My Spiritual Journey

I am approaching my 90th birthday. I am only now beginning to realize that my spiritual journey is a lifetime process of learning and experiencing and becoming. I am still learning how to articulate to myself how I am a part of this awesome universe of constant creation of stars and galaxies and the astounding and continuing evolution of life that includes even me. And it is only in these recent years that I am experiencing a coming together of answers to my searching and studying. But even now, such answers are still only a glimpse into the marvelous mystery of who we are.

When I was 42, my daughter, Susan, died suddenly at age 16. Amidst the grief, I remember a real feeling of “belonging to humanity,” that I was a part of a universal human experience. And a year later, I felt compelled to put my feeling into words. That little essay is attached below.

As I reread it today, I am struck at the simplicity of those words and how they pointed even then to my current understanding. But I remember my feeling some uncertainty at the time about the singleness of the concept of love as the answer. Yet those were the words I wrote then. They helped assuage my grief, but I don’t think I fully accepted them. Yet now I read those words and say, “Yes!”

But that has been typical of my spiritual journey.  It’s been a “slowly dawning recognition,”  My early doubts and questions have had many tentative answers through the years. For me it has taken a lifetime to reach what to me is a understandable and meaningful way of relating to the world.

A turning point for me was some years ago when I saw John 14:20 as a summary statement for me of my relationship to God: “Know that I am in my Father, and you in me and I in you.” The love that I experience in me and around me is my inward experience of God. I also experience God as the living presence in the world around me.  I experience God in my oneness with the continuing creativity throughout the universe.  I am part of something grand and glorious.  Yet there is still a mystery in the wonder of it all.

That makes all the difference in how I live my life in relationship with all other life and with the world itself.  But the key word in the mystery is Love.

Loren Bullock
July 12, 2014

                                            SUSAN DIANE BULLOCK

She was born February 18, 1950, Bloomington, Indiana.  She died April 12, 1966, Lexington, Massachusetts.  Age 16.

We took her so for granted day by day. We worried with her about her rebuffs and failures, and we rejoiced in her accomplishments and successes. So we wonder why. We wonder about a life that ends so quickly after sixteen years.

She had struggles to overcome which we never had. Yet she still developed. Through it all, her personality grew, her sensitivity to others deepened, and her understanding of those around her increased. She was on the threshold of breaking through to adulthood. Yet it was not to be. All the reaching and the stretching, all the growing and the learning. What was it for? Why was she here?

The answer is simple. She was here to love and be loved. She gave her love to each of us and to those around her. And she knew that she was loved. So her life was complete after all. Our dismay at its shortness cannot diminish its fullness.

Her life was love. Can anyone’s life be more?

M. Loren Bullock
April 12, 1967

This was written on the first anniversary of Susan’s death. She had physical coordination and speech problems that were very possibly the beginnings of the same muscular dystrophy that was later diagnosed in her mother, Polly Kidder Bullock (1922-1989).