Student Spiritual Biography Series
Installment 2 - Jared Coady
I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, USA in 1977, and moved to Oklahoma City, OK in 1981.
Growing up, I had the hands of my angel over my eyes and my ears, missing much of what was happening around me so that I could live fully in my imagination until almost age twelve. Relatedly, I was a naturally reverent child, and I can recall at age eight that the beauty of the Catholic church I attended on Sunday, appealed to me in such a way that when asked, “what will you be when you grow up?” there was a significant period when I would answer “priest.”
Around the same age, my grandfather took me camping in Colorado. In the south of that state, among the ancient cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, I danced atop a sun temple. There I experienced an absorption into the nameless, into the everything. This experience is so vague now, but I know that it has echoed and guided me through life’s changes.
I was awakened from this stage through harsh, physical and emotional mistreatment by my schoolmates. That pain would later become a need for protection, which would later mature again into a relationship with the Messiah.
At age twelve, my childhood family dissolved. On the evening of the day that I was informed of this, I found a copy of the Dao De Jing on my father’s bedside table. Taking it, I read it from cover to cover in a short period of time. The prevalent idea that took hold in my soul from this reading, is that what looks like fragments actually make a whole. This has lived in my thinking in a very deep way for almost my entire life. This idea served as a seed for something spiritual to be carried through the wilderness of the next decade.
During that decade, aged 12-22, I was under the influence of many spiritual beings that express themselves as social forces as a wide array of ideals that reside in human souls. Looking back, it is as though I lived deeply through most of the ideologies that exist in modern America in rapid succession.
About half way through this period, I began to study the Enneagram as a means of self-improvement. Starting at age 17, self-improvement became my focus for many decades, and instead of paying attention in high school, I would take a book about this topic with me, and read it in class. I recall during the end of my high school years that there were a few distinct moments that I was the one teaching the class, and that the entire group had gathered around me, even the adult charged with our education. For context of the place and time, Timothy McVeigh blew up a building downtown during my junior year; we heard the explosion through the open classroom window on that spring day. He opened doors that have been important in the continued formation of US culture, and by extension the world’s evolving.
This period came to an end gradually in my early twenties. Alongside working towards a degree in horticulture, I began to study East Asian martial arts. This naturally germinated the seed of Spirit that lay dormant in my soul since the dissolution of my family. I soon found myself in a private relationship with a very surly, unpleasant, but also very talented teacher of Chinese medicine, philosophy, and internal martial arts. During this period, I became acquainted with the hidden importance of numbers; the relationship between heaven, human and earth; dynamic abstractions that seek to describe what is hidden to regular eyes; concepts of immortality, and more. This led me both to study Mandarin Chinese, later to a deep practice of Yoga, as well as to move to Taichung, Taiwan. In my yoga practice, I was disciplined in both asana and pranayama, yet I also emphasized studying the Vedas and especially Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. This period lasted roughly from ages 21-28.
Living in a new country and learning a new language broke down many soul-spirit structures inside of me. This confluence of events resulted in me becoming a teacher in a Waldorf school in Taiwan at age 30. Anthroposophy gradually helped me revise and renew all of my studies of ancient Eastern thought and practice, and to begin to gradually develop a direct relationship with the Christ Impulse and the One behind it.
By age 33, I was back in the U.S. as a class teacher, but significantly, I began to work intensively in community development. This took place in the milieu of my school work, where I found that I could teach and support the student and parent community, and that I could also help organize adult education events around anthroposophical study. Spiritual development through community work quickly felt like it was my “purpose,” and this sense was reinforced by the fact that many of the natural assets I came into this life with supported that type of activity. I worked in leadership roles developing schools in Taiwan, Kansas, Florida, and Oklahoma.
In Oklahoma, my sense-of-self as “community developer” became purified through “fire.” I will leave this part vague, as it is still unfolding. However, the early results seem to be twofold. I have learned to love Christ by name, and see Him as the One who guides me through the door and into resurrection and new life. Secondly, through this death and resurrection, I am still a “community developer” by nature and by destiny, but through His grace, my activity within community has been washed clean(er) of many unhelpful aspects of my personality. In this role, and through Him, I can play a small part in growing His church-as-body.
Jared Coady, 47, is a Knowing Christ student residing onsite at the Christian Community Seminary in North America. He resides in Norman, Oklahoma, USA, where he enjoys gardening, householding, and community building.
- This is a blog entry by The Seminary of the Christian Community in North America. These are posted weekly by the student blog team of Athena Masilungan, Nicole Reinhart, and Lincoln Earle-Centers. For more information about our seminary, see the website: www.christiancommunityseminary.ca and for more video/audio content check out the Seminary’s Patreon page: www.patreon.com/ccseminary/posts.
The views expressed in this blog entry are the views of its author, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Seminary, its directors, or the Christian Community.