Student Spiritual Biography Series
Installment 6 - Wendy Matus
It was 1992, and as a sales representative for Xerox Corporation in upstate NY, I did a lot of driving. To keep me company on the long stretches of highway, my parents gifted me the deluxe, 12-cassette recordings of the Deepak Chopra seminars. I was hooked. I still remember the deep sound of Deepak’s voice as he declared, “You are That, all this is That, and THAT IS ALL THERE IS!”
The following year, at 25 years old, I left Xerox and headed West to Denver in search of the “That” Deepak Chopra described. Those cassette tapes wore thin as they played in the tape deck of my white Mustang convertible, and channeling Parzival on his white horse, I drove across the country in search of a Holy Grail. I traveled, lived, and worked in the Herbal Medicine industry in Colorado, Boston, and Cincinnati, all the while still spiritually searching… In 1995, while living in Boston, I met a Guru, Ella Collier, who channeled the “I AM” and spoke of Christ consciousness. Working with Elle awakened a need for Christ in my life, but it was clear the guru path was not a long-term solution.
I made my way to reside in San Diego, where I experienced an existential moment. I sat down at my kitchen table and resolved to remain right there until I finally answered the question: What is my life’s work? I prayed. On the table sat the San Diego Reader, a local newspaper. I opened the paper to an advertisement to study Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. That was it, Herbal Medicine!
A deep reverence for plants defined my early childhood. From the age of three, I would be found in the flower gardens of my neighbor’s house in Rochester, NY, picking flowers to grind and make perfume or potions, or just staring at the flowers for hours on end. The nuns at Saint Ambrose school also held my reverence due to their kind and gentle ways, but by the time I turned seven, we moved to the deep woods of upstate NY, leaving the nuns and St. Ambrose behind. I was at home wandering in the fields and woods, surrounded by everything green, and the forest became my true place of reverence.
The thought of studying Herbal Medicine made my heart sing. When I began this four-year Master’s program in Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Diego, a friend gave me Paramahansa Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi. Soon, I was regularly attending religious services at Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship in Encinitas, CA, and began studying Kriya Yoga, becoming an initiate on this path. Yogananda had a deep love and reverence for Christ. My Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine classmates soon nicknamed me “God Girl.” I was also drawn to the San Diego Zen Center, where my teacher and guru, Charlotte Joko Beck, author of Everyday Zen, guided us through three-day-long meditations at the center. My deep love of Herbal Medicine and studies culminated in a Master’s of Traditional Oriental Medicine. In the autumn of 2000, I followed a call to move to NYC, the Big Apple, to work as an Acupuncturist and Herbalist.
I soon married, and my daughter was born in 2008. In 2010, after visiting 13 other nursery schools for my daughter, we finally found Green Meadow Waldorf School in Spring Valley, NY. It was during an anthroposophical book study at Green Meadow that Anna Silber, our teacher, drew the angelic hierarchies on the board. The truth resonated in my heart, and I burst into tears. I began taking my daughter to the Christian Community Church for festivals, and before long, we were attending every Sunday.
In 2015, my husband and I divorced. Looking back, our Christ community was a source of deep peace for me and my daughter during this tragic time. Patrick Kennedy became our congregational priest, and his ability to see the Christ in us started to heal the pain in our family. I had been working in the healing field for decades, but when I experienced the healing force of Christ in the Consecration of the Human Being, I knew my path was about to change.
In the fall of 2018, I enrolled in the North American Seminary of the Christian Community in Spring Valley, NY. After that first year in the seminary and many DLP classes later, I am thrilled to be a part of the Seminary Hybrid Program.
Wendy Matus is a Knowing Christ student in the hybrid-online program. She lives in the Spring Valley New York.
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.