The End of One Journey, the Beginning of Another

The new year seems like an apt time to celebrate one of the most potent experiences of newness I have ever had.

As described in the most recent installment of my spiritual adventures (posted way back last September!), I had enrolled in Pacific School of Religion (PSR) in Berkeley, California to pursue an "M.Div." degree.

PSR was a highly-respected seminary, and rightly so, with a fine faculty. Yet I found I wasn't happy there. After the exciting experiences of being "led" or "called," I missed the mystical flavor that had come to permeate my life. Here there were no spiritual experiences, but rather study of Old Testament history and exegesis of New Testament passages.

During the winter, I started meeting with two men early each morning for meditation. This satisfied some of my mystical longing. One of the men, Marty, was a fellow student in the M.Div. program. The other, Joseph, was a Franciscan friar who lived in a PSR dormitory but was involved in a different program of study through the Graduate Theological Union. Each morning, Joseph would usher us into our meditative state by ringing a pair of Tibetan "ting-sha" bells. We meditated for about half an hour.

Then, one day, Joseph arrived with an invitation. He said a most wonderful man he had met during a visit to Canada was coming to Berkeley to give a series of lectures. Joseph was sure Marty and I would find the talks very meaningful.

I felt hesitant. This was Berkeley in the 1970s, with announcements of lectures by Shri-so-and-so and Guru-such-and-such tacked to every telephone pole. Also, there was a charge for this lecture series, and as a student on scholarship, I seemingly had little money for such.

But Joseph, God bless him, persisted. He said to me, "Look, there's an open house tomorrow morning, at no charge. Come and meet Mr. Mills, and then you can decide." And he showed us a photo of this gentleman. Odd, I thought -- he looks familiar.

So the next morning, dressed in my only skirt, with a nice blouse (Joseph told us that Mr. Mills appreciated formality -- a rarity in Berkeley at the time) and headed off to the open house in an apartment near campus. Mr. Mills, impeccably dressed in a finely tailored suit, entered the living room where a couple of dozen people, mostly PSR students, were sitting. He began to speak; he wasn't giving a lecture, exactly, but neither was he simply chatting with individuals. And from his first words, something very strange was happening to me.

In his very first sentence, Mr. Mills said, ". . .a meeting to melt the ice so that water could be what it is. . . ." Not long before this, I had attended one of the "self-discovery" workshops so popular in California at the time. An exercise at the workshop was to draw a picture showing ourselves in a symbolic form. I drew a large block of ice, melting and watering flowers all around it. How could Mr. Mills know of this drawing? But to me, it seemed he did.

Later in his talk, he spoke of a mirror breaking, with some of his words closely paralleling my words in a poem I had written years before. A common subject, yes, and yet . . . .

But it was much more than these small coincidences that brought an extraordinary stillness into my mind. There was something in his presence, in the sound of his voice, perhaps -- I couldn't identify where the feeling came from. Somehow what he was saying -- or not saying? -- brought a profound, a gigantic sense of meaning, as though he were answering every deep question I had ever entertained. As though -- right there in that small apartment in Berkeley, California -- this man named Mr. Mills had just handed me the very secrets of the Universe.
(To be continued in the next post)