them personally, but you read or hear the things they say from time to time. You know what they do for a living and what kind of reputation they have as a person.
Now imagine someone you love; someone you are very close to. Think of the things you enjoy about him or her. Remember what it is like to sit quietly sharing your feelings and thoughts. Think of what a pleasure it is to put your arms around her or him and share a great big hug. Wonderful, isn’t it? Now contrast the two people in your experience. The leader you know about. The second person you know personally. You experience them, perhaps every day. There is a lot of difference between your experience of the two.
You can actually know God rather than being limited to knowing about him. Maybe it seems a little strange to compare knowing God with knowing a material person, but you can experience God.
Sometimes the feeling of enjoying the contemplation of the goodness of God is very much like the feeling you would get when you are sharing a great big joyful hug with someone you really love. While you are not able to touch a material body, you can still feel God’s presence. You can sense your response to him.
You can also experience spiritual influence in your life through the circumstances which provide opportunities to grow and learn. Have you ever gone through a difficult time and then looked back and said, “Gee, that was rough while it was happening, but I wouldn’t trade what I learned for any amount of money?” Your spiritual parent helps you to learn and grow from such events. If you will be alert, he will turn them into opportunities to make great progress.
God Answers Prayer
You can experience answers to your prayers. There are times when you may receive immediate and definite answers to your prayers. Have you ever asked God to change your attitude about a person or a situation? If you are willing, that kind of prayer may be answered within a few moments. You will feel your attitude being transformed.
There are situations when it takes time before you realize that your prayers have been answered. Because you are, like all of us, an immature mortal, it is probably hard for you even to recognize the answers to your prayers. At times, it takes so long for you to grow to the point where you are ready to receive what you asked for, that you may not recognize the answer to that long-ago prayer. You may not even remember that you made the prayer request.
Then there are those times when your spiritual parent smiles and says, “You don’t know what you are asking.” But spirit does not stop there. You receive what you really need. Once, many years ago I prayed day after day after day for someone I loved. I didn’t even give any thought to the possibility that I might not know what my loved one needed. I just begged God to give him what I wanted him to have. Well, that was not what he needed. In fact, it would have been disastrous for him, spiritually. In infinite wisdom and grace, God gave him what he needed.
The result was years of struggle and uncertainty, but the rewards were a life freely and joyfully dedicated to spiritual work and a material existence adequate to enable him to pursue that work. It was eight or nine years after I had prayed so hard before I recognized that my prayers had been answered, and answered beyond anything my younger mind could have imagined. God answers your prayers with a generosity you may not yet recognize. And you can become wiser as you learn to recognize the answers.
God’s Watchcare
Another way in which you can experience your spiritual parent in your daily life is to recognize divine watchcare. Once you understand that the real and important things of this life are not material but spiritual, you begin to view your life differently. You see that the disasters were only hurtful in a material way. Indeed, you may see that they have been very beneficial spiritually. Given some time, you begin to see the true pattern: spiritually you are cherished and nurtured.
The wise parent does not cushion the toddler’s every fall nor stuff the child’s mouth full of food before he has even had the opportunity to feel hunger. What a good parent does do is to provide the things the child really needs, such as healthy food, love, opportunities to learn, and protection from truly harmful elements. This is the same way that God watches over you and provides you with what you really need. And as you mature, you begin to perceive this truth. Not only can you perceive it, but you can also take great pleasure in it.
Spiritual Guidance
God also gives you guidance. Certainly you may find guidance in wise writings and the example of worthy lives. But beyond these helpful guides, God gives you personal daily guidance. Now, I have had people look at me with narrowed eyes when I said that. “But,” they say, “God gave me a mind to use. I don’t ask God to solve my problems and give me the answers.”
No one really wants to be given all the answers. That would be like someone who, just when you have started a really intriguing riddle, gives you the answer. The riddle is ruined forever. No, divine guidance is more like that true friend who, when you are totally stumped on a really difficult riddle, gives you just a little hint.
God guides you and yet leaves you totally free to make your own decision, even if it is not the best one. And there is no nagging or saying, “I told you so.” God is a guide, not a drill sergeant—an unimposing friend who graciously permits you to ignore his advice if you wish. Divine guidance is often so subtle, you really have to look hard to perceive it. And when you look back on it, you wonder if you are fooling yourself about having been assisted.
Faith
Faith is a key element in this whole business of experiencing God. Experiencing God is not objective. It cannot be confirmed by scientific experiments. You can, however, step beyond belief to living faith. You can live in faith, feeling God’s presence in worship, acknowledging answers to your prayers, depending upon divine watchcare, following spiritual guidance. When you live in faith, your experience will tell you that you are happier, more successful, more aware physically, emotionally, and spiritually, more alive than you have ever been before. Your experience will testify to the truth and reality of your relationship with the divine.
When you believe that you can know God and are willing to live your life in intimate association, the divine spirit within you responds with open arms. Your spiritual parent confirms even the tiniest flicker of faith. Faith is that something inside of you that says” Even through I’m not yet able to feel God’s presence in worship, I know that I can grow to experience him. I will keep trying.”
Faith says, “Even though it looks like I have made a total mess of everything, I know God will help me transform this disaster into goodness and growth.” Faith is God’s presence within you that strengthens and guides you even though you do not sense a physical being. You are learning to respond to a spiritual being.
The Spiritual Seed
This experience between you and the divine is the spiritual seed from which all else meaningful in your life grows. From this personal relationship will flow your increasing interest in and love for your sisters and brothers. Each one will become uniquely and individually fascinating to you.
From this flowering union with God will arise those transforming fruits of the spirit and those urges to service which you will begin to give expression to. And eventually you, who are a material being of animal origin, will grow into resemblance to your new family. You will become more and more like your spiritual parent.
Serving Your Family
Serving sisters and brothers is not a servanthood, not some price you must pay to become “good.” Sometimes life is viewed as a battle of wills — your higher unselfish will overcoming and controlling your selfish lower will.
But such self-discipline is not the way you become like your spiritual parent.
You become more like God because you are attracted by the divine nature: You come to love bountiful goodness. Poise and mercy inspire you to higher and higher behavior. You long to be like that. Loving God causes you to progressively become more spiritually beautiful and good.
Out of your personal experience with your spiritual parent, arises an urge to serve and to share the joys of this relationship. You become more loving, serving, sustaining, feeling, giving, and forgiving. Service for your brothers and sisters flows naturally from the change within you. Freely serving others brings you joy.
Fostering Growth
You can foster this internal change of heart by testing life’s every small choice and decision by this standard: “Is the decision I am about to make Godlike, is It generous, kind, and considerate of others?”
You can foster your growth by choosing to live loyally by your highest concepts of truth, beauty and goodness. By the word “loyally,” I mean you love that which you value so much that you will readily and reliably choose to foster and support it
even at the expense of your personal material goals. This is a way of saying with your life, “It is truly my will that your will be done.” And it is wanting to do God’s will more than you want to do anything else which will unfailingly cause you to become more like God.
You can foster your own growth in God awareness by incorporating simple spiritual growth habits into your life. If you regularly, frequently, and habitually ask to know God’s will for you and if you remain alert for indications of that will, you will begin to know God’s will for you.
If you apply yourself to learning about God’s nature intellectually by study and spiritually by communion, then you will be able more accurately to predict and understand the best choice in situation after situation. God’s will is always consistent with a loving and merciful nature.
The Power of Love
The desire to do good to others is the essence of God. This is love. God has given each of his creatures an instinctive response to this kind of unselfish love. The experience of being loved evokes love as a response. We love because we have experienced unselfish love and want to be like that. Those we love will in turn desire to give their love. It is an instinctive response. If you learn to join in God’s love for your fellows, then you will be spreading the infectiousness of this desire to do good to others, this Godlike love.
Many modern human beings do not yet know it, but we have both a capacity and a need to express this kind of love. This desire to do good to others, when it becomes our shared experience, will transform our world.
This concept of love as the desire to do good to others is applicable to your relationship with deity also. It sounds strange to say you want to do good to God, but this is exactly what wanting to do God’s will is.
Who among us does not long to do things during this life which will advance truth, beauty, goodness, justice, mercy, fairness, equality, or some other higher value. Well, that is a desire to do good to others, and that is love. How grand it will be to be able to look back on your life and say, “Thank you for the opportunity, the boundless assistance, the guidance, and the experience of doing something for you.”
Love in Action
Service is a fruit or consequence of your relationship with God and of your growing ability to love others. It is a natural outgrowth of love.
When you really feel the desire to do good to others, then you have merely to put your sincere desire into action and you will be serving. Service which is a fruit of the spirit is not a burden or a duty, obligation or debt. It arises from your desire to do good for others. It is a joy and a reward in itself. Service is love in action.
It is impossible to define certain acts as being service because the motive of an act is the real determiner of whether it is true service. Any unselfish act done for the good of another person is service. Sometimes service is self-giving, at other times it is self-restraint, but always it is self-forgetful, done for the purpose of benefiting others. Within these bounds, service can be anything from a smile to giving up your life, from sharing your sandwich to sharing the good news of relationship with God, from a minute of prayer for a friend to a life wholeheartedly dedicated to the doing of God’s will.
Transformation: Personal and Planetary
Your experience of the world can be transformed by love right now. This transformation begins within you. Your transformation is only a realization and a decision away. The realization is that you already love others. You love others because already you desire to do good to them. The decision is to live your life consistent with that loving desire.
Living a loving life is the method. Love has the magic you long for to transform your life and your world. Transformation will happen if you live the spiritual life loyally and lovingly and if you allow time and the magic of love to work.
The spiritual life is based on a simple, basic philosophy of life which, if lived loyally, is guaranteed to bring about transformation, first in your life, then to your personal world, and ultimately to the culture of our entire planet. That philosophy is: Love and worship God. Love and serve your sisters and brothers. Have faith in both God and your siblings. Forgive, be unselfish, be merciful as well as just.
Acceptance of this philosophy of experiential love will bring humanity to God and God to humanity and in the process, it will bring humans together in loving mutual respect.
