I was born into a religious family and because of that, my first exposure to a Higher Power came solely through a religious perspective. I’ve been slowly trudging on a path though, over the course of my entire life since then, that continues to lead me away from being religious to that of being spiritual.
My religious path began in my Methodist family, as we were all devout members of the United Methodist Church in Poughkeepsie, NY during all my childhood years. One of the things I learned there very early on was how important it was to attend each Sunday’s worship service and to make sure I studied the Bible. It was often stressed that the Bible was the strict word of God and that everything in it was supposed to be obeyed. But frankly the Bible bored me, as did each church service back then. I usually did what I was told though, so I still attended those services each week and frequently read the Bible as well. By the time I left home and went off to college, I had 18 years of this religious upbringing and my idea of God was all about obeying rules and living in fear of breaking them.
It was in college that I began to face the fact that I might be gay, and unfortunately because of this strong religious upbringing, the notion of being a homosexual wasn’t sitting well within me. I kept remembering those few passages in the Bible that contradicted the sexual attractions I was feeling towards people of the same sex and it upset me greatly. So alcohol and drugs soon became my way of escaping all of my religious and sexuality worries. But that all changed when I fell in love with one of my closest friends during my senior year. It was then that I faced my first real religious crisis.
If “lying with a man, as a man lies with a woman” were immoral, why would God have created me only to fall in love with someone of the same sex? Was I really being immoral by loving a man with all my heart and soul? These were questions I didn’t have any answers for and my desire to find them was much in part why I became clean and sober. I knew I would never discover them so long as I kept myself inebriated or high, as that only left me in a constant state of being numb from whom I really was inside.
I spent the first few years of my newfound sobriety from alcohol and drugs going back to my childhood roots. I found a church I loved and began attending it, as well as regularly studying the Bible again. I began to utilize prayer as a way to asking God about my sexuality, but no answers came so I started living a double life because of it. On the one hand I tried to be a devout Christian by doing exactly as I was taught in my religious upbringing, but on the other hand I was supposedly going against what I was taught by being in same-sex relationships. This internal calamity led me to finally sit down with the leaders of this church to ask for some guidance. What I received from them didn’t help my dilemma though, as they only pointed to the Bible and said my actions were immoral.
I left that church only to spend the next seven years or so angry and confused. I couldn’t understand why God had made me the way I was if it was supposedly wrong, so I allowed this confusion to lead me into a living a life of promiscuity. It was almost as if this became my act of rebellion to the religious God I was brought up with. Thankfully, my discovery of meditation would change all this. It was through one of my earliest deep meditations one night that I finally received the answer from God that I so desperately had searched years for. During it, I was told it didn’t matter whether I was in a relationship with a man or a woman, so long as whoever it was with I’d love with all my body, mind, and soul. My entire life began to change after that because this spiritual experience went directly against the Bible and the “word of God” I was told all of it contained. If I had to label a single point in time where my path of spirituality truly began, it was after this meditation ended that night.
I immediately began to study the books and teachings of a bunch of other religions and attended several services of many of them as well soon after, only to find more rules and principles that just alienated people instead of embracing them. I ultimately realized that my religious upbringing and living a religious life wasn’t going to work for me anymore. But through daily prayer, meditation, and working the 12 Steps of recovery, I began to discover a more loving and accepting God who was able to show me more of the actual truths behind the words and beliefs I had read about or was taught in my religious upbringing. This led me to accept the fact that there was no religious book on this entire planet that could ever encompass every single word or truth of God. Instead, I began to believe that religion and all of its books only had a piece of truth in them, and it would take internal guidance and direction from my Higher Power to fully figure out what they were.
Nowadays I receive my communications from God not through the Bible, church services, or any other religious context. On the contrary, I receive them through the movement of my heart and soul and do my best to apply each of them to how I live my life everyday. I no longer allow anyone or anything to tell me what God’s words are, as to me this is what being religious was all about. Instead, I wait patiently upon God now for the answers to come from within, as I believe this is what spirituality truly is. So I guess it just took me having to walk that religious path to finally find the one I believe I was always meant to walk on…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson