Barefoot on Holy Ground Twelve Lessons in Spiritual Craftsmanship

The New Disciples All the way to heaven is heaven. Catherine of Sienna, fourteenth century As we move into the twenty-first century, spiritual inquiry has entered a phase of ripening maturity. Today a large number of seekers have abandoned the glitz and glamour of so-called spiritual trappings. They are more sober and realistic about the quest, better educated, less naive about quick weekend fixes, and generally less argumentative and resistant. Over the last three decades, more and more of us have become aware of the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit. We've been rebirthed, reparented, rolfed, and realigned with acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, therapeutic massages, and energy work. We've been recovered and 12-stepped, cleared and cleansed with everything from colonics to sage, sweats to primal screams. We've learned to find shadows, codependent patterns, past lives, and lost inner children. We've given up cigarettes, hard liquor, and red meat and taken up veggies, flower essences, and herbs. We know our cholesterol levels and our heart rates. We know where the sun and moon are on our astrological charts, the number personal year we're in, our enneagram and Myers/Briggs acronyms. We've gone to workshops for our souls, our sex lives, our aura, and our finances. We've filled countless notebooks from more lectures than anyone can name and spent weeks in ashrams, convents, monasteries, and retreat centers. We've meditated, recycled, networked, drummed, danced, inner-journeyed, and chanted in a dozen languages. We've listened to gurus, shamans, channelers, visiting lecturers, and a multitude of teachers who act as escorts through our passages. And now are we all saints and masters? Probably not. Are we more awake? I think so. Are we more prepared to carry out our missions? Probably. For all the flaws and missteps, the dabbling and psychobabbling, and in spite of the ever-present potential for narcissism and inflation, through the process many of us have been made ready for our assignments in the world. A new breed of spiritual seekers has emerged in the last sev- eral decades. I call them disciplesawake, aware, committed, and global in worldview. They have been identified by many names, among them Transitionists (journalist Marilyn Ferguson), Enzymes (futurist William Irwin), socially transcendent (author and business consultant Marsha Sinetar), preservers, promoters, and prophets (minister and author Louis Richard Batzler), new world servers (the Tibetan channeled through Alice Bailey). They come in many forms and from many backgrounds, and these new disciples are all rolling up their sleeves to do the work they came to do. At first I hesitated to use the word disciple in this book. Perhaps what seemed most risky about the word is that it has usually meant devotion to one particular spiritual or religious tradition, but it also holds creative, active energy of consciousness. A disciple is one who recognizes, commits to, and is obedient to the promptings of his or her inner spiritual imperative and chooses to bring that consciousness into every aspect of life. Disciples are responsible for themselves, knowing they are always in the process of growing and choosing to shape their personalities to serve their spiritual intentions. Disciples tend to be open, flexible, and teachable, inclusive in their worldview and dedicated to participating in the healing of planetary challenges. In the movie City of Joy, one of the characters says there are three ways to go through life: run, observe, or commit. Disciples commit. Disciples are found everywhere and are identified by their being, not necessarily by their doing. Disciples tend to call forth the positive and the good in every circumstance. One by one they discipline their resourcesbody, mind, emKarpinski, Gloria D. is the author of 'Barefoot on Holy Ground Twelve Lessons in Spiritual Craftsmanship', published 2001 under ISBN 9780345435095 and ISBN 0345435095.