So I’m on this journey, for want of a better word.  I don’t know when it began, sometimes I could say last year, or the year before, sometimes I think it was about twenty years ago, or longer.  Whatever.  It’s been about seeking the divine, about searching for a  life purpose, about fulfilling a God given mission.

When I was younger I wanted to be a religious sister, join a convent, live a life devoted to prayer and service.  Then, for the longest time, I followed a vocation to ordained ministry.  I took theology classes and worked as a lay minister.  I read about prayer, took retreats, attended self-development courses, completed personality type indicator profiles.  I had therapy.  I had spiritual direction.  I trained professionally, and then in a different profession.  I was married, and then not, and then married again.  I became a parent.  Years and years of searching, sometimes feeling like I was in the right place, or on the right path, but mostly not so much.  Resting my head for a few months with one form of prayer, then finding it empty and moving on.  A spiritual nomad.

The net widened. I explored meditation, Reiki and its principles,  I began following the wheel of the year and the cycles of the moon, connecting to rhythms beyond liturgical calendars.  I discovered divination, began studying the tarot.  I took Hay House courses on angels and crystals and space clearing.  Still hungry to know, still hungry to connect with God, with that which is beyond, to find the path, my path.

What I am coming to realise, maybe you’ve found this too, is that for all the books and courses and studies and wisdom out there at the end of the day it is just about God and me.  I have tried to follow the patterns set down by formal religion, or by particular spiritual gurus.  Often I end up feeling like something is missing.  It can be like following a recipe but the end result looking nothing like the glossy image in the book.  Unexpected in spite of best efforts.

I am wondering if that missing link is God herself; if I have been so busy trying to find her that I am failing to notice  she is right here.  The truth I have been seeking might, after all, under my nose. Which is not at all what I was expecting.  Or looking for.  But is, perhaps, what is. Not someone else’s truth, not wisdom from a book or a doctrine… the truth of divine love and light breathing quietly beside me, holding me in the dark and whispering in my ear as I sleep.