Lost and Found: My Spiritual Journey in Seven Paragraphs

Contributed by Stefan Swanson

When I was eighteen, I was out to dinner with my family, home from college for the first time since I had left, and my father talked about something that drew my attention. I had been raised a Lutheran, so when he brought up the idea that Jesus Christ actually survived the Cross by using breathing techniques he learned in India during his “Lost Years” and left for India, dying at a ripe old age and buried there, I was floored. I didn’t know how to react. I asked my father if I could borrow the book (a practice which still happens fairly often between us), and he let me bring it back to school.

I read it, and could feel the stones of doubt dropping in my stomach as I had never felt before.

It was never that I hadn’t thought about my faith, or about Jesus. I spent my middle and high school years as a “church kid.” But something about this book struck me in a way that both made me indefatigably curious, as well terrified. It was my first encounter with doubt. Did Jesus survive the Cross? Was Jesus really God? Was Christianity true or not? What about the majority of the world’s people who believe something entirely different from what I believed? Who was right?

This led me on an insatiable and spiritual quest. I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I even switched my major from music performance to religion. I read Thich Nat Han and the Dalai Lama. I took classes studying Japanese Cults and Greek mythology. By the time I was 21, I had discovered that I no longer believed in God. I kept reading, expanding out to the New Atheists: Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins, as well as other less well-known atheists. Science writers like V.S. Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks and Steven Pinker further cemented my newfound atheism and increased my curiosity about the brain. Then came the philosophers: David Hume, Soren Kierkegaard, and Albert Camus play largest in my interpretation of existence these days.

So you’re probably saying to yourself, “Great. That’s a long list of people I will most likely never read. What the hell do you actually believe?” Good question. Here’s a summary of what I believe that I wrote some months ago, when I was trying to find the right words to put my beliefs on paper.

“I believe in people to be artists, weaving their own tapestry of life, creating their own truths, writing their own novels, painting their own realities onto the canvas of the universe, and living through these masterpieces in order to love and help others and to create a better, more joyful, more just world.”

Life is an art as well as narrative. While we should pay attention to and support good science, we all have passionate experiences that teach us more about life than we get from textbooks and philosophers. We must live life. We should find the things in life that we are passionate about and follow those and enjoy them, for what else are we here to do? That can be different for different people, and that is great. What is life without variety?

But What About Intertwine?

Before I get too off track, I want to talk about Intertwine. I love the image of Intertwining, because it shows us the truth of how we are all interconnected, often much more than we think, and this is what this community is here for. One of the sad truths of human beings is that w

e sort ourselves into those who are like us. We find and connect most often with people who are the same race, religion, income category, gender, etc.

This is a myth of the human race. We have all forgotten that we are, simply and purely, human beings. Christians say that all are one in Christ, I say we are all one in being human. We all despair, we all laugh, we all love, we all cry, we all doubt, we all believe in something. These are common experiences no matter your demographic information.

When people sort themselves in ways I previously mentioned, that is when trust and compassion is lost. Divisions arise. Hatred and bigotry take hold. Intertwine is about bridging those divisions. It’s about bringing people of different backgrounds together to learn more about each other and learn to see each other as pure human beings. This is what breeds compassion.

I remember when I was in high school, and there were kids who would go to rehab. I’m not proud of it, but I wrote them off. I thought they were dumb, bad kids. I had no respect or care for them. My first job out of college was working on an inpatient dual diagnosis unit for adolescents.

That’s when I discovered the truth of what those kids I wrote off in high school truly were. Hurting. Abused. Children of adults who would use with and provide hard drugs for their own children. They were never given a chance. I also found them incredibly intelligent and well-meaning. They had the misfortune of being born into dysfunctional families so different from my own that I purely did not understand. But through working with them I started to. My compassion for them has grown abundantly through those experiences, and, as hard and difficult as those days were, I am eternally grateful for them.

This is what human beings are up against: our own nature. Our own tendencies to congregate with those who are just like us. Intertwine is a community that is open and welcome to all. Our wish is to bring together people of all races, religions, political persuasions, income levels, etc., and learn from each other that, at the root of it, at the very end of the day, we are all just human beings doing our best to live life as fully as we can.