Realistic Spirituality

As I speak with people both inside the parish I serve and at my "adjunct offices" (various coffee shops in the surrounding community!), I've begun to suspect there are two competing themes when it comes to discussing the "spiritual life":

The Desire: "I want to grow spiritually. I'm hungry for deeper connections in my relationship with....(God, Spirit, Soul, Nature, Others). I want some concrete tools to assist me in this growth."

The Difficulty: "My life is so busy, I don't have time to devote myself to such growth, so I alternantly feel resigned to my situation or guilty about it. I know I'm not the only person dealing with the complexities of managing 'life as we know it', but I do feel isolated and this isolation sometimes paralyzes me from taking any positive steps toward those deeper connections."

The gnawing sense that we should be "doing more" about our respective spiritual growth, compounded with the realities of our day to day lives (as evidenced by our calendars) is, I think an excellent place to begin any conversation about the spiritual life. I think at least part of the difficulty is the almost universal tendency to begin by ennumerating our places of deficiency:

Deficiencies in knowledge, skill or activities (Doing): "I know I don't (read the Bible, pray, attend religious services, serve my community/fellow human beings) enough."

Deficiencies in disposition (Being): "I know I need to be more... (loving, patient, kind, consistent, faithful, or [insert your favorite 'spiritual quality' here])."

Perhaps we need to reorient the conversation. Perhaps instead of beginning with all the things that need improving, we could begin with those areas in our spiritual lives about which we feel reasonably good. I'm sure such an inventory does not constitute arrogance or pride. But it might keep us out of the pit of metaphorical self-flagellation, which serves only to keep us bound up in guilt-ridden spiritual paralysis.

Recently, someone shared with me an interesting observation that has been a part of their journey for decades, "The spiritual life is just one humiliation after another." At first glance, this axiom would seem to promote the very sort of guilt and shame which has been so much a part of many people's experience with the spiritual path.

But my friend rightly pointed out that "humiliation" is a cognate of the word "humility" which comes from the word "hummus" which means "earth" (as in "dirt"). He noted that, in the spiritual life, the way "up" is actually "down". The life of the spirit begins right here, in the life we're living, in the body through which we're living it.

So much of the talk of the spiritual life has an ethereal affect to it -- as if, when we become "this" or "that" enough; and when we do enough of "this" or "that" then we will somehow climb to the celestial city and take our seat among the enlightened ones. The fact is, the spiritual life is not really about escaping the lives we're living (or even taking a vacation from them). The spiritual life is abut entering our lives more deeply and seeking our own center -- our groundedness, our "earthiness" -- in the middle of the chaos which sometimes swirls around us (both the chaos that comes our way and the chaos we create through inattention).

I suspect that in our culture of constant striving and achievement orientation, the idea of sitting still for a few minutes, simply breathing and reading a line or two of poetry (or a verse from the Bible) may not seem like a very comprehensive plan. Maybe beginning over and over again, day in and day out, from a place of acceptance -- accepting our desires, our limitations, our inconsistencies, our strengths, our successes and our failures -- doesn't sound very spiritual. But I suspect we really can't begin from any place else, and God only knows where such realism might actually lead!