I wanted to grow some more in this area, but after a certain point, it didn’t make a lot of sense for me to keep going to the AA meeting, because my addiction had been only of a physical nature, and the risk of my going back to using the prescription drug I got hooked on was about as close to zero as it’s possible to be.  I felt it was time to “go outside” into the broader world’s explorations of the spiritual realm.
 
I continued to stay away from more mainstream Christian churches, though, because there were just too many areas of their interpretation that I couldn’t honestly get on board with.

I looked briefly into the Unitarian church, but found that it seemed to have long ago passed its heyday, at a point where people who questioned conventional dogmas still found a need to feed their spiritual sides—or maybe just wanted someplace other than a conventional church to go on Sunday mornings.  Whatever had happened to it, there just weren’t many Unitarian churches around me.

I went a little farther with the Quakers, largely because of their belief that everyone has some “lights” worth sharing about the nature of life and the ineffable.  But after attending a few meetings, I sensed a certain admixture of group-think and hierarchy limiting the free and open exchange of observations and insights. I mentioned this to a Quaker co-worker, and she told me the particular church I’d gone to was a bit too “crunchy granola” for her tastes, too.  (My own way of characterizing these people was similar:  that they ate a lot more lentils than most folks.)

I tried another Quaker church in a nearby college town, and found it more open—but not always in a positive way.  One Sunday, after a more or less normal beginning, a man with such a profound speech impediment that it was impossible to get even the vaguest sense of what he was talking about “shared his lights.”   To make matters worse, unlike the lentil-eaters at the other church, who occasionally broke the prevailing silence with concise, carefully-considered utterances and then returned to silence, this man went on and on and on about whatever his thoughts might have been (and they could just as easily have been recipes for all his favorite foods or an impossibly elaborate mathematical equation)—for nearly as long as the sermon in a conventional church.

Not being able to envision much benefit in having another experience like this, I put my exploration of the ineffable on the back burner—at least until some more promising path of discovery appeared.  For the time being, it was enough to deal with the pragmatic business of living my day-to-day life in a more positive and productive way.

It was only after some additional unusual personal experiences that I began to give serious consideration again to this realm of the theological…or metaphysical…or whatever it was.