The Coming Interspiritual Age

exploring ways to help individuals cultivate this self-actualized awareness. Over the summer I finished a four-year project called the Sacred Door Trail (SDT). The SDT is a 170-mile interfaith pilgrimage trail located in western Montana, which is dedicated to spiritual unity, peace, and our connection to earth and community. This past summer I finished the guidebook for the trail and facilitated the opening ceremonies, which brought people and leaders from various faith-based and indigenous traditions together to bless the land in their own ways to establish the trail as a shared sacred space.

Currently I am working to plant this interfaith pilgrimage trail template in the heart of New York City. The goal of this urban interfaith pilgrimage would be to broaden people’s awareness of the sacred and to remind them that the sacred is not just found in churches and temples but manifests in all aspects of our culture.

The path will not stop at any temples or churches but instead will direct people through the 9/11 memorial, central park, the Museum of Natural History, Wall Street, polluted zones, and other cultural points. The hope is that this will encourage people to reflect on what we are creating as a society, what's working, what isn't, where we want to go from here, and how can a deeper more encompassing connection to the sacred help guide our vision and creation? Ultimately these interfaith pilgrimage paths serve as tangible symbols and anchors of the coming interspiritual age!

Another tool I have discovered to be effective in fostering these deeper relationships is a nature based Rite of Passage (RoP). Using a pan cultural model developed by Stephen Foster and Meredith Little through the School of Lost Borders. I have created an organization called Inner Wild which facilitates RoP's for individuals and groups 16 years of age and older.

Rites of passage experiences are deeply imbedded in our collective human history and sadly we live in a culture and a world that has all but forgotten the importance of such an experience. In indigenous cultures the RoP was used to help shift the individual from the "I" perspective into the "We" perspective. This awakened a self-actualized awareness in the individual and at the same time helped them to better understand their own gifts and how they could use those gifts to be of service to the greater community. If a healthy RoP model is not available to youth, they will make one up for themselves. It may be joining a gang or a fraternity, or running away. All of these are forms of an RoP. An important aspect of our work at Inner Wild is with elders. We recently created a program called the Elders Initiative, which seeks to empower ecologically-centered elders who understand the linkages between human experience, culture, and ecosystems, and can communicate such knowledge trans-generationally through mentorship, rites of passage, and other types of nature connection experiences. The goal here is twofold: to help revive nature based Rites of Passages in communities around the world while at the same time helping elders to reclaim their role as wisdom keepers and mentors in our communities.

Over the past two years my work with Rites of Passage has evolved into deeper community development-style workshops that focus on leadership cultivation through the lens of Integral