AXIS MUNDI painting by David Heskin & Aloria Weaver

In my recent viewing of the film, Vision, which is a film adaptation of the life story of the great female Christian Mystic, Hildegard Von Bingen, I am reminded yet again of the importance of heretics in Christianity. Indeed, Christianity was founded by one of history’s greatest heretics, and began as a spiritual revolution by a visionary. Throughout Christianity’s history, there have been special visionaries that have continued the original flame of Christianity’s founding; the mystics that sought direct communion with Spirit, with God rather than blind obedience to hierarchical religious structures of dogma – and Hildegard Von Bingen was but one of them. Indeed, the entire Anabaptist wing of Christianity began as a heretic religion, and growing up in Ohio in the Church of the Brethren, I was constantly reminded of this left-wing, conscientious-objector, progressive source of our founding. It’s funny how progressive, visionary heretic sects evolve and begin to embody the very same qualities of hierarchy and structured dogmatic control that they originally rebelled against. I guess it’s the metaphor of a young teenage boy rebelling against the controlling patriarchal father, only to mature into manhood and becoming the same authoritarian father that he rebelled against. But it is this essence of rebelliousness and spiritual inquiry, of seeking direct communion with the spiritual source – of God, that excited me and spurred me to be a heretic against my entire family and Church, to find out for myself what is spiritual truth from direct experience rather than from what is handed to me in religious propaganda. When I was 17, It was a friend at a Youth Conference at Manchester College that triggered me to begin asking questions – like ‘What is God?’, and ‘What’s wrong with drugs and sex and nudity?’ rather than just accepting what I was told. Thus I left my home and my Church as I entered college and began my spiritual quest of mysticism and seeking God in the many paths to enlightenment.

After many years of exploring Quaker meeting houses, Zen buddhist temples, Yoga classes, Tai Chi, Rumi poetry, the Tao Te Ching, New Age Psychic Channelling, Reiki, Sufism and Islamic Mosques, I found myself on the West Coast living out of my backpack. I wandered around homeless with but pennies to my name and the universe providing daily miracles to support & prove to me that reality is imbued with consciousness. What began as a quest to find God, to find Enlightenment and to be guided by synchronicity, inspired largely by the Mayan shaman author, Martin Prechtel, found me one day in June of 2003 in Salt Lake City, Utah, having my first great mystical breakthrough experience. Earlier that week, I’d been in Seattle and had discovered my new best friend, Mira, on the sidewalks of Seattle, bumming for change on the street. She’d just arrived in Seattle days before and had been sleeping underneath bushes, on a journey to heal herself of bulimia, seeking Ayahuasca as a means to heal herself of her bulimic curse. I’d never heard of Ayahuasca and had no idea what that was, but I told Mira that I would help her find Ayahuasca because I had faith in magic and miracles. Days later, we were hitch-hiking through rural Idaho on our way to a Rainbow Gathering in Utah, and had been blessed with a string of really sweet rides offered by lovely and kind drivers, but had suddenly found ourself on the side of a highway for 50 minutes unable to lure anyone to stop for us. As I carried the gigantic pack on my back, weighed down by the exhausting weight and the heat from the sun, I began praying for help. I cried out for God to open the heart of some kind person on the highway, someone with a really good heart. Nearly moments later a driver pulled onto the side of the highway, with Mira jumping up and down, her arms waving excitedly. We had found a ride!

Our driver explained his story. He was an ex-military man that had found a lucrative job doing what he’d been trained to do in the military; working on helicoptors. He would drive to some station in any given state somewhere on the West coast, work a week long shift, and then drive home to Salt Lake City, arrive in his furniture-less bachelor pad house and take every psychedelic known to mankind for several days before driving back to work for another week long shift. Right as we entered Utah, he asked Mira and I if we’d like to join him and do Ayahuasca that evening! Our jaws dropped and hit the floor at the same time as we stared at each other in wide eyed disbelief! At that time, I was completely oblivious to the tradition of Amazonian Ayahuasca ceremonies and had never seen it, smelled it or tasted it before – so I was totally wide eyed, innocent and said Yes. Mira wanted to join us but was terrified of finally having an opportunity to partake of the Ayahuasca, plus she wanted to make it to a PsyTrance party out in the woods an hour away from Salt Lake City, so we dropped her off in the middle of nowhere, the contents of her backpack splayed out on the ground, with an enormous storm system approaching from the West and only a tiny bit of raw veggies to sustain her. When I arrived at my driver’s house, we entered the kitchen and he opened up the cabinet, exposing shelves containing nearly every psychedelic drug known to man. He prepared the chacruna leaves and the syrian rue pills and I prepared an altar of all my sacred items in the empty living room. When the bowls of Chacruna tea were ready, we downed it, and he sat down to watch movies and play video games – meanwhile I sat in the living room and began meditating and praying to God. I had no idea what this would possibly do to me; I was a psychedelic baby.

It began with gorgeous fractal mandalas opening in the sky above me; a sensation moved through my body that felt like I was an empty vessel and God was being poured into me. I was reminded of my favorite Christian hymn, “Have Thine Own Way, Lord”, the lyrics of – ‘Thou Art the Potter, I am the Clay, Mold me and Make me after thy Will, as I am waiting, Yielded and Still.’ I felt that stillness and yielding within me, opening to the heavens, experiencing my first true mystic awakening of God pouring into me like a waterfall. I began weeping in bliss. I looked into a mirror and began watching all the faces from all my past lives and past incarnations wash over me and I wept, and then a realization swept over me in its awe-inspiring totality – that everything that exists is the flesh of God. We are literally standing on God; this street is God, this front Porch is God, this sky is God, this lawn is God; everything is God. The ecstasy of this realization prompted me to leave the house and begin wandering barefoot through the streets in pure awe of the Divinity of everything surrounding me. I wandered for several blocks and found a man waiting at a bus stop for a bus. As I approached him, his face was one of complete and utter fear and revulsion – his first words to me were “Are you an Angel?” I explained that I wasn’t an angel, I was just awakened by the Light of God. I asked him why he was waiting for a bus, when he is surrounded by God, and that God is waiting for him. I sat with him for almost an hour as he poured his heart out and listened to him gush about his challenges with his wife, their child, his job, everything. I sat there with him and reminded him that God is everywhere and everything, and that God is waiting for him to open his heart and receive. As I left, I felt as though I’d just experienced the most important experience of my entire life up to that moment.

I believe that every one of us needs to personally experience the transcendent presence of God, of the Divine, in some way in one’s life in order to truly know that there is a Divine hand at work in reality and in our lives, in order to cultivate a faith based on a real connection, rather than a blind faith enforced by some external belief system. And truly, every single one of us deeply deserves to experience this relationship with what we could call “God” so that we may know in the depths of our Soul, our connection to the universal mystery that is much larger than any one religion. It is this concept that birthed initiations and vision quests in Native American and Indigenous cultures, where the youth were put into situations where they had to open up to the wider girth of awareness that reality can envelope when one is prayerfully in connection to this “holy spirit” wisdom emergent in reality. It is these kinds of direct experiences of the Divine, of God, that inspired the Christian mystic, Hildegard Von Bingen. As a Benedictine nun, she sought to express her uncontrived and unconventional visionary experiences of God with others through Song, through writings, through Art, and through herbal medicine. Despite her unconventional spiritual expressions, and especially as an empowered woman expressing an almost pagan facet of Christianity, she is still revered for her spiritual wisdom as one of the greatest Christian mystics in history.

I will never understand why Christianity evolved in such a way as to make narrowly defined belief systems and structures more important to the basic tenets of it, rather than the kind of heart-centered, community-centric, Love and Forgiveness is the way to the Kingdom of Heaven concepts that Jesus taught. It has always seemed to me to be history’s greatest irony that the most liberated, visionary mystic man who walked the planet spurred the creation of the most dogmatic religion history has ever seen, due to the fact that it was co-opted by the Roman powers for their own selfish purposes of elitist control over their empire. The very empire that Jesus spoke against took his cross and turned it into the most authoritarian, controlling religious empire in history. And it is this very Roman Catholic empire that the Anabaptists were spurning a heretic religion against.

So I ask you, my fellow Brothers and Sisters of the Church of the Brethren, the German Baptists, the Mennonites, the Dunkards, the Amish; where is your inner heretic? Have you had a direct experience of God? Have you sought your own personal redemption, have you awakened your soul to your own divinity? Have you done your own deep work of transforming yourself from a programmed slave to a hierarchical system of oppression, have you found your liberation? If you haven’t, have you read the history of your own church? Do you know that the Anabaptists were started by rebels, in revolt to both the Roman Catholic Church and Lutheranism? There is something I’ve always treasured and valued about the Anabaptist concept of choosing ones own baptism when one actually has cultivated true faith and belief, coming to the faith from oneself rather than being baptised at birth because that’s what everyone did.

I have long admired the Anabaptists for living on the fringes of society, for the Amish living simply and traditionally, for the ‘Salt of the Earth’ people that I grew up surrounded by – the rural farming communities that I grew up around in Ohio. But, largely prompted by my mom, I also admired the women’s liberation movement and the history of women’s empowerment in the church, such as the suffragette movement that grew out of Quaker meeting houses in Philadelphia, and the empowerment of early German Baptist Brethren women like Sarah Righter Major. Growing up in a congregation with two pastors – a married couple sharing the reigns, I grew up believing that progressive values were morally right and questioned the accepted standards of society, and had to push the envelope beyond what is traditionally accepted true, by aligning more and more with what morally feels right in one’s spirit, such as empowering women even though it broke conventions of traditional patriarchal religious institutions. In fact, when I went to a German Baptist church with my family near Covington Ohio, it felt more oppressively male-centric and utterly patriarchal than any other experience in my entire life, even more so than my dabbling experiences with Islamic Mosques. This one experience helped give me a clearer understanding of the karmic lineage of my family than any other before or since; since that time I have sought to completely extract all aspects of this harsh hard wood floored, patriarchal, hierarchical, anti-dancing, anti-freedom, anti-sensuality religion from my soul. And thus I have been a heretic ever since, essentially shunned in not so many words from my family and religion of birth.

I have had to find a whole new family, a whole new community, a whole new spirituality out here on the West Coast. We are a spiritual community of misfits, freaks, artists, hippies, musicians, mystics, massage therapists, tantrikas, psychonauts; devoid of the structured hierarchy and control that is endemic to spiritual communities that are structured around strict belief systems and churches. We may all be self-obsessed fanatical new age weirdos, but we’ve all come together based on common energetic patternings, lifestyles of freedom and creativity, and have tried to find ways to be mutually supportive of each other while living on the fringes of the mainstream society, outside of any dogma. Our spirituality seems to be self-created through our own process of awakening and liberation, and is something each of us has had to discover on our own via parties, ceremonies, drugs, sexuality, our journey away from our Church of birth, and life. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to me, sometimes I miss the support of a blood family, but most of the time I am just in awe of the stunningly gorgeous earth-centered community of freaks that I am surrounded by.

But despite this, I keep discovering new layers to the Anabaptist in my skin – I keep finding new layers to peel away that reveal more and more an inherent quality of the heretic christian mystic within myself. It is only just now that I’ve realized that I was born in a counter-culture fringe religion, that I was born to never fit into mainstream society. I was born programmed to give a middle finger to war, military, law enforcement and the global elite. I’ve long wondered why down deep in the root of my soul I just can’t accept the social conventions of this American society – like buying cars, paying taxes, using credit cards, working a regular “job”, shopping in malls, supporting the endless wars, and I cannot seem to fit into it in any way, no matter how much I have tried and struggled. It’s been an absolutely maddening and infinitely confusing schism within myself; to try to fit into the mainstream and follow its program or give it a big middle finger and follow my heart and live as a mystic rebel. But it’s what my ancestors have been doing for hundreds of years; living outside of the mainstream society, struggling as conscientious objectors against every single war, refusing to wear anything but modest clothes, driving horses and buggies, living simply within their means, gardening and absolutely refusing to get intoxicated.

After several years as a total stoner, It has shown up as a need for sobriety and mental clarity, for a need for living simply, for a need to live in a spiritual community of kindred spirits, for a need to participate in spiritual community events that bring us together to sing on a consistent basis, for a need to live in small towns connected to the Earth surrounded by gardens. The container looks very different than the gardens, churches, tractors, hymns, services and passover bread of my ancestors, but in its actual day to day actualization, it often feels like the next level of the same paradigm, simply a more modern free-spirited version of a similar lifestyle. And I am grateful for the safe container I grew up in, but I will be forever dedicated to stripping away all the layers of repression of joy, creativity and sensuality that were instilled in me as a child.

Thus I am always seeking communion with my brothers and sisters, those kindred spirits of the heretic religion of the heart.