Hi, I’m Marc. Let me tell you a bit about myself.

I am a professional guide – in the natural world, I am a qualified mountain guide and I operate my own outdoors company.

I am also a spiritual guide, and a qualified Spiritual Director in the Carmelite Charism.

I see these two professions of mountain guiding and spiritual guiding as being very complementary. The job of a guide is to keep their clients safe, point out any dangers on the way, and help them to get where they want to go. A guide has expert knowledge of the area, understands mapping, pacing and route-finding, and has probably already walked the path beforehand.

However, although he will help you find the way, it is sill up to the client to put in the effort (physical or spiritual) needed to get to the goal. A guide doesn’t do the hard work for you. As an ancient Chinese proverb says;

“Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself”

Who am I? I am a contemplative, anchored in the love of God expressed through Christ and enriched through the world of Nature.

I was raised in a christian family in England, although as I grew up I seemed to prefer Wales, or Scotland. My ancestry on my father’s side is from Ireland, county Donegal. There must be Celtic ancestry in my blood, for I have always loved the wild and sacred places of the British Isles.

I studied conservation, and then theology.

As I moved into early adulthood, I deepend my rational, theological training, and gradually lost sight of the sacredness of nature, which had always inspired me as a kid. As the years went by, I slowly became more of a fundamentalist, and a literalist.

Then in early mid-life, I had a spiritual crisis. My faith fell apart, and I found myself questioning everything and holding on to nothing. I embraced atheism, and found myself growing angry with the religion of my youth, because I could no longer deal with the cognitive dissonance I was holding. These days it’s becoming normal to talk about “deconstruction” of faith, but in those days I was very alone.

My doubt and skepticism didn’t end with me becoming an angry atheist though. Deep down in my soul was still a hunger, a longing for something or someone more than what materialism and science offered. I had rejected “God” – the angry sky-father of my early life – but I still longed for connection with the Divine and the Sacred. Atheism didn’t address my deep need for Mystery.

I became a spiritual seeker.

I began to study the religions and spiritualities of the world, looking for truth. One of the facts which atheists seem to ignore is that all human societies throughout the world and through history have had a way of connecting with the sacred. They may call it by many names such as Tao, God, the Void, The universe, Dharmakaya, Brahman, Allah, Great Spirit, Ein Sof and so on but it’s always been there.

So I began to look in earnest into everything that came my way, guided by my intuition and by a growing sense of synchronicity. The right teaching or practice or book always seemed to come along at the right time for my spiritual growth.

Having broken out of the constraints of my young, fundamentalist self, I looked deeply into and practiced many spiritual systems, always in search of Truth. Each of the teachings I studied could take a lifetime to master, but I gained enough proficiency in the beginner stages of some of them to at least understand where they are coming from and what they try to produce in the life of the seeker. I became familiar with many spiritualities both ancient and modern.

As my understanding of spirituality grew, my longing for the unknown, mysterious god or spirit, beyond the constraints of human religion, became more and more intense. A turning point for me was when I rediscovered the teachings of St John of the Cross, and his description of the Dark Night of the Soul. In reading his works, I suddenly realised that this “dark night” was what I was going through. As a baby is born forth from darkness, so I had to walk through my own dark years of doubt, deconstruction and atheism before my spiritual rebirth. I realised that I had died to being a religious fundamentalist, and was being reborn (or awakened) as a mystic. Interestingly, the seeds of this awakening were already present in me as a youth, but didn’t flower until after my crisis of faith in mid-life.

Whilst I remain rooted in the christian contemplative tradition, I have come to a place of love and acceptance of other spiritual traditions, seeing the good that can come forth from them. It seems that God, no matter what language we use to refer to him/her/it, always transcends our understanding, and always responds to the soul who truly cries out for Divine Union. God will always be bigger than the boxes we try to constrain him to.

Along with other mystics, I find it hard to put into words the many experiences I have had in the inner realms. This doesn’t mean I have attained any dizzying heights of spiritual achievement, rather I have learned to embrace the mystery of the divine, leaning toward the apophatic expressions of faith and experiencing first-hand the “cloud of unknowing”. It is no longer possible to accept or deny statements of doctrine with the black-and-white faith I once used to hold.

When asked, “what do you believe?”, I am more inclined to answer with what I practice rather than what I believe (or at least, what I try to practice, being a mystic doesn’t make one perfect). I try to practice:

• Loving others
• Acceptance and tolerance
• Forgiveness
• Exercising compassion and kindness
• Being a peace-maker
• Helping others to discover their true selves, and to discover the Source of Love from which they come.

In short, I try to practice the ways of being in this world toward which all religions should be pointing us anyway, but which the dogmatic religiosity of my youth was so unable to actually produce in me.

Rather than cite creeds, I resonate with the sufi poet Hafiz, as he declares his experience of God as the supreme state of Love:

I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself
A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
a Buddhist, a Jew.
The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even a pure
Soul.
Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me
Of every concept and image
my mind has ever known.