S4E1: Happy Accident

After privately vlogging intuited reflections over the last year, I realized an opportunity to share these thoughts more broadly for the benefit of the community I want to connect with and learn from. 

Welcome to Season 4! Join the convo as we dare to explore the possibility that God might be encountered through conscience, intuition, direct experience, tradition, community, and mystery -- all at once.

Love, 

Cecilia

moderndaymirror.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

There's lots in motion right now. Lots of exciting energy moving through me. Over the last week, what has unraveled is an opportunity to build community with other like-minded folks through a series of synchronicities and reflections, because it's very clear that my path over the last year has led me to this point. I've realized that the opportunity is to be very specific about the community that I'm building, specific to our experience being raised in and around Catholicism. And I thankfully had some really great conversations with mentors this week who are able to just hold space for me to work through some of these limiting beliefs I've had. Beliefs that were probably keeping me from this realization on a very subconscious level. Ideas like for me to show up and create space for people to talk about experiences of God that are not mirrored in church doctrine is pitying me against the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church and my mind is this like big powerful entity. And I was grateful for the chance to be able to say that out loud because it actually feels a bit silly. Silly in the fact that it's like it's a form of outsourcing my sovereignty, my free will to subscribe to that line of thinking. It's also not a competition or a battle in the least. Because on one side of it is people that are devout Catholics, that are very good Catholics. They follow the rules and the doctrine and they believe anything outside of that is not of God. And then on this side of the shit sandwich, there are people who have had, you know, very different experiences of spirituality who think that all religion is bad, all religion is oppressive, it doesn't serve us. And then here's me in the middle. It feels like making myself vulnerable to criticism and skepticism from both sides. But I'm really just trying to create space for what I think is a community that has not been very visible thus far. I'll say in this lifetime. Because what I've learned is that this what I'm experiencing is not new. It's not new at all. It's not even new to Catholicism. Catholicism has always had figures that showed up and spoke to these very personal experiences of God. Experiences that have even been condemned by the church since. Visions, downloads, channeling. We have mystics and scholars and saints who did not neatly fit inside of the church's teachings. But because we've put all of these people on a pedestal and we've been made to feel like they're so inaccessible to us, we do not realize how many of us are actually walking that same path. And I'm just really excited about what's possible. What's possible when we are intentional about bringing a community like this together? And I'm not even thinking more broadly outside of ourselves, although there is an awareness I have that there is a lot of potential in that. I'm just talking about what's possible for each of us and our internal experiences of God and knowing ourselves more fully. So now that I've named and it feels like unleashed this energy, now I don't want to shut up about it. I am starting this event that I'm calling Second Sundays on the second Sunday of every month, getting folks together over Zoom. It's a midday event. So, you know, whether people who go to church might want to do that in the morning or in the evening, you know, it's midday. People who maybe don't go to church at all, but adopt Sunday as a day of rest and relaxation. It's not a time that requires that you get up earlier than you normally would. Or I mean, I don't know, maybe for some folks, but 2 p.m. just felt like reasonable. It felt like an accessible point in the day for both East Coast, West Coast, et cetera. So I have really high hopes for this space, not in the idea that like I'm committed to or that I need to see a lot of participation, even. It's just in the naming of it, the fact that I have been able to put language to a need that has been unmet for so long, unaddressed, because so many of us are living inside of the spiritual closet, cloaked in this shame we feel because we love astrology, or because we've astral projected in our sleep, or because we're interested in and have connected with alien races. I mean, it's to some people, I realize that that might sound absurd, but I actually know these people personally that have had these experiences. And there is something about, not for everyone, but for a lot of people, there's something about this common shared experience of religion. Are there still still elements of oppression and spiritual neglect in a lot of religions, including Catholicism? Yes. And the church is still the people. It's not the rules, it's not even the leadership. The church is the people. I can't, and I don't want to. Oh, this is making me emotional. Throw away these people. And while yes, I have decades of family included in this idea of these people, I'm not even talking about them. I mean, is there a tender spot in my heart that feels more dialed in and connected when I know that I'm sharing these traditions with my family? Absolutely. And it's just this idea of like, we're so quick to throw, what is that phrase? Throw the baby out with the bathwater. It just doesn't make sense to me that we're still, even people who are so enlightened, are still living in this binary of either or. You're either a good Catholic or a bad Catholic, you're either religious or you're not. There's so much room for the in-between. There's so much room for us to metabolize the beauty that lives inside of our religions that have carried us for so long. There's a little voice in my head right now that's that's worried about others perceiving my passion for this as though I'm like on a soapbox of some kind. And that was that has been another scary part of working to create this community is this idea that people think I'm trying to be a cult leader. It's never been my style. I've never found that idea appealing. I just know that I'm not alone. I'm not alone in my experience of God. I'm not alone in these thoughts that are inviting me to expand my idea of our creator and how deeply we're loved, and how much autonomy we have to create the lives that we want to live, the lives that we deserve. Not because we're good Catholics, not because we've followed anybody's rules, but just because we exist. Sometimes when I'm I'm expressing on here, it feels like I'm walking on a cliff that is like getting ready to collapse beneath my feet. Like the path is, or maybe it's the opposite of that. It's like the path is revealing itself with each step, and I'm always nervous that it's going to crumble beneath my feet. Like, oh, this is where I'm gonna lose it. This is where I'm gonna lose this, the flow that is moving through me. I'm gonna stutter or I'm gonna lose my place. Like those things are even bad. But after having shared that from my heart space, this feels like it may have ended up as the podcast episode that I had been wanting to record. It's so funny how these things have a way of playing out.