When I was about 20 I had a spiritual experience which changed my life. I was going out with a young Francophone lady. On one summer weekend I was staying with her at her parents’ home in Montreal. On Sunday morning her parents decided we should accompany them to church. I think they suspected we were up to a little hanky panky (and quite rightly so) and were in need of a little religious reminder.
I hadn’t been for a few years and wasn’t looking forward to it. They took us to an English Catholic church in my honour.
The structure was a modern (for the mid-sixties), low, dome shape. That morning a strange thing happened. When they turned on the cooling system, the fans went in reverse. The consequence was that the accumulated dust in the filters ended up in the church. About two inches of dirt covered everything. We had to sit and sweat in all this filth.
This day they had a guest priest from the Arch Diocese of Greater Montreal area to deliver the sermon. He raved and ranted and pounded the pulpit, for a good half hour, admonishing these good people for the fact that only one English Catholic priest had been ordained in the entire city the previous year.
Well, here we were, wallowing in this sea of dust and dirt and this guy is laying a mega-guilt trip on us, causing most to squirm in their pews. Suddenly, he paused, took a deep breath, raised his arms to the sky and said, in a much calmer and quieter voice, “Perhaps this is a sign from God...” lowered his arms to the ground, “...showering His blessings upon us.”
I shrieked in hysteria, and then, suddenly fearing for my life, bolted from the church, never to return. I have no idea what anybody else got from his attempt at metaphor but I didn’t see all that dirt as a blessing. To me it seemed we had been crapped on from on high.
For me it had been a sign that organized religion was not the path for me. A few years later I saw a bumper sticker which read, “Jesus was the first Anarchist”. To me that made sense. I read what he had to say and what he did with his life. I surmized from it he was trying to tell us the spiritual journey is to be a solo one - a personal odyssey. Judging by his contempt for the religious sorts of the day, he didn’t seem to have much use for organized religion, either.