Jessica Maxwell - Roll Around Heaven: An All-True Accidental Spiritual Adventure

an all-true
accidental spiritual
adventure

jessica maxwell

Copyright 2009 by Jessica Maxwell

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of Atria Books/Beyond Words Publishing, Inc., except where permitted by law.

The Blue Grosbeak2008 Ridgefield, by Mark Catesby, page 55

Managing editor: Lindsay S. Brown
Editor: Marie Hix
Copyeditor: Meadowlark Publishing Services
Interior design: Devon Smith
Composition: William H. Brunson Typography Services

First Atria Books/Beyond Words hardcover edition October 2009

ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Beyond Words Publishing is a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For more information about special discounts for bulk purchases,
please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or
business@simonandschuster.com.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.
For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers
Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com .

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maxwell, Jessica,

Roll around heaven : an all-true accidental spiritual adventure / Jessica Maxwell.

p. cm.

1. Maxwell, Jessica. 2. Spiritual biography. I. Title.

BL73.M387A3 2009

204.092dc22

[B]

2009015043

ISBN: 978-1-58270-236-0
ISBN: 978-1-43914-975-1 (ebook)

The corporate mission of Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.: Inspire to Integrity

For Rande, who knew from the beginning,
and for Tom, the rock around which my heaven rolls

With special gratitude to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for her tireless
efforts to honor the worlds great faiths and celebrate the thread of
goodness that binds them all.

Except ye see signs and wonders,
ye will not believe.
J OHN 4:48

First, my fathers face appeared in the sky three days after he died. Then the Holy Pig Farmer showed up. Next thing I knew, I was having lunch with Deepak Chopra, dancing with Stephen Hawking, reading the auras of big league pitchers, seeing Celtic visions on the Isle of Iona, and discussing war, peace, and woman presidents with the daughters of Islam.

This was not the adventure I had bargained for. I am an adventure writer by trade and training, and my goals were stubbornly earthbound, if a little exotic, and usually involved going fishing or wildlife watching somewhere far, far away. Thats what I thought adventure was... until my life turned into a supernatural circus.

I had never asked for a spiritual journeyor a spiritual teacher, especially one who moonlights as a pig farmer! I didnt know enough about spirituality to request such things. Or even to be a cynica glimpse of a Himalayan partridge would have been more than enough for me. But there I was, a total nonbeliever, regularly having the sort of authentic mystical experiences any seeker would sell her soul for. Well, maybe not her soul, but I know one desperate pilgrim who sold his house so he could take a trip around the world to look for God. Hes probably meditating in southern India right now, begging Krishna or Buddha or Moses or Christ or Mohammed... anyone with bona fide credentials to give him at least a shred of evidence that God really does exist beneath the painful veneer of this messed-up world, and that good things verily will be given unto him thanks to all his hard upper-chakra work.

Which begs the question: why are so many of us so drawn to spirituality these days? Why do we collect books by the Dalai Lama, or Anne Lamott, or any number of spiritual writers? Why have millions of us quietly worked all manner of spiritual practices into our daily lives? Buddhist chanting, Hindu meditation, Native American sage smudging, old-fashioned praying to Jesus. You name it, someones doing it.

Our personal spiritual ardor has rubbed off on the general culture too. Spas once concerned only with the very physical now offer energy work, hotels from Thailand to Wales regularly hold spiritual retreat weekends that book up a year in advance, and youre likely to read about the power of prayer in Parade Magazine. Time and again, polls show that more people are likely to identify themselves as spiritual than religiousand that some 80 percent of us believe in God, or a Higher Power.

Unfortunately, this means that spirituality is dangerously close to becoming another commodity, like yoga lessons and God Is My Copilot bumper stickers. And once commercialized, the peerlessly noble pursuit of the Divine risks doing a belly flop onto our to-do lists, right up there with lose ten pounds and drink more water. If my own unexpected spiritual marathon has taught me anything, its this: if we think we can buyor trivializeour way into the kingdom of heaven, we are in serious trouble.

And that is why Ive written this book, which is nothing less than the unlikely testimony of a former spiritual dodo-brain, humbly offered up to both cynics and wind-blown seekers alike, that (a) the spiritual realm is real, (b) it is accessible to all, and (c) nothing is more important than doing something about (a) and (b). Because when even the most jaded among us bears witness to the exquisitely weird presence of God, I dont see how he or she can help but suspectdespite tsunamis of evidence to the con-trarythat the superglue of the universe is not competition or power or money or, God forbid, bland indifference, but simply love ... just as the prophets and the Beatles and every saint worth her prayer beads always tried to pound into our moronic heads.

God, of course, is a supremely loaded word, fraught with daunting definition snafus, gender issues, unhappy historic implications, and rather severe scientific challenges. As a big fan of scientific studies, I love the fact that research steadily reports connections between science and spirituality. Neuroscientists at the University of Oregon have found that meditation not only lowers blood pressure and reduces anxiety, but it actually rewires the brain to feel more compassion. Talk about the spirit-body connection! And University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Andrew Newberg suspects that spiritual capacity is just another human ability, like being naturally good at math, or at making alarm clocks stop blinking 12:00! 12:00! So if some of us are born able to perceive spiritual dimensions others cant quite yet, does it really make sense to kick the dog for hearing the dog whistle?