Home to the Church

“Along with many others, I experienced and participated in the wildness of the 1960’s, practiced some years in the Hindu and then Buddhist tradition with well-known teachers, even spent ten years in a cult with AdiDa Samraj, the American guru. It was an interesting life because it was an interesting time.  But it was also full of errors and worse. Fortunately, God reached out and redirected me again and again, bringing me home to the Catholic Church and, most of all, to the Eucharist…

In 1994, while living at a Zen training center in Northern California, a well-known Roshi came to visit. He arrived at the Center much later than expected. After greeting him, we went into the Zendo. The Roshi took his seat and began speaking, first telling the story of why he was late. He said that though they were given a map, somehow the instructions were not clear to the driver and four different times on the journey they had to stop and ask for clarification and direction. Finally, a considerate postman led them to the Zen Center in his truck. After relating his story, the Roshi paused for a moment, then said, Looks like lost, but… just went another way…

My journey looked a bit like a plastic bag on a windy day – up there, over there, swirling around, then getting stuck on a branch, and then off again. At the time, I did not realize that the various teachings and experiences I was exploring were coming directly from God, regardless of what seemed to be their source. I did not see the journey as all of a piece, a whole woven from the parts, nor did I see the guiding Hand that led me..

“To arrive at that which you know not, you must go by a way that you know not.”

As a child I spent a lot of time wandering off alone, often up the hill at the end of our street to the fields of a Franciscan Seminary. Just inside the wire fence was a giant oak tree. Taking my seat among its spreading roots and pressing my back against it, I would gaze at the fields and the sky, at the clouds and the few cows that wandered in the grass. There seemed to be Something in the background – with me all the time – but that could not be seen for the looking. I was aware of It, and the trees and ground and sky, in their silence and stillness, seemed to be aware of It too. The Something was a mystery and it formed the Background to all life. I thought that if I could just get still enough, I might see and experience this mystery clearly, perhaps even pass into It in some way. How to do this seemed to me to be of utmost importance. Because my family was not religious, they did not offer me the standard Christian answers. They did not tell me about God and God’s creation, about being a soul and God’s plan for me. And, I’m grateful that they did not.

My home life, like millions of others, sadly, was made difficult due to alcoholism. Perhaps if I had been given answers and then pointed toward the Protestant Church (the only possibility for me in my circumstance at that time), I would have grasped at the security it offered, clung to it and denied the need for my own answers. Instead I had to put it together myself from my own perceptions, from what I now know as God’s silent help expressed in Nature, through my experiences in the nearby Seminary field and eventually from books. This intuition of the mystery of existence, and my own curiosity was God’s way, of calling someone who did not even know God’s name. Every day on the long walk to and from school I passed by a Carmelite convent. The singing and alternating silence coming from the monastery’s chapel drew my attention.

I questioned a friend, a little girl who was Catholic, about what they were doing in there and she said they were called nuns and they spent the whole day being quiet and talking to God. I ran home very excited because now I knew what I wanted to be – a nun! That would be my opportunity to spend all day exploring this Background silence without interruption. However, when I told my plan to my mother she said, You can’t be a nun because we are not Catholic! I responded, Then I want to become Catholic. She said that was not possible, as one had to be born Catholic – like Italians, meaning – we are not Catholic and so neither can you be. On hearing this (and taking it as law the way children do), I felt a shock of disappointment, as if a giant door had been slammed in my face. Though I was powerless to change it, that did not change my intention. I continued to spend time alone in nature and they were profound times.

The Silent Presence which introduced Itself to me there coupled with an ongoing sense of mystery nurtured the search in which I would spend much of my adult life. Since the door to the Catholic Church had seemingly closed, I began to develop my own cosmology, a way of understanding my place in the world that stayed with me, albeit unconsciously, for many years. How I put it all together was that there was an ever-present, silent, all-encompassing Something which was the Background to all existence, with me (and everyone else, I assumed), at all times. I could never manage to focus on it, nonetheless it was always there, like an unending hum at the edge of awareness. It seems that most of life and attention is given to the Foreground, where we live our lives. And I never gave much thought to what might be called the middle-point, the self, the dividing line and the door (or obstruction) between the two. Though these ideas were simplistic, the cosmology developed at this young age directed my spiritual path well into adulthood, though I did not see that fact until I sat down to write this story.

Where did these questions come from and why did I have them? I am sure now it was an intuition of the Divine and a gift from God. Initially, I had the questions and a mystifying sense of existence; then came the magnetic silence I met in Nature. I had no person and no religion to explain all this to me, and as I said, I am glad for that. The quality of explanations I would most likely have received then might have stopped me from questioning further and searching more deeply. Even had I been able to join the Catholic Church at that time perhaps, I would have settled for the security of replacing mystery with doctrine. Looking back on those early years, I see God stirring the waters of my life and setting me off on the path. Later in high school I read everything in the school library on religion, spirituality, and especially anything about miracles and exotic spiritual experiences, all in the service of answering my own questions. Miracles seem to confirm that something is going on here. I bought a rosary and tried to teach myself how to pray with it. My father told me that his mother and her family had been Catholic but had left the Church before he was born due to a disagreement about where my great-grandfather could be buried.

Nothing in the Protestant Christian culture in which I lived was of interest to me; it did not seem to be focused on or even indicate awareness of the Abiding Presence that had informed my early years. By the time I graduated high school in 1962, Eastern and Indian culture and religion appeared to be the rage with young people in America. Even in Kansas, where I grew up, Hindu gurus and yogis began to visit and I never missed the opportunity to hear them speak and, when possible, to question them. In order to be able to pursue these interests I knew I had to get away from home, which was not an easy thing for an eighteen-year-old, working-class girl to do…

I got married at eighteen, primarily so I could get out on my own. A year later my husband and I had a son, and eight years after that we were divorced. All during that time I continued to read anything I could find on spirituality, even some of the more fringe subjects. One influential book was There is a River, the story of the sleeping prophet, Edgar Cayce. Cayce’s reading on the creation of mankind had a strong impact on me. It seemed to provide an explanation, a bridge between the scientific and spiritual world views. As I read it, I became so filled with energy and excitement that I was up all that night in a kind of ecstatic state. It was confirmation that there were other Westerners interested in the same questions. Maybe I would be able to find others with answers.

Because of my circumstance and environment, the only spiritual organizations I knew of were Protestant churches. So the next day I went to one nearby, an American Baptist church, and asked to be baptized. Because I was obviously very fervent and serious, they agreed. I joined the church and tried to participate fully, even teaching Sunday school and once giving a talk to the congregation. Little by little though, it dawned on me that I did not fit in. No one seemed interested in asking the kind of questions that attracted me. I was even asked to stop teaching Sunday school because I didn’t stay closely within the dictates of the official curriculum. After a year I just drifted away through disinterest, and they were most likely glad to see me go.

No longer interested in Christianity, at least in the kind I had encountered in the church, I returned to studying the Eastern Religions. I read the Gospel of Ramakrishna and signed up for his correspondence course. I tried to meditate as they taught and also learn yoga. Later, I took initiation in Transcendental Meditation and went to California for a retreat with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I met the yogi Satchadananda and began meditating and practicing yoga at a local Vedanta Temple. My friends called me the method of the month girl, and they were right. I was not willing to ignore any opportunity, and the more exotic, the better. I was looking for the true path, the right path.
Some years later, divorced and supporting myself and my son, I began to attend the local university, majoring in religion. It was not easy to get an in-depth look at Eastern religions – or even Catholic mysticism – at a Bible-belt university, but at least now I had access to the university library. My term papers were frequently returned with a note like, Unusual point of view or not what was asked for. I was reading and writing to answer my own questions, rather than the professors’!

Things progressed until, walking around campus one day, reading a Buddhist Sutra, I spontaneously dropped into an altered state of awareness in which the Oneness of everything revealed itself. It was a powerful experience lasting two days. The foreground had dissolved into the Background, of which everything was part. The experience was further confirmation and inspiration. What was made clear was that meditation techniques and spiritual reading had no control over that Oneness; It came of Its own accord. I summarily gave all my spiritual books away and stopped meditating. I had no idea what to do next but the urge was stronger than ever to find the Truth that Oneness had revealed.    

I came across the first book of an American guru known at that time as Franklin Jones. Later he would change his name many times: from Bubba Free John to Da Free John, and with a few others in between, ending with Adi Da Samraj. His first book was The Knee of Listening, partly an autobiography and partly a description of his spiritual experiences and what he understood or realized based on those experiences. Though I found the biography to be off-putting, when I arrived at the back of the book there was an essay entitled The Way of Understanding. This essay seemed a perfect description of my own experience of the Oneness.  He wrote that the experience had become permanent in his case, so naturally I was interested. I immediately contacted his community and they sent me the manuscript of his second book, The Method of the Siddhas. I devoured this also and began a correspondence with someone in the community, a woman close to the Guru’s inner circle. Eventually she communicated Bubba’s invitation to come and join them in California…”

~ Patricia Masters, Buddhist to Catholic: From the Zafu to the Kneeler