Heaven is not a Gated Community

(An excerpt from my memoir soon to be published “Out of Your Mind- Into Your Heart)

I was drawn to this grand, Gothic-style revival church built in the 1920s. In the sanctuary, light refracted into rainbows through the huge stained-glass windows.

The crowning event of that day, though, was the celebration of the Eucharist.

For the first time in my life, I heard words of welcome:

“Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself on this journey of faith, you are welcome at our table.”

Since childhood in my South African Evangelical background, I had been taught that the Communion ceremony is restricted to the chosen few who had “given their lives to Jesus.”

If you were a person of color, someone would quietly encourage you to attend the church’s afternoon service in the local African language, Zulu.

If you were gay, the Tribe would accuse you of living in sin and suggest “conversion” therapy.

If you were divorced you’d be met with raised eyebrows, though your chances of acceptance improved if your spouse had left you (especially for adultery) rather than the other way around.

None of you would be invited to partake of the Eucharist.

But here, in this congregation, they understood that every single person has a tiny flame of universal reality — that is, Divine Presence — in them.

None are contaminated by original sin.

We all have god-nature implanted in us.

And that makes everyone welcome at this family table.

I’m gobsmacked when it dawns on me that this community of faith embraces black and white, gay and straight, and even a person like myself who was attempting to shake off the vestiges of my Evangelical beliefs. But how do we live out our God nature in an increasingly secular world?

This question pushed me, over time, one step farther along the road to recovery from toxic religion, Evangelical Christian or other.

I have already said that the pain I felt was the prelude to my heart opening to love and oneness with all. But I learned the hard way that pain alone cannot bash down the locked door of one’s own heart.

All my efforts to awaken to the core of love, Divine Presence, seemed to end in frustration.

Now I know that that is because a true connection to Presence cannot be achieved through effort, determination, or our self-assessed merit. Grace alone opens this door.

Our part is to humbly surrender. It was only after I began to step out of myself, let go of the illusion that I controlled my life, and let go of my story built on my assumption of white male privilege, that I approached the rim of my heart. I could not ram the gates of my personal heaven. I had to be invited in.

Of course, I had read about such experiences. A great spiritual teacher named Adyashanti, for example, once said,

“Those moments when we know that we don’t know, when we take the backward step, heart wide open, we fall into grace.”

This realization came to him after decades of trying to reach his inner depths (his awakening) through disciplined meditation practice and assiduous study of the principles of his religion. He felt despair when he could not achieve what he worked so hard for. Adyashanti comments, “My spiritual path was the path of defeat. It was only through this crashing defeat that awakening was revealed.”

“Oh to Grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be”