Research on spirituality indicates that people who are religious are happier than non-religious people, but what if you are a struggling with religion?

Let me share some of my experiences with you.

I am gay and was raised a Catholic.  My mother, before she was my mother, had been a nun.  I found this out only after my grandmother had died and I was looking through a box of old photographs that she had kept under her bed.  I came across a picture of my mother in a nun outfit and immediately thought “Halloween” and kept shuffling through the pictures.  Then I came to another series of photos and noticed that in some there were leaves on the ground, others snow and still others were taken in what seemed like the bright sunshine of Summer and there was my mother, still in that damn Halloween outfit!  My eyes bugged out as I put 2 + 2   together.  I held up a picture in front of my sister’s face and said, “What is this?”

“It looks like Mommy.  IN A NUN OUTFIT!”

My mother had been listening in the other room unbeknownst to us; as if on cue she stepped into the room.

“Yes.  I was a nun.”

“WHAT!??” we exclaimed, fully expecting Allen Funt to step out of the shadows as well but he didn’t.  Yes, my mother had been a nun for years and never got around to telling us.   That was just typical of my family dynamic.   Everything was a big secret and any life experience or wisdom that could be imparted from the older generation was basically kept to themselves.   I was on my own and had to raise myself.  That’s why it took so long, frankly.

All I knew about God or religion from my parents is that YOU ARE ORDERED TO BELIEVE IT no matter how outlandish the stories may be.   Just like the fact that my mother had been a nun was a big secret, questions about spirituality were off the table.

With absolutely no guidance, I made plenty of mistakes and by the time I was 25, I was so beat up emotionally, angry and lost that I had abandoned anything that had to do with God or religion and crawled into the rooms of recovery with a closed mind.

With all the talk of spirituality in the rooms, I believed that I would never be happy because, by this time I didn’t believe in God.  In my heart, I just didn’t know.  If there was a God, he certainly had no interest in me.  During this time my friend Katrina, the woman who became my mentor and basically saved my life famously said to me, “Native Americans believe that when you throw a rock across a river, you change the course of the river.”  I wrote in depth about that experience here.

That statement opened up my world spiritually.  I may not believe in a man on a cloud making a list of who is naughty and who is nice, but I can believe in cause and effect.

I am also pretty sure that there are spiritual laws of the universe just like there are laws of physics. Scientists who study the Universe are aware that we know but a little about all its mysteries.   More is being revealed to us all the time.  For example, just over 100 years ago, we didn’t know that x-rays, gamma rays and microwaves existed.  Before that time, these invisible aspects of the Universe were undetectable but now their existence is common knowledge.  There is so much that is unseen in the Universe.  I would be truly arrogant to think that I could say definitively that I know all it’s secrets – especially in regard to spiritual concerns.

I had this epiphany where I came to understand that peace comes when surrendering to that mystery.
Here’s the story:  I adopted my cat from the North Shore Animal League when he was around 6 weeks old.  I had to take him back to the facility in a few months to be neutered.  The night before the operation, the doctor told me not feed him because he was going under anesthesia the next day.

So there I was, cooking myself a meal for myself and my poor little kitten was pacing around his empty bowl, crying out to me to feed him.   This was breaking my heart!  How could I let this little kitten cry!?  He couldn’t understand that I wasn’t feeding him for his own good and I couldn’t explain it to him.

I picked him up and looked in his big eyes,  “I’m sorry.  I can’t feed you tonight.  It might hurt you.”

I immediately felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder and I understood that, in some ways, I was like the cat in the apartment.

You see… the cat in the apartment lives all his life in a couple of rooms not understanding the full scope of what that means.  He stays in the apartment, sometimes he even goes in the hall and he gets pet by some of the neighbors, but he doesn’t understand that when that person who feeds him leaves the apartment she goes on a subway and heads to work in a big building at a TV station and this TV station goes all over the country and people pick it up with satellites that are in space, and in space there is a moon that people walked on and on and on and on…

These are all concepts the cat could never understand – he doesn’t even have the capacity to “get it” even if I sat down and tried.

All that the cat knows is that he’s not getting fed and it doesn’t seem fair.

You see, I think I’m pretty smart, but just like I couldn’t tell my little cat in words that he could understand that not feeding him was for his own good, the mysteries of the Universe are so vast that, even though they may affect me, I don’t even have the capacity to fully understand them.

I embrace the mystery with an open heart and mind.  More will be revealed.