Reading this brought to mind the profound experience I had while visiting Wales on spiritual pilgrimage to the British Isles.
I had a deep connection with Ireland already, and with my love of PG Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer, and Jane Austen I fully expected to love England. But Wales was a surprise. I felt a profound draw to the forests, the mountains, and the castles.
And in several places — most notably Tintern Abbey on the River Wye — I quite literally felt an “echo of the lost places of my soul’s past.” It was rather disorienting, as if I was walking both in the present and in the past at the same moment.
I also relate to the “grief” mentioned in the definition above. For many years I would walk for hours along the coast feeling that I didn’t fully belong here but not knowing where I did belong. But it helped to be with the wind, and the rocks, and the waves.
Music awakens a similar spiritual longing in me. Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms, Puccini — all of them have repeatedly brought me to tears of such intense yearning for…. something. Something that’s indefinable and beyond words, yet ineffably beautiful.
My theory is that these great composers were in touch with the divine, and that their music awakened and then fanned the flames of my spiritual longing — my inner yearning to seek, to know, to experience the divine for myself.
I’m convinced this was a big part of what set me on my spiritual path and helped determine my ministry.