The Beginnings of My Spiritual Journey

This is my first published essay in Spiritual Health Magazine!

Introduction

Anyone identifying as spiritual but not religious embarks on a unique path filled with challenges related to self-identity, relationships with others, the larger society, or some form of transcendent higher power. Unlike those who find solace in a tried-and-true path dictated by organized religion, the spiritual but not religious individual must rely on personal choice and inclinations to discover their own truth and craft their own version of an “authentic self.” With this in mind, I want to share with you how I became interested in discovering “who I am” and how I started on the path to discover my own version of the truth.

My Favorite Uncle

Uncle Ancel, my dad’s older brother and my favorite uncle, stood over six feet tall and probably weighed at least two hundred and twenty pounds. As a kid, I often visited his house to play with one of his sons, straining my neck way up high whenever he walked into the room. My Uncle Ancel always seemed happy and eager to lend a helping hand, like the time he drove us kids to school every morning for three weeks when my dad was out of town for work. But all that changed one unsuspecting summer evening.

Brain Cancer

One warm summer evening, between my junior and senior years in high school, Uncle Ancel collapsed to the cellar floor like a sack of potatoes while square dancing next door with my mom, dad, and their square-dancing club. I was sitting at our kitchen table, munching on my bowl of Lucky Charms cereal when my dad suddenly burst through the kitchen door. His eyes were bugging out of his head, and I could see his chest rapidly rising and falling with short, sporadic breaths. Like a power lifter straining with every ounce of his being to get the weights above his head, my dad blurted out:

“Your Uncle Ancel just fell to the cellar floor, and we can’t wake him up. I called the ambulance.”

Like a bolt of lightning appearing then disappearing in the night sky, my dad turned around and flew back out of the kitchen door, running full steam ahead back to our neighbor’s house.

I stood there on my neighbor’s front lawn, frozen like a statue, taking in the surreal scene of my father frantically trying to help the EMTs lift the stretcher carrying my uncle’s motionless body into the waiting ambulance. Two days later, my dad called our family together in the living room and announced that his older brother, Ancel, whom he loved dearly, had a tumor in his brain and would need immediate surgery to save his life. I never suspected this family crisis would mark the start of my serious foray into spirituality and religion.

The Last Time I Saw My Uncle Alive

The last time I saw my Uncle Ancel alive was the day his wife placed a frantic call to my dad. Her husband had fallen on his way to the second-floor stair landing and couldn’t get back to his feet. My dad and I rushed over to their house, just a couple of minutes away. As we ran up the back porch stairs and into the small kitchen area, I peered down the hallway toward the second-floor stairs. There, I saw my Uncle Ancel sitting on the floor with his back against the staircase, his head hanging down between his knees.

The first thing I noticed was his almost completely bald head, sprinkled with small patches of snow-white hair jutting outward on the top of his scalp like porcupine quills. The sight of him sitting there, hunched over with seemingly no strength left in his body, shocked me and broke my heart. As my dad and I rushed over to help him, he slowly lifted his head, flashed a faint smile in our direction, and then, as if he had no strength to hold up his head, dropped it back down between his knees.

We carefully lifted him off the floor and, fireman’s and began to gingerly move him up the stairs to his bedroom. He seemed so much smaller and felt noticeably light as we moved him. We placed him on his bed in a sitting position. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but as my dad and I stood in the doorway, my Uncle Ancel made a joke and attempted a hearty laugh in our direction. I couldn’t believe he was trying to tell a joke under such circumstances. That was the last time I saw him alive. Three months later, my Uncle Ancel passed away, one year from the day he was first diagnosed with that vicious, devilish cancer.

An Unsettling Dream

One night, a month after my uncle passed, I experienced a disturbing dream. I found myself walking down a dimly lit hallway with doorways on my left and right. Suddenly, about fifty feet ahead, a human figure appeared in one of the doorways to my left. This startled me because all the other doorways appeared empty. It dawned on me that I was alone in a very large and unfamiliar building. A tightening and slight sensation of nausea developed in the pit of my stomach, like after you wolf down a McDonald’s hamburger way too fast.

The figure of a man standing in the doorway, motionless, was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. My mind instantly flashed back to the numerous times I’d seen my Uncle Ancel dressed the same way. “Is that my Uncle Ancel?” I heard myself ask in my mind. Sure enough, as I got closer, I recognized it was my “dead” Uncle Ancel standing there!

Our eyes instantly locked. It felt like some kind of magnetic energy beam was pulling our eyes closer together. I froze in my tracks at the sight of my dead uncle. Scanning his face, I was immediately drawn to his mouth and lips. His lips seemed tightly pressed together in a straight line, and the look on his face made me feel like he was deadly serious about something he wanted to say. At the same time, it seemed like he was failing to get his mouth to open, as if his lips were clamped shut by some kind of heavy, steel zipper. “What are you trying to tell me, Uncle?” I heard myself pleading in my mind, over and over again. After uttering those words, the dream abruptly ended, and I woke up feeling uneasy and confused about what had just happened.

Searching for Answers

Over the next several days, I often flashed back to this dream about my dead uncle. I wondered if, somehow, somewhere, my uncle was still alive and trying to communicate with me. But why? Why me, and what did he want to tell me? For the first time in my life, I started to seriously think about life after death and the meaning of my life.

The untimely death of my Uncle Ancel at just fifty-six years old confused me, especially the way he had to suffer for a year with that vicious and devilish cancer. Why am I on this earth, anyway? What is the purpose of my life? Is there a spiritual world people live in after they die? These were the questions constantly buzzing in my head as a seventeen-year-old preparing to start his senior year in high school.

Raised in a marginally serious Catholic family, including my two-year stint as an altar boy at our local church and my grandmother’s talk of me possibly becoming a Catholic priest, by the time I entered junior high school, my love and admiration for God had turned into a love and admiration for girls and sports. (These new pursuits, supplanting my love for God, failed to bolster my academic career!) As a senior in high school, I had little interaction with the local church and no interest in exploring what the church’s teachings had to say about life after death and the meaning of life on earth. I did not speak a word of this interest to my parents or siblings.

Feeling Isolated and Alone

Trying to talk with my classmates about life after death and mind-to-mind communication elicited disapproving stares and arched eyebrows. Yet, I kept researching this topic, buying books about it, and going to the library. The local university library became a particular haven, offering support and protection from what seemed to be an uninterested, indifferent student population. I recall eagerly approaching the entrance door at the main university library. The closer I got, the more I felt the building reaching out to me, inviting me in, beckoning me to the now defunct Dewey decimal card catalog to search and find another gem of a book about the spiritual world and life after death. I spent hours on end relishing the musty, hardbound books, many published in England at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century.

Unaware at the time, I was beginning to feel isolated and estranged from my close friends and hangout buddies. Their interests and concerns felt light years away from my obsessive interest in “otherworldly” matters.

Conclusion

I didn’t know where I was headed, but I simply felt I had to keep pursuing this rather odd and peculiar path, trying to discover the truth about life after death and the existence of a spiritual world, a journey originally brought on by the passing of my dear uncle.

Maybe my Uncle Ancel was alive somewhere, somehow, trying to help guide me in an unforeseen, unknown direction, for the sake of my future….

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