by Roslyn Harper
First spiritual stirrings
My first introduction to spirituality was in the form of a prayer that my mother taught me to pray every night before going to sleep. It began with “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep”. Apart from teaching me this prayer, I can’t remember either of my parents teaching me anything about Jesus or faith of any sort. I was sent to an Anglican Sunday School though, and I’d been baptised at six weeks of age in the local Anglican Church.
The first stirrings of my heart that I can recall happened in school assemblies in my first year of school at age five. We would always sing some Christian children’s songs (and this was at a State School) at the beginning of the assembly. I can still remember the lovely feelings I felt within me when I heard the name of Jesus. I loved hearing hymns sung also on the occasions when I would hear them on the radio. At the end of my first year of school, when I was still five years old, we first year pupils staged a Nativity play for the parents, which required lots of rehearsals. I loved the story and I asked for my own Bible so that I could look up Luke Chapter Two, parts of which were the lines to be rehearsed for the play. I was chosen to be an angel, with very few spoken lines, but I really wanted to play the part of Mary, so I memorised all her lines as well. One line that seemed to keep drawing my attention was Luke 2:19: “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
Throughout the years, these words have stayed with me, and have continued to draw me to them. I think I still want to play the role of Mary! I’ve always loved pondering things. (I don’t know what I made of the word as a five year old. I just loved the idea of pondering things in my heart.)
Childhood to young adulthood: Heart responses
I would have been considered a loner as a child. I would often prefer to sit quietly under a tree rather than play with other kids. I had two siblings quite close to me in age, so I always had someone to play with, but my main memories are of doing things on my own. I loved to find a ‘hiding place’, perhaps under a willow tree, or amongst big rocks on my grandparents’ large property overlooking a river.
I shared a bedroom with my sister, but I yearned for my own space even as a young child, and begged my parents for a room of my own (which wasn’t really possible). My father finally built a divider down the middle of our large bedroom, so that I had my own space at last.
I remember often waking to the sounds of early morning birdsong, and that would thrill my heart. I still love to hear the early morning birdsong during my quiet times each morning.
Something strange would happen within me whenever I walked past a church. I had a lovely sense of something like goodness, kindness within me. I would wonder what went on inside the church buildings.
There were some particular people who drew me, just by their presence. There seemed to be something special about them. One Sunday School teacher even named it for me. Her name was Joy, and that’s what she said she felt inside her. I sensed it in her. I would now also say there was a certain sort of peace about these people. I knew that they were churchgoers, but not all churchgoers had that something special that I could sense. I would wonder about it and so wish that I had whatever it was for myself.
As a teenager, my sister was given a small sticker by a churchgoing friend of hers. She put it on her bookcase, which I had to walk past to get to my part of the bedroom. My heart did a sort of flutter whenever I saw the words on the sticker – LOVE, JOY, PEACE. How I longed to know these words within myself.
It was as if I was always wanting something more in my life, although I had no idea what it might be. This urge for something more allowed me to take courageous steps – like leaving the safety of my childhood home and state to study interstate. In hindsight, I think I was spiritually searching, but I was looking at outward ways to satisfy an inner longing. Along the way, I met and fell in love with a young (17 year old) man, who later became my husband, and for a while I thought I’d found what I’d been searching for. We settled into married life and work, and after a couple of years, started our young family. We had two children, my husband rose quickly in his academic career and by our early 30s we had purchased a lovely home in Melbourne. What more could I want? And yet, I felt there was something missing from my life. I could even visualise it as a big hole inside of me.
Mind responses
As a child, I spent much time thinking about God, but I never thought to ask questions of anyone about God. Along the way, I picked up some erroneous ideas. I remember being taught by an RE teacher when I was eight years old about sin. She somehow compared it (or the consequences of it) to going to bed with snakes and spiders. My vivid imagination could picture it clearly, and it horrified me. Perhaps this contributed to my all-pervasive fear of doing the wrong thing or of failing to live up to some high standards.
As I grew into my high school years, my mind became ambivalent about God. I tried talking to this God I thought existed and asking him to do something amazing in my life. Nothing amazing happened, so I made the conscious decision to not believe in God anymore. This gave me some sense of relief from the all-pervasive fear. I tried not to think about God. Meanwhile, I was still having the lovely heart responses, which I just didn’t associate with God at all.
My early 30s: Heart responses
I was still being drawn to particular people – and I started joining the dots. They were all people who took their Christian faith seriously. It wasn’t necessarily that they’d had an easy life – quite to the contrary in some cases.
With two young children, I yearned for some solitude, so I would go for early morning walks on my own before my husband left for work. These were often such delightful experiences, I found my heart full of gratitude and I felt I had to give thanks to someone. God came back into my thought life in a big way. I decided it was much more difficult to disbelieve in God than to believe in the existence of Someone beyond our everyday material world. I bought myself a modern translation Bible to try to learn more about God. (That didn’t help much at all. It just put me off reading the Bible!)
I started getting up really early and sitting quietly. (I had read something of Transcendental Meditation, which gave me the idea of sitting still and silently). I enjoyed these moments, but they were all too short for me because my younger son usually rose almost as soon as I did, and disturbed my quiet. I don’t think I had any sense of the Divine, or sense of anything other than quiet peace during these tentative first steps at practising meditation.
I was still yearning for something more, despite having everything I thought was needed for a happy life. Outwardly, perhaps I did have everything I needed, but inwardly I was very needy.
A turning point came in December 1988, when we attended the wedding of a friend of mine from earlier years. This friend was one of those people who took her Christian faith seriously. Suddenly, I was surrounded in the church by people who spoke about Jesus Christ as if they knew and loved him as a person! I was astounded – and I became desperate to know this life that they obviously knew.
My inner and outer worlds were coming together. I needed to speak up, I needed help to learn what others had and what I so desired for myself. I wanted to know Jesus Christ for myself.
Head responses
I finally found a Christian who was happy to meet with me, and we worked through a course called Christianity Explained. I devoured books on the Christian faith that she lent to me. I came to understand intellectually that I needed to repent of doing life my way and to ask Jesus Christ to come into my life. I tried doing this, but nothing happened inwardly for me. This is surely not what I’d been hoping for. I kept on reading books to try to find whatever it was that would change my life.
Heart response
The heart response that eventually took me by surprise came early one morning in my office, before I’d started my work for the day. As I sat quietly in my chair, I had an amazing vision of Light filling my whole being, filling my office, filling my total awareness. I just knew this Light was the One I’d been seeking - Jesus Christ, God. I guess it was a bit like Paul’s Damascus Road experience but without the physical blindness. I spent the rest of the day in this marvellous Presence in the religious centre at my workplace, speaking with the One I had just met so personally. This was the best day of my life! I now knew for sure that I was a Christ one, or Christian. So, at 33 years of age, my inner yearnings from early childhood were being touched in a deep way. God had finally answered my teenage prayer asking for something amazing to happen for me!
I felt compelled to go to church so that I could meet others who would understand what I had just experienced. I loved being with other Christians. However, I was disappointed in some respects. The Christians I met didn’t seem to want to know of my life-changing moment. They were keen to hear my ‘testimony’ otherwise, but I learnt to omit the key, life-changing moment! I told my story in a ‘safe’ way - the outer, intellectual story, not the all important inner story. I kept that to myself for many years.
Another disappointment was that I was also told that I should stop meditating because it wasn’t a Christian practice and it was a dangerous thing for a Christian to do. I was told that I had been led through error to the truth, and I was now to leave behind the erroneous ways. If I wanted a quiet time in the morning, I should read the Bible and pray instead of sitting in silence.
Beyond my 30s
Church was exciting in the first few years, once my husband came on board and experienced a much more intellectual conversion moment six months after my very different conversion. We met lovely people, several of whom are now our closest friends. Their family lives were good influences on our children, who made friends that also endure to this day (30 plus years later).
I learnt a lot of the content of the Bible. I tried to learn what it meant for my life, but usually found that extremely frustrating and obscure. Gradually, I became less interested in sermons and Bible studies. I think my heart was being neglected as I tried to understand things intellectually.
So, somehow my heart responses were drying up, even though I was doing what I was taught was needed for spiritual growth. I was a regular churchgoer and usually a member of at least one Bible Study group. I tried to do Bible Study and to pray at home each day the way I’d been taught by more experienced Christians. I just seemed to lose my inner connection to Jesus Christ that had been so life-giving for me in earlier years.
I had no idea what I needed to do. I became very anxious and depressed. I started seeing a psychiatrist, who told me I needed to get up as soon as I woke up, rather than lying in bed getting more and more anxious. She said I should practise mindfulness, which I’d never heard of. She gave me the briefest of introductions to mindfulness, and so I started this practice. Within days, I sensed a presence with me, touching me, comforting me. I started to feel excited every morning that I woke up, to see if the presence would be in my mindfulness times. I tried not to think that this could be Jesus Christ, but within a very short time, there was a recognition that it was indeed the same Jesus Christ I had known earlier and was drawn to, even as a young child and who met me powerfully with the vision of Light in 1989.
By this time, I knew there was such a thing as Christian meditation and yet no one that I knew of practised it. So for nearly two years, I was on my own. I practised meditation every single morning. It came very naturally to me and I had a wonderful honeymoon period in my early morning times. This wonderful sense didn’t seem to flow into the rest of my day much though. Once again, I found myself restless for something more. I felt a loneliness within me, because I couldn’t share the joy of my inner journey with anyone. I had no idea that there were many Christians who practised silent meditation, or that there were groups of meditators, so I didn’t go looking for them.
One way and another though, I gradually started meeting other meditators. Over the last few years, I’ve been having Spiritual Direction, and have been part of an assortment of groups of Christian meditators.
I am inwardly fed in these various ways but not so through church services. I guess I always longed for a church service that would nurture me on a regular basis, but had no idea where to find one. What a surprise was awaiting me when I read about a contemplative church service in Canberra* that is now available via the Internet (thanks to Covid-19!). It’s early days yet, but so far, I’m finding these services to be a balm for my thirsty soul! It seems that God makes me wait a long, long time to answer my heart longings. Then I am given far more than I could have ever asked or imagined! I have a church service that nurtures my soul and I can still attend the church of which I am a member with my husband. This provides ongoing fellowship with a Christian community in Melbourne. What amazing Grace.
Looking back to those words that so drew me in my teen years – LOVE, JOY, PEACE – I can truly say that they are inner realities for me now. I know what it is to sense love, joy and peace within me, at least some of the time. I look forward to the adventure that might be in store for me as my life in Christ evolves over the remaining years of my earthly life.
*Benedictus Contemplative Church. See: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/blog/a-new-church-grounded-in-meditation-and-committed-to-radical-transformation