by Yong Chin Denn

My early spiritual development, as I see it, was mostly my own making. Since my youth was during the Korean War, I was largely left alone. My father was declared missing in the war, and my mother left my sister and me with relatives in order to work. In my relative's house I observed their ideas about God. The existence of God was commonly acknowledged and the acceptance of their humble place and our role in God's creation was taught simply in the context of our daily life. Many old, wise stories were told to us about how we ought to serve people and all other living beings we come into contact with in our daily life. Later, my mother came and took us to live with her. She did not have much time for spiritual matters but instilled in us a sense of independence, teaching us to develop a strong self-image.

When I sought God's aid in the first major crisis of my adult life, I realized that I had to let go of my self-image. I could not stand before God and say, "Here I am Lord, this is the way I am," and expect to gain the divine way. Yet letting go of "the way I am" felt like death. Can one exist without a certain way of thinking or being that one is used to? I had not yet gained the divine way, still God seemed to ask me to drop "my way" first.

The wrenching pains I endured during this process of release were much more intense than the pain of my life's crisis, and my first inclination was to abandon my spiritual journey. In retrospect, I see that the pain was inevitable considering the emotional and spiritual state that I was in at the time. However, if I had had more simple faith in God's goodness, I would not have suffered so much fear. God never forces his will upon anyone; he gave us our own free will. When we come to God with our troubles, we are praying that he will give us the grace to see more clearly or grant us his peace and love within so that we can then make our own decision. Our spiritual journey will not make us God's puppets. Rather, we will be more closely approaching the true selves God intended us to be.

From my own bits and pieces of experiences of God, and through reading other people's unitive experiences, one thing has become clear: somehow, we lose the physical, emotional sense of ourselves and merge into all there is and discover that each element is in its place, radiating peace and love. We experience a sense of coming home, a sense of perfect unity and harmony. The fact that we painfully long for it afterward is a further sign that we instinctively feel that that is where we belong. The pure, all-encompassing love energy we feel and yearn for is God.

The homemade image of myself I created before I knew who I really was is not worth fighting for, but its inconvenient intrusions into my daily life must be tolerated. The real meaning of self-sacrifice, or dying to the self, is the death of this homemade self-image. We are deathly fearful of losing this homemade self. Constantly, we try to bargain with God, seeing just how much of our self-image we are willing to let go of at a given moment of our life. It is similar to my experience of learning to swim as a little girl: I remember trying to swim with one big toe always touching the bottom of the pool. Soon I realized that I could not swim as long as my one toe was touching the bottom.

We can clean our actions of selfishness and practice various virtues, yet at some point we need to abandon our homemade self in order to be born from above and see God. We need to reclaim our rightful heritage as children of God, a pure love energy. It really is not a dying experience since the homemade self was only an image, a mask. It is a birthing experience of our spirit being. When the Holy Spirit invites us, we need to simply consent without fear. The only part we are responsible for is to tame our homemade self so it yields to the soul's spiritual journey back to God.

When one is blessed to have been brought up to trust and love God from early childhood, that simple pure faith alone can help overcome fears that arise during one's journey towards God. However, most of us seem to struggle along, our faith growing bit by bit from the tiniest seed of love for God, taking small, fearful steps toward God. During this timid process, our love for God grows little by little. We are like the newly hatched turtles in the spring, blindly yet instinctively crawling towards water. We set out for love from our mother's loving care and travel all the way to God's divine love, looking for perfect love outside us. However, when our spiritual eyes are opened, we drop the pursuit and simply see the perfect love in ourselves and everything which is God.

For me God is pure love energy itself and we are all a part of the love energy within God. With it the duality of subject and object in love relationships somehow disappears. My age-old desire to possess the unconditional love of someone or to have someone to love seems redundant. The unconditional love of every soul is already extended to me. The soul's oneness is such that it is as if a part of me is loving the other part of me. The unconditional perfect love that we are seeking cannot be found from the level of our homemade self. When we connect with others from the center of our being, the perfect love is the only operating energy we will find.

From my childhood relative's house, I walked miles to reach my real home in God. In fact, it took me nearly a half century. Yet I haven't the foggiest idea how to live in my real home as a member of God's household. The verse, "my spirit sent by God, taking nothing with me," gives me hope for now.

Yong Chin Denn is a 1996 graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program. This article is taken from one of her program papers.