My name is Charles Saunders; I am a simple man who has one simple belief in life. God is love. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the heart of the American Southeast, as a person of color and learning of the hate filled history of the Jim Crow south, I became intimately familiar with the fallen nature of mankind. However, within all of the hate, envy, greed, and oppression, I learned about and witnessed from the civil rights history of my family and my post-Civil Rights experience, I saw the glimmer of hope. I saw the spark of God’s light, the flame of love, compassion, forgiveness, and supernatural joy which saved the souls of this nation, both black and white, slave and slave owner, oppressor and oppressed. This spark of God’s light is what saved my black people from being overwhelmed in the pits of despair, sorrow, and worthlessness, and it is the same light shining within the southern white culture which has allowed for self-forgiveness and the motivation to enact change. This is what is desperately needed in our world today.

This is my motivation, this is my journey, this is my soul’s mission to find God in all things and plainly show that to the world, that all peoples might one day be able to see the radiance of God’s love which pours from every atom of existence. It is for this reason that, after finishing my undergraduate studies of philosophy and religion, I decided to volunteer for two years with the Catholic Church in search of direction for understanding God’s call for my life. My first year volunteering I worked with the most blessed population, adults with developmental disabilities. It was in working with those beautiful souls that I came to see the beauty in innocence and I began to see the unconditional love within the innocent as the cornerstone of God’s Kingdom on earth. It was this experience that drove me to serve a second year with the destitute of the Dominican Republic. In my time of searching, in my time of spiritual discernment, I found the grandeur of god shining through the simplest of lives. I began to see the boundaries of my belief, the limited capacity of my being to comprehend God. This realization and love of truth led me to where I am now, a man in search of God.

I am currently a graduate student of Contemplative Religions at the University of Naropa in Boulder, Colorado. It is here that I hope to learn the contemplative practices of the east in order to help myself and the wider Christian community to expand our understanding of God, prayer, and God’s Divine Silence. As a simple man I seek not fame or fortune, but rather understanding. I seek to understand the Godhead in the totality of creation that encompasses all aspects of life, philosophy, religiosity, and moral codes. I write as a form of prayer in hopes that God’s spirit might flow through me and into the minds and hearts of all those with ears to hear, that God may be glorified in a collective yearning for truth. In this way, I pray, that the minds and hearts of all humanity may be directed toward heaven, that our collective soul may rise like the smoke of an offering of sweet incense and merge indistinguishably into the essence and totality of love which is the Great Transcendent Godhead.