What Drew You To This Path?

I don’t know what lead me to this path.  Dumb luck?  God loved me first and then I loved Him?  It’s hard to write an essay on this—where does this path begin?  When I took the promise?  When my good friend, Jody, invited me to the seminar on Money in the Holy Way by Rahim Bronner?  When Sidi al-Jamal married me to the heart and soul of my beloved?  When that first light dawned and I felt something move inside me?  Has it been lifetimes or just this time?  Was it the years in Catholic school, First Holy Communion, a mother whose devotion to the Blessed Virgin linked us for the first time to holy beads?  Was it thirty years of meditation, three marriages, the death of my daughter?  If you are wanting a sound bite for a good PR presentation, I don’t know if you will find it here.

And what is this path? Is it the Shadhiliyya Sufi path or is it the path of the ages?  The only true and beautiful path.  The path of knowledge and love of God.  Is it the path of Divine intervention in our creation, in our humanness?  Is it the teachings of all the Masters, great saints, the enlightened?  I have tried several times to begin this essay, to answer your question and all I am left with are questions of my own.  Who is asking?  Who is answering?  My heart aches with the longing to know.

What brought me to this path—my heart’s longing for its Self.  My soul’s aching desire to know You.  I have had hints, glimpses, moments, even days, of complete annihilation, complete weeping surrender to You, the goal, the source, the path of all my longing.  And then nothing.  Lost again in the shadow lands, unable to distinguish truth from non-truth; fantasy from reality.  What brought me here is what has brought me anywhere, everywhere.  This longing, this aching to know You, to be You, to become You.

Perhaps pain and suffering drove me to You.  Perhaps the sweet, subconscious memory of those times You were near and maybe I knew it as You, maybe I didn’t—but You were there surrounding me with the most ineffable love and light.  My earliest recollection in the beautiful silent church as a young girl, sitting alone in the cathedral like arch of the sanctuary.  Light, filtered and golden above the altar, a sense of holy wonder and nearness.  Or was it in the nights by the big bed in my parents’ bedroom, where we as children would kneel and recite the Rosary as mother led us through the mysteries of Jesus.  Where, upon the morning of my mother’s death, praying the rosary by her bedside, I was taken back to those early rosaries and saw for the first time Mother Mary’s presence in our circle and her imprint on my soul—a child of God.  Or was it the day in Chicago O’Hara International Airport, on my way home to Oregon to my daughter’s funeral, who died in the night while I sat in deep, silent meditation in the fields of Iowa.  Maybe then, while I wrote the eulogy for my daughter who was 10 when she died; maybe then when You showed me that my soul and all the souls of all the busy, rushing travelers were linked, linked together in Your passionate embrace. 

I don’t know when I came to this path.  You pick one.  I am at a loss to choose.