It's Part of Who I Am: Searching for Spiritual Understanding - Softcover

Fraser, Kay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1452529302 ISBN 13: 9781452529301

Verlag: BalboaPressAu, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

It's Part of Who I Am: Searching for Spiritual Understanding tells the story of one woman, Peace, who relentlessly seeks out spiritual understanding. Her daughter, Kay, explores the complexities involved in the life of her mother. She, in turn, finds that her exploration leads her to embark on her own spiritual journey. Kay Fraser-who holds a PhD in social history-brings her academic background to this intimate and personal account that follows Peace on a fifty-five year journey through many twists and turns. Peace begins with Christianity and then moves through a variety of teachings-Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, the Theosophical Society, Co-Freemasonry, and 'A Course in Miracles'-before turning to Zen Buddhism for two decades. Finally she returns to the Christian Church. Her return to the church gave rise to many questions and answers between mother and daughter. Whenever Peace was asked why, after all her searching, she had returned to the church she would simply say "It's part of who I am." If you are drawn to other people's accounts of their spiritual journeys and wonder what insights they can provide for your own journey then It's Part of Who I Am: Searching for Spiritual Understanding will give you some clues about how to find that deep spiritual core within. Yet, it also gives hints about how not to travel on your own journey.

Über diesen Titel

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It's part of who I am

Searching for spiritual understanding

By Kay Fraser

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2015 Kay Fraser
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2930-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Introduction, ix, 
Chapter 1 A Life Develops, 1, 
Chapter 2 The Search Begins — Christianity To Zen Buddhism, 15, 
Chapter 3 The Circle Completed — Zen Buddhism And Back To Christianity, 34, 
Chapter 4 The End Of The Journey, 53, 
Chapter 5 Lessons From My Mother, 73, 
Chapter 6 Another Journey — In Paris, 94, 
Chapter 7 Further Understanding, 112, 

CHAPTER 1

A Life Develops

Peace was born into one of the old families from Kaitaia in the north of the North Island of New Zealand, the Matthews. The family history goes back to one of the first missionaries in the area, Joseph Matthews. He had arrived in the north during the year 1832 under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society and two years later he set up the Kaitaia Mission Station. He was ordained a deacon in September 1844 and a priest in August 1858. The Bishop of Auckland addressed the Synod on 20 October 1896, a year after the death of the Reverend Joseph Matthews, and said he was "a man of simple faith, and though not a scholar, was always a reverent and thoughtful student of Holy Scripture, and a man of exemplary life."

It is this quite ordinary Reverend Joseph Matthews, her great- great-grandfather whom Peace often harks back to as the reason for her returning to the Christian Church. She sometimes says about her involvement in the Christian Church that it was in her genes. My response to this comment is that I don't think there is a genetic component to our make-up which stipulates what religion we belong to. However, her feeling for the Reverend Matthews goes very deep. She seems to remember that she learnt about him very early in her life, probably at school in Kaitaia. Further, she almost had a feeling of adoration towards him — certainly she was, and still is, very proud of him.

She remembers her early days in the countryside of Kaitaia with great fondness and says in her journal that it was "an interesting and venturesome childhood." Many enjoyable moments were spent playing alongside the river alone, where she recalls she taught herself to swim by simply jumping into the river and automatically beginning to dog-paddle. No parents were around. Today she says she can still see the river flowing down with its strong current into which she jumped and began swimming. Her love of water she suggests was really beyond the normal — obsessive almost. When talking about this feeling she has for the water, Peace who is a water sign, a Scorpio, laughingly says, "It was part of who I was — must have been a fish." On holidays and weekends her father would take them (there were two other children in the family) walking for miles through the swamps, over the sand hills and onto Ninety Mile Beach, on the west coast of Northland. Granddad was looking for Maori stones and relics although apparently he didn't find much. One important moment she does remember is the time they took their two pet bantams with them on their walk and "the little hen laid eggs."

Peace has very little to say about her mother in her journal notes except, "There was no relationship with her that I can remember like there was with our father." Yet, it is with the death of her mother that she turns to the Christian Church as a thirty-seven-year-old adult.

The Depression years brought difficulties for Granddad. He had a grocery business and gave people food expecting them to pay later, and of course many did not have the money to repay him. He went into bankruptcy and the family left Kaitaia for Auckland. Peace's father eventually became a successful strawberry grower in Auckland. It was here in the early 1930s that her parents separated. This would have been an unusual occurrence for the period but it was probably helped by the fact that Nana received three thousand pounds in an inheritance from her father. He was a 'remittance man' — someone who was the black sheep of a well-to-do family in England, the Sheldums, and who was paid to stay in New Zealand and not return to the homeland. When he died the family in England ensured that what was owed his family was paid out. As Peace explains, "It was a lot of money then and that was probably how we survived."

It is important to emphasise here that as a child growing up in Kaitaia and during her teenage years in Auckland, Peace had no background in the Christian Church, apart from her personal veneration of the Reverend Joseph Matthews. The three children went to Sunday school and were confirmed in the Anglican Church but, as Peace writes, "It meant nothing to me." If there was any cultural influence with regard to Christianity in some parts of the Matthews family at the time, it did not touch my mother's family. In fact Peace still remembers her mother making a comment about religion, or the church, which was something like "there is nothing there." Furthermore, unlike Peace, her brother and sister never became interested in Christianity. I mention these facts about growing up without a family tradition within the church so as to counter the argument, which could be made, that when Peace did have her 'religious conversion' she was simply returning to her cultural roots. However, she did not have any roots or early foundation in the Christian Church.

Her teenage years were nothing special. She tells us they "were not happy times. I did not understand life, sex or anything else, and had no inclination to delve into things and find out." There were only two years spent at high school and then a year at a business college where she was only interested in "just passing" so that she could get a job in the government service. There was never any stimulation or encouragement with regard to her education. It was not until later in her life that ambition appeared and when she went back to night school she excelled in her shorthand typing exams eventually to work as a shorthand typist in the police department near where we lived. One of my friends has helped me decipher the shorthand notes Peace has dotted throughout her books. This friend is very surprised by the level of my mother's shorthand and says that it is almost perfect and certainly very sophisticated. Peace would be very pleased to hear these thoughts and I can see her big smile.

Life became more interesting for Peace when she started to holiday with girlfriends and, as she tells us, "found the attraction of boys and realised they found me attractive." She then started to go to dances in Auckland with girlfriends. These were public dances and were lots of fun. She says, "Sometimes we would be taken home by partners we met there. No sex, drink or anything else was involved in those relationships." The period was the mid-to-late 1930s and these were obviously enjoyable times for my mother, almost innocent times when compared with the stories of excess alcohol and drugs that surround the youth of today. Peace met my father, Alan, at one of these dances and remembers "he was handsome in a rugged sort of way and had plenty of personality." Two years later, in 1939, they were married. She was twenty-one years old and my father was twenty-five.

The early years of my parents' marriage were very happy. When we talk about their relationship, which was often troubled in their later years, Peace often repeats to me what a friend told her about those first years. Apparently, the friend said she had...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BalboaPressAu
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1452529302
• ISBN 13: 9781452529301
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 148
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland