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Spiritual Autobiography of Rick Davis
I was raised in an unchurched household. My first experience with religion
was being forced to recite the Lord's Prayer in school. Even then, I knew that I could not believe what others professed.
A brief series of visits to a Baptist church when I was in high school confirmed my non-Christian status.
When I
went off to college, I checked out the local Unitarian Church. This, I discovered, was a place where you didn't have to accept
a particular creed, and where in fact exploration of beliefs was encouraged.
In the ensuing years, I continued
to explore and various schools of philosophy and Eastern religions in an attempt to find something that made sense to me.
But nothing seemed to click.
Then I read Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" and Gary Zukav's "Dancing
Wu Li Masters." Though I didn't understand everything I read, I understood enough to give me for the first time a clear
picture of reality at its most fundamental level -- the subatomic. Further investigation informed me that the name for the
concepts I held was pantheism.
A search in the library card catalog (they still used actual cards back then) led
me to "Accepting the Universe" by John Burroughs. This book gave me a much more complete vision of nature and its
divinity, a vision which complemented the unified matter-energy world of the subatomic. Now I had a fuller philosophy, and
a name for it as well.
Once the internet was accessible, I came across a couple of pantheist sites, including WPM.
I still maintain an active role in my community's Unitarian Universalist Church, but my personal beliefs are most closely
reflected in the WPM credo. So almost 50 years after learning to recite a prayer I didn't believe in, I have found a community
of like-minded folks to be a part of.
Miscellaneous information: I live in Akron, where I work for the Summit
County Health Department doing program planning and grant writing. I am married (33 years, same person!) and have two children
(one still in college and one graduated) and two cats.
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