Searching For Spirituality
Given by James Covington on September 17th, 2005
Good morning!
We gather in this place this day
To let silence heal our spirits,
To let community enclose us in warmth,
To let vision change our hearts.
Come, let us worship together.
I am speaking about spirituality today for a couple of reasons. First, because we are encouraging you to sign-up for Community Circles, a program we started a couple of years ago to provide people a way to connect to one another in a smaller setting through sharing with one another their personal values and views about meaning and purpose. So we like to think of Community Circles as an avenue for spiritual growth and connection, for those who are interested. Not everyone is. Second, America has become obsessed with spirituality. Newsweek magazine recently devoted nearly its entire issue to ongoing interest Americans have in this subject. But what do we mean by “spirituality.”
Interestingly, Unitarian Universalists have historically had some reservations about “spirituality,” and even today, many are perplexed and a bit chagrined by the rising interest within our membership
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, subjective. Being spiritual has been likened to “nailing down the air in a balloon.”
Spirit in Latin means “to breathe”; in the Hebrew scriptures it is life, breath, ruah; in the Christian scriptures it is pneuma, 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.”
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. Just distracting ourselves in order to get through the day. We all go through times like this, of course, WE all have our demons. This is suffering of the spirit.
Let me tell you a story from the Buddhist tradition. “There was once a woman who was arrogant and proud. She decided she wanted to attain enlightenment, so she asked various spiritual advisors how to do that. One said, ‘Well, if you climb to the top of this very high mountain, you’ll find a cave there. Sitting inside that cave is a very wise old woman, and she will tell you.’ So this woman thought, ‘Good, I’ll do that. Nothing but the best.’ Enduring great hardships, she finally found the cave, and sure enough, sitting there was this very gentle, spiritual-looking old woman in white garments, who smiled at her. Overcome with awe and respect, she prostrated herself at the feet of this woman and said, ‘I want to attain enlightenment. Show me how.’ The wise woman looked at her, smiling her beatific smile, and asked, ‘Are you sure you want to attain enlightenment?’ And the woman said, ‘Of course, I’m sure.’ Whereupon the smiling woman turned into a demon, stood up brandishing a big stick, and started chasing her, saying, ‘Now! Now! Now!’ For the rest of her life, that lady could never get away from the demon who was always saying, ‘Now!’
So you want enlightenment? Are you sure? That’s always the question. Because you see we don’t know where we will be taken by the Spirit. We do know one thing—we will come to new life, to greater compassion, a greater ability to love. We’ll be led to greater integration of person. Well, all that sounds good, you say. And you answer, along with the woman in the Buddhist story, “Of course, I want enlightenment.” And then your demons arrive and begin chasing you. The demon of jealousy. Of lust. Of hatred. Of bitterness of heart. Of unwillingness to forgive. Oh, you mean, I have to face these demons? Oh, yes, I’m afraid we do.
Notice also that the spiritual teacher kept chanting, “Now! Now! Now!” The irony is that in order to be enlightened, the searcher did not have to go through great ordeals, climbing up to the top of a high mountain, to get to a holy woman in a cave. She was told, “Now! Just be present in the moment.” So simple. Chop wood, carry water.
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. 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 marketplace. Book store shelves groan with spiritually-oriented self-help books. We already have a book entitled the Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators.
I recently took an on-line religious inventory sponsored by Beliefnet.net—“What’s Your Spiritual Type?” Here’s the interpretation of the scores, followed by my score:
25-29: Hardcore Skeptic—but interested or your wouldn’t be here!
30-39: Spiritual Dabbler—Open to spiritual matters but far from impressed
40-49 Active Spiritual Seeker—Spiritual but turned off by organized religion.
50-59: Spiritual Straddler—One foot in traditional religion, one foot in free-form spirituality
60-69: Old-fashioned Seeker—Happy with my religion but searching for the right expression of it
70-79: Questioning Believer: You have doubts about the particulars but not the Big Stuff
80-89: Confident Believer—You have little doubt you’ve found the right path
90-100: Candidate for Clergy.
Well, I scored 50: I’m a Spiritual Straddler. Now does that surprise anybody? One Sunday I say I am a humanist. The next Sunday I talk like a theist. I’m just barely above the Active Spiritual Seeker turned off by organized religion. I guess that’s why I’m a Unitarian Universalist. Apparently I’m no candidate for the clergy—so what the hell am I doing up here? I only wish I’d taken this test 45 years ago, before I decided I wanted to preach.
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, the mutual ministry of the faithful.
Spirituality is that inner growth in meaning that happens in each of us and this is what we attempt to nurture around here, especially in our CC. In fact, I believe that growth is facilitated best by a community that has a history, a world-serving mission, a worshipping community, 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 uselessly on the floor.
Now far be it from me to give out spiritual report cards. That would be an act of presumption hazardous to my preaching career. It is not a bad idea, however, for each of us to undertake a periodic self-examination. My question then, is, “What is the state of your spirit?”
I make the assumption here that 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 and self-absorbed on the one hand, or positive, communally-based and life-giving on the other.
With my spiritual stethoscope at the ready, then, I ask a few of those provocative questions from my Spiritual Checkup:
Question: Do you have a healthy sense of humor about yourself and the contradictions, the paradoxes and the oxymorons of life? When in doubt, can you laugh at life?
Of course, life is a serious business, but with no sense of humor, no perspective, it is quite simply impossible. As Robert Frost wrote, “Oh God, if you forgive my many little jokes on Thee, I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.”
To be able to laugh at oneself and one’s pretensions is a sign of good spiritual health. Being humbled now and then is spiritually healthy and there is nothing more humbling that trying to minister to a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
Question: Can you deal with the inevitable tragedies of life, including death, including your own?
I don’t believe there are any self-help books that can figure out the meaning of the inherent messiness of the human condition. More apt is the ancient Book of Job – which was perhaps the first anti-self-help book. It looked deep into the ambiguity of human existence in contrast to some of these soporific paeans of praise to the good life as a self-indulgent cakewalk.
It is not only how we live our life, but how we face our death, that is an indicator of spiritual health. Religion prepares us for the worst, as well as the best, that life offers.
Question: Does your spirituality lift you and your life into larger frameworks of meaning so that you see your life as a worthy project, so that you take joy in the work of your hands and heart?
“For 35 years Paul Cezanne lived in obscurity, producing masterpieces that he gave away to unsuspecting neighbors. So great was his love for his work that he never gave a thought to achieving recognition, nor did he suspect that someday he would be looked upon as the father of modern painting. “Cezanne owes his first fame to a Paris dealer who chanced upon his paintings, put some of them together, and presented the world of art with the first Cezanne exhibition. The world was astonished to discover the presence of a master. The master was just as astonished. Shortly after the exhibition opened, Cezanne, arriving at the gallery leaning on the arm of his son, could not contain his amazement when he saw his paintings on display. Turning to his son he exclaimed, “Look, they have framed them!”
We all need to have the work of our lives framed in some larger context than the everyday. That is spiritual health.
Question: Does your spirituality enable you to celebrate life?
I am captivated by the experience of writer Joseph Campbell ringing the great bronze bell at Chartres Cathedral.
He climbed the tower up to the great bronze bell with the concierge. “There was a little platform like a seesaw. He stood on one end of the seesaw, and I stood on the other end of the seesaw, and there was a little bar there for us to hold on to. He gave the thing a push, and then he was on it, and I was on it. And we started going up and down, and the wind was blowing through our hair, up there in the cathedral, and then it began ringing underneath us –’bong, bong, bong.’ It was one of the most thrilling adventures of my life.
I have not been to Chartres, but I think I know whereof Campbell speaks. Bells, chimes, gongs, have always fascinated me - both the sight and the sound of them. They put me in touch with a deeper dimension of my being that words cannot reach.
Here is what I often feel—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 is the Divine spark that exists in each of us, and which may be re-kindled by a touch, a kind word, a memory, a conversation 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.
Question: What is your most spiritual moment? Mine was when I was 16 and felt a presence in a room with five other friends. We called the presence God, at the time. We all felt surrounded by the saints! It was a powerful and moving experience and afterwards I decided to become a minister.
That was a dramatic moment. But a similar feeling occurred last week when the facilitators for Community Circles met and shared our thoughts and fears and questions about natural disasters as we had just witnessed in Hurricane Katrina. I left that meeting feeling very connected.
What is spirituality? It is experienced in the seeking. Seeking God, or seeking the Mystery or the depths of the soul. Finding and touching the core. Call it whatever you want. In Community Circles, we are seeking the answers from the depths of being. All such seeking awakens us to the part of us that cannot be touched by birth or by death, that is timeless, that shows us we are part of a Great Unity from whence we came and to whence we shall return. It takes our fear and gives us courage of living; it takes our grasping and turns it into giving. It enables us to stoke the fire within and to let it burn keenly, focused and bright, in love and in service to all our brothers and sisters in creation. So be it.