Terri
Bertschy
Bentonville,
Arkansas

We’ve all heard the saying “Life’s a Journey,” but for years, I didn’t realize what a key role knowledge played in that journey. I approached life more as a “to-do” list: graduate from high school—check; go to college—check; get married—check; graduate from college—check; start my career—check; have exactly two children—check, check! However, just as I began to feel I was making some real progress in “knocking out my life,” I started losing ground with my to-do list. To-do’s started showing up on my list that I never anticipated: manage panic attacks— check; treat depression—check; go to counseling— check; change careers—check; stop counseling— check; restart counseling—check, check, check!

These to-do’s later in my life made me real­ize that there is much more to life than a predeter­mined to-do list to be completed. That was when, with God’s grace, my real education got under way. And that was when I knew that we must keep forever learning and growing by remaining open and alert to all possibilities and to reach out to our resources, whether that is our faith, friends, family, books, or even ourselves, trials and all—because when we stop learning and growing, the result is suffering and not living the full life that God has made available.

One of my selves was an English teacher. Occasion­ally, she stands up to instruct again. I am grateful to her, but wonder more at the eager child self whose curiosity insists she satisfy her love of learning. My open self was flexible enough to change directions when signs proved intriguing. A cutting-edge area in the late ’70s at the University of Alabama was career counseling. Within that area, even edgier concept was “lifelong learning.” I chose to research and de­velop resources for adult career counseling. This was my introduction to “forever learning.” People learn throughout life.

Many years later, I began to learn about another kind of forever learning. It’s the kind that comes unexpect­edly from some unknown realm. It flashes, resonates, and touches. It is recognizable as truth. Its source is mystifying and humbling. It moves to tears and laughter and fear. If allowed a foothold, the fear can lead to madness. This forever learning comes down through the ages to appear in writing, art, music, and dreams. It is the kind that is understood only by those willing to see and hear. It is the stuff of life itself.

Perhaps it is only this kind of learning that is for­ever. This kind enables us to draw our lines in the sand and stand because we never forget or doubt its truth. It is unshakable and profound enough to last. The forever learning that has passed through our an­cestors becomes our own to treasure and to pass on to enrich the lives of others. And so it is. The student becomes the teacher of the teacher. The giddy girl gives to the trainable teacher who remembers and re­claims her inner child and hurries out to play with the universe, to dance with learning. It is perpetual recess when nouns, adjectives, and adverbs don’t matter. The child is mother of the woman. Forever learning.

I have always had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Having an academic career has enabled me to happily pursue knowledge for a living and to actively seek what I have needed to know in order to make sense of life. But my world was turned upside-down when my younger sister died suddenly of a brain aneurism at the age of thirty-eight, leaving behind a husband and four small children. Now nothing seemed to make sense. Up until this point, my learning process involved a quest for what was knowable and scientifically verifiable. For the first time in my life, this type of knowledge was useless in helping me to explain the senselessness of her death and to navigate my grief. It also led me to embark on a spiritual

journey that involved a quest for a new kind of learning: a lifelong search for what is essentially unknowable due to the infinite nature of the spiritual realm. In spite of the impossibility of ever fully understanding this truth, I find it comforting that this kind of learning will go on forever

The soul continually expands on its journey; we are the physical form of this experience in the now that is forever. In grace, we continue to evolve to our highest awareness. On my path in this container, I have lived much and seen the world in wondrous ways. The highs and lows have been a dance of ecstasy and agony. Feelings have come and gone; now I can sit and be. Time passes, decades go by, and I say jokingly, “I don’t want to learn anything more right now; I am full.” But the spiral continues; the mind, body and spirit are eager to absorb more and more to continue the winding road to freedom. Truth is freedom, knowing ourselves as Divine Spirit would know us, treating our bodies with the reverent respect that all God’s creatures deserve. Our spiritual hunger cries out for a new realization of truth, and there, in an instant, we get it, even in the most mundane moments. What I have come to know this time around and try to live each day is that all of God is in us, all the time. The freedom comes in the remembrance of this gift.

Growing up in a Lutheran parsonage, the firstborn and only girl of seven, I took my “good girl” role seriously. I became helper and sister to my nurse mother who was mostly pregnant the first ten years of my life. When the twin boys were born, she asked me, age ten, which one I wanted to take care of. I said, “The one I can carry.” Luke was two pounds lighter than his brother. My role as a parentified child kept me from doing the counter dependency of adolescence. Many years later, I had to grieve the loss of artist Luke as a son when he was killed in a car accident. He is forever with me in spirit.

Sensitive to rejection or any kind of control, I married a kind, gentle, and passive seminary student. I was still loyal to the narrow Christian fundamentalism my father preached. Father’s anger and guilt from denied feelings and rejection of my female birth had left its mark, and the day came in my marriage when I became aware that I didn’t like myself very well. I prayed, “Teach me! Change me!” which became my daily mantra for the next five years. Then, “All hell broke loose.”

Three of our four adopted children were on alcohol and drugs. I went to Alanon. My husband had always tried to be a pal rather than a parent. When my youngest at sixteen became involved with a man in prison, I wanted to have her committed to a drug treatment program where her friend was already getting help. My minister husband objected. As a beginning psychotherapist with training in alcohol and drug abuse, I staged an intervention to get his cooperation. It backfired and my thirty-two-year marriage was over. I was devastated. Yet I knew I had somehow asked for it.

The breakup of my marriage, along with my failure to get any of our affected teens into therapy, was a catalyst for my self-healing journey to unravel the pain of my childhood and re-examine the foundation for my faith. Whatever healing modality I needed came into my life. Despite my training as a nurse, MSW psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, ordained Pathways of Light minister, and life coach, my greatest learning has come from the University of Life. Spirit has continued to “Teach me and change me.” I have exchanged my sinner identity for the I Am eternal love presence within my heart. Many blocks in the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual areas are being healed as I embrace my mission to share what I have learned. My new mantra is “I Am Ageless, Awake, Aware, and At One.”

With only a sixth grade education, Grandma never stopped reading and exploring new ideas. She passed this thirst for knowledge on to her daughters. Between Grandma, Mom, and Aunt Becky, I learned to read and write before going to school. I was one of two first graders in a one-room schoolhouse, giving me an opportunity to learn even more. As the women before me did, I married young. However, that did not stop my education. Books, magazines, and shared experiences helped me develop skills for early parenting, household management, and marriage skills.

Much of my education also focused on the spiritual side as I learned early on that I could not do a good job unless my heart and soul were in it. Workshops, seminars, an occasional college course, along with some work experiences and community involvement broadened my education and expanded my spirit. Yet I longed for that college degree and finally obtained it at age sixty. That same year, recently widowed, I set out with my two Yorkies for a new life in a RV. As I traveled, I wrote about my new life experiences.

When my book, Rainbow Remedies for Life’s Stormy Times, came out in 2001, my education revved into high gear as I explored marketing and speaking skills. The following year, I helped my husband’s aunt write her memoir, Remember the Happy Times. Now in her nineties, Aunt Ruthie is still learning. Along with her strong faith, she studies current events, preferring non-fiction to novels. As a child, her family was too poor for her to go to school, but later in life, she went back and got her high school diploma in night school, although she could have easily aced the GED. She is my mentor.

In 2009, like many, I hit an economic dip that demanded employment. For a time, I grew despondent in spite of encouragement from my family and writer friends. However, like Ruthie, I was determined to keep on learning. This time, my education focused strongly on the spiritual side, rather than the practical. Once my spirit was restored, I went for resume help and found a goldmine of free online educational opportunities. Continuing the spiritual study along with the computer classes, I gained enough confidence to go after my dream job. I am once again employed and still learning.

Three months prior to my sixty-fifth birthday, I entered into an ordination program for Interfaith Ministry. I believe I may be the oldest seminarian in my class of 2011. My spiritual path for more than twenty years has been eclectic and certainly God-directed. With no previous thoughts of a ministry, albeit a spiritual counselor for many years, I was strongly pulled onto another level of learning and growth.

As my seminary dean expressed to me, “The deep work of ministry is ego, fear, and shadow work.” I know this to be so as I am on a path of growth, learning, and healing that takes me deeper still within myself. I am not positive where God wants me to use my ministerial presence after I receive ordination. I have had glimpses of hospital chaplaincy as I now work with Alzheimer patients in my community. And guidance toward hospice chaplaincy was shown to me as I held my brother’s hand when he took his final breath last October. I am completely open to forever learning on this journey called my life. I am grateful as God works through me, in whatever way that may be, to serve my fellow path-walkers.

Having an open mind is essential to maximizing the use of our God-given talents. In spite of what my friends opined, I gave up suffering and actuated a new adventure at age fifty. As long as it was pro-social, I believed that God and the universe would support me, and they did. Having reached a point in my life where my children were grown and leaving, my early unfulfilled dreams began to nag at me. Why did I do this? Why didn’t I do that? Did I take the best path? Did I sacrifice my early talents?

With “life-time learning” now popular and available, I decided to start again, to pick up where I left off. I believe that life itself is a never-ending learning event. Having doubts occasionally, I learned that “a bend in the road is not the end of the road.” Some things may need to be deferred or detoured. And the old cliché, “when a door closes, a window opens,” proved to be true. We just need to realize that the Spirit is motivating us and leading us to do that work for the world that only we are uniquely designed to do.

Johann Von Goethe, the German philosopher and poet, stated, “When you take a Bold step, the Universe moves to support you.” This proved to be true for me when I returned to school, gained a new degree, and proceeded to serve my fellow man as a psychotherapist.

Doors opened for me that I never would have imagined. Spirit brought me through to satisfying goals. I also discovered that, had I pursued this degree when I was just out of high school, I would not have learned and been able to use the wonderful cutting-edge effective treatments provided by psychology since they had not been discovered yet. So God’s timing proved to be right!

In conclusion, I want to mention the scrip on a posture in my kitchen: “Your talents are God’s gift to you. How you use them is your gift to God.”