Go, then, and live these truths, and those I have brought to you through other sources, that
you may spread the joy in your soul, feel it in your heart, and know it in your mind.
God is life, at its highest vibration, which is joy itself.
God is totally joyful, and you will move to your own expression of godliness when you
express this First Attitude of God.
(14)Fourteen
I never met anyone more joyful than Terry Cole-Whittaker. With a smile that could knock your
eyes out, a wondrous, eruptive, liberated laughter that was utterly infectious, and an
unparalleled ability to touch people deeply with her understandings of the human condition,
this sensational woman took Southern California by storm in the early 1980s with a brand of
optimistic spirituality that brought hundreds of thousands back into happy relationship with
themselves and with God.
I first heard about Terry when I lived in Escondido and worked for Dr. Kübler-Ross at Shanti
Nilaya. I’ve never been more occupationally fulfilled, and close contact with a person of such
compassion and spiritual wisdom brought me back to a place. I had not been in years: a
place of yearning to have a personal relationship with God; to know God in my life as a direct
experience.
I hadn’t gone to church since my twenties when, for the second time in my life, I’d almost
become a member of the clergy. Missing out on the priesthood in my teens, I cycled back to
my desire to minister when I continued my theological investigations in the years after I left
Milwaukee at nineteen.
In searching for a God of whom I did not have to be afraid, I abandoned Roman Catholicism
for good after turning twenty. I began scouring books on theology and made visits to a
number of churches and synagogues in Anne Arundel County, finally settling on the First
Presbyterian Church in Annapolis as the place I would attend.
Almost immediately, I joined the choir, and within a year I’d become a Lay Reader in the
church. As I stood at the lectern on Sundays and read the week’s scriptural passages, I
became aware once more of my childhood longing to spend my life in close relationship with
God, teaching all the world of His love.
Presbyterians did not seem to be nearly as fear-based in their faith as Catholics (there were
far fewer rules, rituals, and, therefore, pitfalls), so I had a much higher comfort level with their
theology. I became so comfortable, in fact, that I began to put some real passion into my
Sunday-morning Bible readings—so much so that the congregation began to look forward to
my turn in the rotation. This became apparent not only to me, but to the leadership of the
church as well, and it was not long before I was brought in for a chat with the pastor, one of
the nicest people I’ve ever known.
“Tell me,” the Rev. Winslow Shaw asked after pleasantries had been exchanged, “have you
ever thought of entering the ministry?”