Suzanne Clores - Memoris of a Spiritual Outsider

Speaking practically, exploring six different spiritual paths is not the fastest nor the simplest route to the essence of one's inner being. But taking an assortment of backroads provided me with a variety of experiences and put me in contact with many women pursuing the same end: individual connection with God.... Most impressively, each woman I met was able to move beyond the first and perhaps the greatest obstacle-doubt-and approach the endlessly demanding feat of keeping her desire and passion alive and in focus.

From the introduction

In Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider, Suzanne Clores leads us through her struggle to bring spirituality into her life. While hers is a personal quest, it also reflects that of a whole generation of young people who are cut off from spirituality yet long for it in some vague, unarticulated way.

Out of college and in the workforce, Suzanne Clores identifies the longing she feels as a spiritual yearning, but like many of her peers she has a difficult time wholeheartedly embracing any religion. In this book, she presents a moving account of a pilgrimage across America that led her to a variety of religious traditions-Buddhism, Wicca, Yoga, Sufism, Shamanism, and Voodoo. Along the way, she encounters individuals who have embraced these outsider traditions, each of whom she follows, at least for a time, in hope of finding her own spiritual path.

Cultivating a spiritual practice while living among hip, urbane Generation X-ers is as unpopular as letter writing, she muses. Yet she perseveres, and her story, along with the stories of the people she meets, offers us a fascinating glimpse into the hearts and minds of the next generation of seekers who are looking for meaning in a secular world.

This spiritual outsider chose a difficult path to discovering the mystic hidden deep within herself. Searching for an authentic spiritual life that would lead her to the Divine, she found the truth: The Divine dwelling within the Self only gives itself to those who surrender, who trust, who commit themselves whole-heartedly to it.

Wayne Teasdale, author of The Mystic Heart

Suzanne Clores special talentespecially impressive given her birthright of generational twentysomething cynicismis to enter into various sacred and spiritual worlds with an astonishing innocence, opening doors for the reader to experience each one as if for the first time. I laughed out loud more than once, seeing myself through her eyes, yet never felt disrespected. A charming read.

Vicki Noble, co-creator of Motherpeace

To my family

Copyright 2000 by Suzanne Clores

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact: Conari Press, 2550 Ninth Street, Suite 1O1, Berkeley, California 94710-2551.

Conari Press books are distributed by Publishers Group West.

Cover photography: Kamil Vojnar/Photonica

Cover author photo: Nancy Opitz

Cover and book design: Claudia Smelser

Cover art direction: Ame Beanland

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Clores, Suzanne.

Memoirs of a spiritual outsider / Suzanne Clores.

ISBN: 1-57324-172-5

I. Clores, Suzanne. 2. Spiritual biographyUnited States. I. Title.

BL73.C57 A3 2000

291.4'092dc2I

00-009140

Printed in the United States of America on recycled paper.

00 01 02 03 PHOENIX 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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by Rebecca Walker,

author of White, Black, and Jewish

and founder of 3rd Wave

I have never looked for God. Never found myself in a church, mosque, or synagogue, crying into my hands, kneeling in a pew, gazing at the cross, longing for salvation. Religion was never where I turned to be soothed, was not where I looked to know peace, connection, transcendence.

Without knowing it, I have always been a spiritual outsider. By birth, by breeding. When I was born my parents were baptist-pagan and jewish-lawyer, and raised me without the Holy Book, but with hundreds of others. Volumes by Marquez, Baldwin, Tillie Olsen. Letters from a Birmingham Jail, Diary of Anne Frank, Life of Gandhi. Siddhartha. They had faith I would find my way, that a relationship to the Divine was obvious, all around me. I would not need the Guide, with all of its pitfalls and problematics.

As a child I loved my cat, to lie down next to my mother's warm brown body, to wear my father's dirty T-shirts that smelled of him. I liked my mother's rose bushes, the dogwood tree she planted, the magnolia trees in the South I visited on summer holidays. I loved lakes, the ocean. I loved the older women in my life who brushed my hair and took me shopping at theater supply stores, letting me choose feathers and glitter and purple cloth to make a magic cape.

God did not live outside of me when I was a child. God did not look down on me, blessing and correcting. I ran free; that was where God was, that was where my joy was, that was when life was magical and good. I did not know I was a spiritual outsider, a seeker on a path strewn with dahlias, petunias, hydrangeas inherited from my mother and all the other mothers before her. In college, I had a crisis of faith. I was anxious all the time. I couldn't figure out what was to become of me. I was fighting against an institution that did not know my name and did not wish to. I felt alone. I wondered how to cope. I could not engage faith because it had never failed me; I had not ever had to reach for it, it was so much a part of me.

I read Peace Is Every Step and found that there was a way to breathe, to see, to believe that there was good underneath, there was a flower in every pile of garbage, a mound of garbage in every bunch of flowers. This felt right to me, and so I kept reading everything I could find by Thich Nhat Hahn and then other Buddhist writers. I learned to meditate, and then I saw that I was on a path again and this time I had more tools. I had breathing and meditating and seeing beauty in what was ugly and ugliness in what was beautiful and being kind to people and loving them even when they hurt me.

But even then, when people would ask me what religion I was and I would look at them blankly and say, None, and when people said, Oh she doesn't believe in God, and I said, Yes yes I do but then couldn't explain that my God didn't look like that God in the books, even then I did not know I was a spiritual outsider, because my friend Matt waited for hours to get tickets to see the Dalai Lama and my professors whom I loved taught me about African American altars that traced back to Africa, and because I knew, fundamentally, that I was okay, that I was being held in the universe's embrace.

We are all spiritual outsiders.

As an adult, two of the people closest to me came out of religion, and came to me for refuge from that place. Both were driven nearly insane by a God who did not love them, a God who lived in their minds as a demon, lashing out at them, beating them with great stripes on their psyches, sending them literally to their knees. They spoke of a God I did not know, one that had never lodged in my mind, for if it had a part of me surely would have died. I would not have seen the flowers, would not have felt the wind, would not have known to love as God the women who took me with them, to love that generous, yielding, sweet smelling place.