on demand and had just assumed I wasn’t religious. But if I understood Robinson correctly, the sense of something beyond myself that I often felt in nature and while writing in my journal was in fact a form of connection to a Higher Power. I didn’t have to follow the rules and dogma of any particular religion. I could pick out the teachings and rituals that resonated with me from different faiths and create some of my own, forging my own spiritual smorgasbord.
As this powerful realization sunk in, the colorful stripes on my childhood wallpaper started to blur and merge before my eyes. I no longer felt the desk and chair beneath me; I lost all awareness of my body. Soon, I completely dissolved—floating in a buzzing, limitless “electricity” that felt both like nothingness and all there is. Suddenly, a surge of warmth gushed in, and I was flooded with an incredible feeling of loving and of being loved and a deep understanding that I was connected to everything and everyone in the entire world. I stayed in this euphoric state until a chirping bird flew me back into my body at dawn.
I still didn’t consider myself a religious person, but one thing was certain: That night, there was no denying the inexplicable connection I felt to something much bigger than myself, and that something felt like pure love. Spirituality was no longer something merely intellectual and outside of me. I now recognized it as the deepest part of my being.
A few weeks later, I chose my field of study: Comparative World Religions with a minor in Psychology.
“Comparative what?” my mom asked.
I laughed. I knew exactly what she felt.
“Why don’t you major in computer science?”
“Ugh, banging on a keyboard all day and sitting in front of a screen? I’ll go mad! Besides, what could be more important than learning what matters most to people on their most profound level?”
“Take at least one programming class.”
“Forget it, Mom.”
Senior year, I had to write a culminating paper encapsulating all four years of my college studies. It was due in a few weeks, and I was still struggling to choose a topic. I had read and discussed every major religious text, from the Bible to the Buddhist Sutras, and studied all the foremost schools of psychology—Skinner, Freud, Jung, Maslow, and more—how could I put it all together into a thesis-length paper, focused around a single question?
I thought about my two favorite religious scholars, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Mahatma Gandhi. Smith was a renowned religious historian who pioneered the comparative study of religions. He discouraged the “we’re right, you’re wrong” attitude and instead advocated the “pluralist” view that all world religions are equally valid. Gandhi took it one step further and wrote, “Just as a tree has many branches but one root, similarly, the various religions are the leaves and branches of the same tree.”2
I was intrigued, yet confused. Were all religions leading to the same, shared “truth,” or was everyone walking toward different, but equal, truths? Did it matter?
That was it! I had to go find Smith, a comparative religion scholar who had taught at Harvard. I’d heard he was still alive and living in Toronto. My burning question was this: Did he, like Gandhi, believe that all world religions lead to the same ultimate truth?
Four days later, I was in his home. His wife Muriel welcomed me in, serving me tea and straightening the red and blue crocheted Afghan on her husband’s lap. Professor Smith was a kindly white-haired man with glasses, who spoke softly and thoughtfully while rocking in his mahogany chair. We talked for over three hours. By the end of our conversation, he confirmed that he did believe that all world religions were variations of the same ultimate reality. I thanked him profusely for his wisdom and hospitality.
After listening to the interview tape, I realized I was still missing the psychology part of my thesis. Psychology provided a broader understanding of why people think and behave the way they do, but how did that fit into this spiritual question of ultimate truth?
I went to Widener Library, hoping to find something helpful. Wandering down a narrow aisle in the stacks, my backpack bumped into a shelf, drawing my eye to a book by Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
I sat down in the nearest carrel and read it cover to cover. Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust. While enduring unspeakable hardships in Nazi concentration camps, he observed that his fellow prisoners who felt they no longer had a purpose were the first ones to die. He concluded that the main motivation we’re all driven by is the desire to find meaning in our lives. Based on this insight, he created a new form of psychotherapy called “logotherapy” (“meaning” therapy).
I’d found my missing link. While Smith had demonstrated that we all share a common religious history and affirmed that we are all spiritually connected, he never really explained what that spiritual connection was. Frankl’s theory identified that connection, namely that we all share a universal search for meaning.
Combining Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s religious pluralism with Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, I wrote my senior thesis on people’s search for purpose, in their own lives and in life in general. I concluded:
Whether we are all seeking the same, shared Truth or whether there are many different truths, we’ll never know. What we share is the process—the existential search—as well as the goal of understanding life’s essential meaning. Since we’ll never attain our goal, the best we can do is to respect one another’s attempts. If we focused less on our differences and more on the shared nature of our fundamental search, there would be a lot more tolerance and understanding in the world.
I laughed as I printed the last page and ran to go turn it in. I had gone to one of the preppiest, most academically esteemed universities in America and emerged a hippie.
Back in college, finding my life’s meaning had felt like a daunting task—like we have to take some big leap to live our big purpose. When most people hear “go big or go home,” they choose to go home. Working on John’s sheep farm helped me realize that small steps toward living your passion are just as good as a big leap, so long as my contribution to the world is somehow useful. If all I accomplished was to make three more batches of shortbread to keep John and his farm going for another day, then I had done my part.
Are You Talking to Me?
Push Past Your Fear
Before coming to John’s farm, I’d met an Indian woman at Mount Cook, in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Looking out of the youth hostel kitchen window at the snow falling thick and hard, I noticed a woman who looked to be about sixty-five struggling with one of the largest suitcases I’d ever seen. I ran outside in my slippers to help.
Have you ever liked someone from the moment you met, without knowing why? That’s how it was with Kamla and me. Although we had nothing in common culturally or generationally, we immediately connected and chatted for several hours over a pot of hot tea.
Before she left, Kamla handed me a tiny piece of paper with her address and phone number written on it. Too bad she didn’t live in Thailand or somewhere else that I really wanted to visit. There was no way I was ever going to India. I had no desire to go to a country that destitute, crowded, and intense.
Three
