Wesley Lachman 

     A spiritual path is paradoxical. On the one hand we are doing something–praying, meditating, questioning–to bring us to God. At the same time God is entirely with us, filling us, surrounding us, loving us. What we seek is what we already are, but don't yet recognize.

     Perhaps your spiritual path began, as mine did, in your faith community. I went to church camp where we were sent out each morning for thirty minutes of "quiet time" to read the Bible and pray. As I sat up against a huge tree, all alone, I remember looking out and being confronted by the silence of the woods. It seems that the awesome power and presence of silence has remained my companion ever since.

     Later, Sharry, my wife, and I were working as volunteers for an nongovermental orgainization doing training in the developing world. We were fortunate to live in Calcutta and in Zambia among people who had very little. Those eight years living among the poor taught me that my life was inseparable from the lives of others. What happened in their lives was happening in mine. I started to experience compassion.

     Subsequently I became involved with Montessori teaching and children who had learning disabilities. When my classroom job ended unexpectedly, I floundered. I saw that my self-concept had become all tangled up with my job. I felt like a failure. My meager achievements simply did not measure up to what society expected of a man my age.

     Then it struck me. I was feeling inadequate according to cultural standards that I didn't even believe in. I had unwittingly become identified with my culture rather than my faith. So I abruptly switched my identification to my local congregation and became quite involved there. But I began to realize that I could not derive my identity from anything external, not even the church. I would have to find it in that place of inner silence, the realm of spirit.

     I soon found myself on a spiritual plateau. I was going around in circles: being forgiven, trying harder, not measuring up, being forgiven again and so on. I needed a deeper way. After some time I stumbled upon the contemplative tradition of the church. Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating found this in the monastery, but I found it in Eugene at the interfaith Center for Sacred Sciences.

     Then my spiritual experience began to form itself into a coherent whole. Through meditation, I came to see that at the very center of who I am is the silence and stillness and spaciousness of God. Everything else revolves around that, lives by the light of that. All true compassion comes from that.

     This is what I had glimpsed in the forest as a child. I had spent almost a lifetime searching for what I already was. At center, we are all of us that silent spaciousness that we have all encountered. There, in God, in us, we find the lasting happiness we have all yearned for.

      Wesley Lachman is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), he teaches spirituality at Central Presbyterian Church in Eugene where he is also active in social concerns. He studies the contemplative path at the Center for Sacred Sciences, in Eugene.

      This column is coordinated by Lane Interfaith Allliance, a network of more than 30 religious and spiritual traditions in the Eugene-Springfield area. For more information, visit www.laneinterfaithalliance.org or call 344-5693.