My Spiritual Sandwich

Dr. Vicki Harvey

 
The history of my spirituality resembles an ordinary sandwich. There’s the slice of bread I’m on now that is quite similar to the slice that composed the first nine years of my life. The decades in the middle are the filling—meaty and inviting—but unbounded without the leavened bread on either end that holds it together and gives identity.
 
I recall being a child and the simplicity with which I talked to God as if He were right here.  I could see Him in the clouds and knew He was looking directly back. There was no dogma, no guilt, no “radio interference” of voices that have no business in the flow of conversation between me and my Maker. I didn’t learn it. It was just there. I am now spending my elderly years back in that purity and organic connection, though a volcanic blast rocketed me there.
 
The sixty years in between became a rich breeding ground, a composite soil that included nutrients and byproducts of a life in all its vibrancy, messiness, saintliness and faultiness, beauty and unfathomable tragedy. God was my father figure, good deed rewarder, listener of one-way prayer, source of ego gratification as well as of mystery and doubt. He was an entity that went from an actual Being to the Ground of Being, to not existing at all
 
Though there’s guidance from a Holy book that underpins our faith, in my case the Bible, humans are left with a great ambiguity—a lack of a factual proof of God. So perhaps no object has more projection attached to it than our concept of deity. Understanding how we use God for our fantasies versus an actual experience with Presence can take a lifetime. At least it did for me.
 
Depending on my stage of life I sought God’s will accordingly. Between college and grad school I traveled to a mountain in Switzerland where Frances Schaefer, an American theologian, ran a commune called L’Abri. Walking through alpine meadows I asked a spiritual scholar my burning question: “Could I be both a follower of Freudian teachings and a Christian, since Freud was an unapologetic atheist?” Though my naïveté rings loud to my seventy-year-old ears now, I am struck by that young woman’s earnestness.
 
Every client in my thirty year career that followed as a psychologist came to their session, knowingly or not, surrounded by my prayer that God would be in the midst of our time together, guiding our work. I was active in church. I felt I was in God’s embrace and giving back as I faced challenges both in my private life as well as my efforts to create a more just world through activism.
 
Then my husband and I faced an unimaginable tragedy—the suicide of our beautiful daughter. At that, my faith extinguished as completely as a flame snuffed by a breath. This child, whom we had adopted and given our all to, given to us through God’s grace, in whom we found joy and meaning, but with whom we also suffered alongside of, was just GONE. It was incomprehensible and unsurvivable, and only made a modicum of sense if indeed God did not exist and never had. All was random and nihilistic.
 
My life was over. And I can’t say today how and why that isn’t still so. No explanation fits the enormity of the situation. But the fact is, I’m still here, I’m actually thriving, and God inhabits every breath and nuance of my existence.
 
An amalgamation of people and events lifting me happened, I know that.
 
A friend and her children anonymously left paper heart messages at my door for a year, regular as clockwork. A decision that we couldn’t spend the rest of our lives looking at our empty hands and heart. So we would adopt again.
 
The possibility of getting a child that could fit what our broken hearts could parent was close to nil, and yet it happened, not with one child, but with two.
 
A pastor asking me if I’d like to serve on a national panel of our church for mental health justice and that panel accepting me, thus giving me a lifeline to pour myself into in and advocate for others at the very fulcrum of my own heartbreak.
 
A friend who listened endlessly to me about how God didn’t exist, who read all the materials I gave her so I could convince her and myself, and who allowed me all the space to do this, so that I eventually reached the end of my own arguments, exhausted and unable to claim atheism.
 
I’m on that second slice of leavened sandwich bread now, resting, existing. Things are simple again. I talk to God. God either answers in quite striking ways or He fills the silence with Presence or sometimes not. Whatever God looks like, He is first and foremost in the hands and hearts of people.  He becomes flesh and dwells among us so that He know us and has intimacy with us. For me, my spirituality isn’t about anything else. No getting it right, no doing God’s will and expecting certain outcomes. I meditate and ask for God’s gaze of love and then I sit and try to get out of my own thoughts and needs. I wait expectantly. I have no agenda. Getting out of the way has made all the difference.
 
The middle part of my sandwich was mostly about anxious striving. Now I let God come or not. It makes no difference. I see God all around anyway. He always has been here, and now He delights in my recognizing that and looking back at Him. God goes through whatever I go through. He suffers when I do, and rejoices when I do. This is something I experience now just like it was when I was a small child and I knew God’s love to be intrinsic.
 
Dr. Vicki Harvey is retired and constantly wondering when the ‘slow’ part of that lifestyle begins. Raising a twelve and eighteen-year-old, recovering from knee replacement, caring for many pets, enjoying her marriage, and using her voice for political activism along with the passionate partners at Diamond Bar United Church of Christ in California, are some of the ways she lives into her faith journey as it reveals itself day by day.