Welcome to Just Dawn!
One day, many years ago, when I was about 16 years old, I had a sudden joyful knowing in my heart of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew I wanted to be a minister. It was what I now think of as a moment of “I know that I know that I know.” I had no doubt about it. What puzzled me in the next moment however, was with what church or religion was I to be a minister? I ran through all those I knew of, including the one I was brought up in & thought “no, not that one” to each in turn. My joy & amazement that I knew what I wanted to be & do gradually turned to grief & loss as I realized that my church did not exist. Sadly, on the heels of this awareness, was an even more discouraging awareness & belief. That I wasn’t “good or worthy” enough to be a minister. It took me more than 20 years to overcome these two obstacles. Twenty plus years of work healing myself with the help of Spirit & others. Twenty plus years of searching for my church, studying & learning. Twenty plus years of anguish knowing that I was not doing what I was meant to do & fear that I might not ever. Of course, while the healing portion of my journey may never be over, I am happy to report that I was gradually led to my “church” & I claimed my path. This may or may not be a path, church or religion you have ever heard of. In fact, I’d been a minister for a number of years before I fully realized that my spiritual belief system had a name, let alone any other groups besides my own small circle. I discovered it in a bookstore of all places. I came upon a book called “Gnosis of the Cosmic Christ” by Tau Malachi (www.sophian.org) that looked very interesting. I bought it. I read it. I was stunned by what I read. I was a Christian Gnostic & had been at least since the day when I realized I wanted to be a minister. I just hadn’t known.
In today’s world, my path to becoming a minister is not considered the normal path. The normal path is to join an established church or religion with an established belief system. Then to study that belief system & probably go through a prescribed ministerial school/program, become ordained & start ministering to a congregation or in a church, temple or synagogue in some way. I definitely stepped into my ministry backwards by the world’s standards but it doesn’t seem that Spirit is too concerned with what the world expects. I was ordained May 15th, 1999 & at that time, I was 40 years into Spirit’s lifetime course of study for me. I have since that time, been ministering to individuals as a pastoral counselor & holistic therapist as well as continuing my own healing & spiritual study. I live in Indiana with my husband & I am a mother & grandmother.
A little over a month before Thanksgiving 2010, my daughter was telling me about a family blog that she was following & the personal problems that they were having. To say that I was horrified by what she told me, would not have been overstating my reaction – not to their problems but that there were bloggers airing their lives in a public forum for everyone to read! I said to her, “Why would anyone want to blog?!!” I was truly dumbfounded. It took Spirit a little less than a week to answer my rhetorical question. That’s how long it took for me to realize that I wanted to blog about my personal spiritual path, experiences & realizations.
I long ago realized that there are no truly rhetorical questions. Spirit answers each & everyone. You must want to know, otherwise why would you ask? So, first lesson: Don’t ask unless you want to know the answer! Obviously, I wanted to know the answer or maybe Spirit had just been waiting for me to ask so that I would be open to sitting here & blogging. Or maybe a little of both. Anyway, the desire was planted, suddenly, overwhelmingly & by the first week in December (2010), I had a domain name picked out & this blog site established. I hope you enjoy it. I know I haven’t been this thrilled since my wedding day, the birth of my daughter & my ordination.
My intent for this blog is to share what I have experienced of a spiritual nature throughout my life. These are not experiences unique to me but they are experiences that very few people seem to have or at least few people talk about having. In sharing them, I hope to let others know that these are normal & should maybe even be expected & sought out. After all, we are spiritual beings not just physical beings.
Growing up, I mostly kept these experiences to myself, since no one else talked about them. I explained them away in my mind & trivialized them or ignored them since there were no possible explanations that I could come up with & no one else, least of all my church, seemed to know of them or speak of them. As a teenager & then as a young adult, I began to understand these as experiences of Spirit & I sought out books & finally turned to alternative religions looking for explanations. I became disillusioned with Christianity as a whole & threw the baby (Jesus Christ) out with the bath water (all established Christian religions), so to speak, believing that Christ was to blame for the lack I perceived in the established religions.
Eventually, I realized I didn’t feel good about excluding Christ from my path & I returned to my Christian roots. Thus began the long process of uniting my personal experience of Spirit with my Christian upbringing & finding my own path back home to myself & God. And while I may call myself a Christian Gnostic, my intent is not to teach that path nor any particular religion, creed, dogma or belief system. After all, there are nearly as many different forms of Christian Gnosticism as there are individual Gnostics let alone all the other forms of Christianity & every other religion on the Earth. Each person has to find their own way back home to God, to Spirit, to themselves. As we are each unique, we each have a truly unique spiritual path. I simply want to increase the awareness of God & Spirit & what is possible. I hope to do this through sharing all of the experiences that I have had & new ones as well. Each of us has the capacity to experience God directly, first-hand, up-close & personal. In fact, probably right now you are experiencing Spirit. You may or may not be aware of it. God is talking to us all the time. We just have not learned to listen nor to recognize that what we perceive is God or Spirit.
As a pastoral counselor & human being, I see people every day looking for answers outside of themselves, never realizing that the answers to their questions are as close as their questions. The trick, if you can call it that, is to cultivate a personal relationship with God & Spirit by cultivating an awareness of God & Spirit. This cultivation of awareness of Spirit is something that is sadly missing in our American culture & in many of our religions. It is this lack I intend to address in my blog posts. I may at times sound new age & at other times sound fundamentalist or any other of a number of labels. I am none of these. Many ideas labeled “New Age” are anything but new & many “Fundamentalist” ideas are basic teachings that are as valid today as they were thousands of years ago. Spirit made it very clear to me, quite a long time ago, that my path is a straight & narrow one between all extremes & even to some degree encompassing the extremes. Terminology is another tricky area that may arise in my blog posts. I use the terms Spirit & God interchangeably which may be confusing to some. I recognize the existence of the multitude in spirit including the Holy Spirit, Christ, Angels, Arch Angels, etc. but I usually just say Spirit when speaking of any of these individually or as a whole as in God. I will try to be specific if it’s relevant, otherwise feel free to ask me if you’re not certain what I mean.
I am grateful for all the help I have had along the way, both in my life and also in bringing this blogsite into fruition. It has been a joy. WordPress makes doing this so easy and any problems along the way have been corrected by others in my life much more computer literate than I. Hopefully one day I will be able to say that I know what I am doing here!
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Love, Dawn