Meanwhile, writers like Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Paramahansa Yogananda, Ram Dass, Carlos Castaneda, and many others were writing about spirituality from perspectives other than the garden-variety Protestant Christianity that I grew up in. It was part of the zeitgeist of the post-hippie era that spiritual practices from the east: yoga, zen, advaita vedanta, and so forth — were widely accepted as meaningful paths for inner exploration. Meanwhile, other authors, like Evelyn Underhill, Morton Kelsey, and Thomas Merton, were introducing me to the mystical tradition within Christianity, which (again) was not really a topic of exploration in my neighborhood suburban church. For me, it was a revelation to see that I could read books like Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi and Underhill’s Mysticism and recognize that, at a level deeper than the cultural distinctions of our different religious traditions, there is a universal oneness: what Wayne Teasdale (who coined the word “interspirituality”) called The Mystic Heart.

For me personally, while I was raised as a Christian and in many ways it remains my “home” faith, thanks to the cultural zeitgeist of my youth, I’ve always been a bit of a wanderer. In my young adult years I was active in the Episcopal Church but also studying meditation at the Shalem Institute, where I was introduced to Tibetan Buddhism. Meanwhile, many of my friends were engaging in Wicca and other forms of nature/goddess spirituality. Again and again I could see the mystical unity beneath all these different religious forms. And in the words of Pete the Cat, I could see that “It’s all good!”