Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Briarcliff, Croton, and Ossining

The Meaning Of Spirituality

Given by James Covington on May 23rd, 2004

“Spirituality” is one of those “squishy” words. The more you try to define it, the more elusive it becomes. The spiritual is dangerous, mysterious, intangible, ephemeral, and subjective. Being spiritual has been likened to “nailing down the air in a balloon.”

To be sure, there is today a deep spiritual hunger. People want more meaning in their lives than they can find in the workaday world. So, spirituality must have something to do with meaning. But, absent the rigorous ethical and spiritual disciplines of a community of faith, many seem to want spirituality on their own terms. Kathleen Norris, in her “spiritual geography,” Dakota, worries about treating the soul “as just one more consumer on the American landscape and spirituality as the commodity that fulfills its every whim.”

America is obsessed with spirituality. It is ubiquitous. We are surrounded by a very profitable spiritual market place. We are awash in McSpirituality; junk food for the soul, a mix-and-match world with a “Designer God.”

How often, however, have we heard it said that “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious?” A common distinction is made between “spirituality,” and religion.” Spirituality generally refers to the private zone of human experience. Religion usually refers to the social zone. The spiritual is self-focused, while the religious is community-centered. Spirituality may be thought of as the “inner lining of religion.”

It is possible to develop spiritually both in isolation and in community, but to the extent contemporary spirituality deprives itself of an ongoing community of faith, I believe it is thereby impoverished. We have perhaps confused the container with the content. Religion can be seen as the outward form, the container, the worship service, the education program, the community outreach, and the mutual ministry of the faithful.

Spirituality is that inner growth in meaning that happens in each of us. I believe that growth is facilitated best by a community that has a history, a world-serving mission, a worshipping community, and a commitment to mutual care over the life span. Spirituality without religion can become amorphous, vague, self-serving, just as water without a pitcher to give it shape spills useless on the floor.

For many people, the word “spiritual” suggests something exotic or paranormal, something on the fringe, something a little woo-woo.

Actually nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being something esoteric and other-worldly, spirituality is the very ground we come from, the “ground of our being, as the theologian Paul Tillich called it. Spirituality is not something optional. It is not some pious choice that women and soft men and priests and holy people make. Spirituality is the essence of what we are as human beings. We may ignore it, but we cannot escape it. Spirituality is like health; we may have good health or poor health, but it’s something we can’t avoid having. The same for spirituality: every human being is a spiritual being. The question is not whether we ‘have spirituality’ but whether the spirituality we have is negative, isolated, vengeful and self-absorbed on the one hand, or positive, gracious, forgiving, communally–based and life-giving on the other.

Spirituality has to do with your integrity, the integration of your values and your living. Spirituality has to do with right relationship, with others and with the earth. It has to do with living in thankfulness.

Ronald Rolheiser, author of a book called “The Holy Longing,” says that our spirituality is what shapes our actions. Do we act in ways that leave us healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter? The “longing” referred to in the title of the book is the erotic drive, the life force, in all of us. Everyone lives with desire, with life energy, that reaches out for fulfillment. We have intellectual energy, emotional energy, creative energy, and physical energy. It is how we handle that energy that determines our spirituality. Where is that passion focused, how is it used. Our life energy can be dissipated. It can be spread too thin. Worst of all, it can be used destructively, to harm instead of to heal. How do we know if we are using our energy well, if we are spiritually integrated? We look at the fruits of our living and the quality of our relationships. We look at what we touch. Does it grow? Does it flourish?

I heard of a woman recently who began dating a man who she thought was the answer to her prayers. “He is so spiritual,” she told her friends. “He has meditated for twelve years.” But when they had their first big argument, he slapped her. I think that said a whole lot more about this spirituality than did his meditating.

Marilyn Sewell, writes: “The opposite of being spiritual is not being a non-believer, the opposite of being spiritual is being dead to life—not wanting anything, not hoping anything, not enduring anything.”

Here is the secret, though—there is always something there to pull us back to life, back to this desire, this fire that burns within, no matter how damped down it may seem at times. This the Divine spark that exists in each of us, and which may be re-kindled by a touch, a kind word, a memory, and we come alive once again. The Norwegians have a lovely legend that each soul is kissed by God before being assigned to a living body, and all during life, the individual retains this dark but very powerful memory of that kiss, and that every experience in that person’s life is subconsciously measured by that remembered kiss. I think that it is so. There is some goodness that pulls at us that will not let us go.

Spirit in Latin means “to breathe”; in the Hebrew scriptures it is life, breath, ruah; in the Christian scriptures it is penuma, life force, vitality and aliveness. The spiritual realm has to do with those invisible forces that create and sustain life, the very ground of our being. It is the inner dimension of things. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about our soul that we “can’t see it but it changes things.”

So spirit, then is that life force—intangible, untouchable, indefinable, yet which we know is the very ground of our being.

But how does one cultivate a spiritual life? There are probably many ways but here are three.

I cultivate the spiritual life when I am centering down. In all devotional literature, this is spoken about over and over again. In all the ways we hear about how to become spiritual these days—meditation, imaging, spiritual retreats, wilderness ventures, etc., this is what people seem to be doing—centering down. Events can also bring this about—tragic events, illnesses, crises—events beyond our control that crash in upon us and remind us of our mortality—or push us inward. In primitive religion one of the most common totems was the center pole(the axis mundi) of the tribe. It was the spirit center—it was the place where one was found when one was lost in the chaos of life.

Centering down is what we do when we have to deal with the inevitable tragedies of life, including death, including your own. It is not only how we live our life, but how we face our death, that is an indicator of spiritual health.

Centering down means moving into our depths. Re-examining who we really are as mortal beings and where we are going, reordering priorities of our lives, figuring out what really matters, or just searching for the strength and courage to deal with the downs and tribulations. Centering down may happen spontaneously, or be brought on by a crisis, a near-death experience. A person may come to herself in dramatic fashion as a woman who called me a few years ago and confided that she has just lost her husband to divorce, had lost her sister who died, and was having difficulties with her teenage daughter. Yet, she said she had never felt so alive, transformed. She said to me, “It feels like an inner presence, something eternal, transcendent, real and alive. I don’t know how to explain this feeling. Is it God? Or just me?”

But many of us have probably gained this sense of ourselves less dramatically, over time, through everyday experiences of learning and suffering and loss and taking risks and making mistakes and being surprised. I call it centering down, going down into self, owning the truth about ourselves, knowing our desire, our longing, our secrets, our deepest concerns. It means putting aside the gimmicks and the fears and the busy-ness and “Listening to the still small voice within.

In Thomas Moore’s book The Care of the Soul, he writes, “the soul, seat of the deepest emotions, can benefit greatly from the gifts of a vivid spiritual life and can suffer when it is deprived of them. The soul needs an articulated worldview, a carefully worked out scheme of values, and a sense of relatedness to the whole.

And this leads me to my second idea on cultivating a spiritual life. In the deepest part of our being, at the center of the soul, is a profound need to belong, whether it be to a blood-line family, a family of friends, a congregation, or even the family of humanity. No one is an island, you know, we are part of an interdependent eco system and no one can act independently. One of the strongest needs of the soul is for community in the form of attachment, intimacy and variety. In the process of give and take, working through, supporting, and loving others, I sometimes feel that the deeper emotional bed of my being is being nurtured in a spiritual way.

There are many signs in our society that we lack a sufficiently deep experience of community. People bemoan the breakdown of family and neighborhood. Loneliness is a major complaint and is responsible for deep-seated emotional pain that leads to despair.

Belonging entails the confirmation of your “identity,” i.e., identifying your relationships. A name relates us to a family, our address to a community, our profession to the work that we do. For us who name the people called Christian, or Jewish or Unitarian as our religious progenitors, we have a spiritual tribe called in the Biblical narrative “people of God, or “people of the Way.” Membership in this spirit/tribe makes us often closer to people of that tribe than I am to people of my blood family. In that sense the belonging we are talking about is of the spirit.

One of the first things the woman who called me decided to do, was to look for a community of others where her spirit, her self could be nurtured and supported. She wanted to know if Unitarian Universalists believed in spirituality. Her soul called out for a belonging and connection to others.

Finally I believe spirituality is enriched by the act of covenanting. I believed covenanting is an aspect of the life of the spirit deeply ingrained in all our spiritual ancestors. It testifies that life is made richer or more humane because we are willing to make decisions and commitment. Covenanting is an action in response to God, to nature, to others, by making promises of life, loyalty and caring. Covenanting is calling ourselves out of ourselves so that we become a part of something or serving a cause that is greater than ourselves. Covenanting calls forth the power of love from its deepest depths; it is the agape form of love, which means, “understanding good will” toward all people. Covenanting, making promises, committing ourselves to another, a cause, a fellowship, and finally to the earth itself, I believe consummates or completes our lives and brings us close to that wholeness we were meant to know.

A spirituality that remains on the personal plain alone, is an incomplete, a spurious spirituality. A spirituality that does not concern itself with the struggle in history for human decency and justice, a spirituality that does not show concern for the shape of things to come, that does not attempt to interpret the signs of the times and address the evil and indecencies of our humanity, is only a sham. It comes up short. Vibrant spirituality and social responsibility are a seamless web in which our gratitude for being overflows into service.

There is a profound sense of the life of the spirit in the act of covenanting. We don’t always keep our promises, we break our contracts, shrink from our pledges, fail to live our ideals, but deep in our hearts we know that covenanting as an action of commitment toward goodness and justice is as natural to human beings a breathing in and breathing out.

And so there you have it. When we use the word “spiritual” we are talking about the mysterious wonderment of life, into which according to the Hebrew myth, God breathed the breath of the Spirit. What I am suggesting to you is this: the essence of spirituality is experienced in certain ways: (1) Centering down, i.e. a deliberate reexamining and nurturing of the soul—the inner self. (2) Belonging, i.e., having a sense of connection with community, one’s family, or even with the human family in some caring and significant way. (3) Covenanting—i.e. promise making, commitment, getting outside of one’s self. Spirituality is more than a private, inner experience. It is sustained and deepened through an active life of commitment in the world.