In Doug Marlette's book of cartoons, There's No Business Like Soul Business, the Rev. Will B. Dunn, a southern preacher with bulbous nose and a black preacher's hat, speaks from his pulpit: "Friends, now that I've returned your spiritual report cards and you've had a chance to look them over, are there any questions?" The next frame shows a single paper airplane, presumably with a question, glancing off his hat. The third shows him trying to protect himself from a deluge of paper airplanes. In the final frame he is buried in paper airplanes, and a thought bubble has these words of despair: "I don't know why I even bother."[1]
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 is not "how are you?" but "how's your faith?"
The seriousness of the spiritual quest goes back in Unitarian Universalist history to the 17th century Minor Church of Poland. To an impressive degree its adherents stressed church discipline, by which they meant the frequent reminding of individuals of their duty as faithful people in a religious community. Quarterly, a moral and spiritual examination was made of each member, followed by exhortation and correction from ministers and laity alike. It was serious business, and each had to make an accounting of their stewardship. A Catholic historian later declared this religious faith was very influential in Polish history, and that one reason why its adherents did not become more numerous was that its moral and spiritual demands were too strict.[2] They took their spiritual report cards seriously!
Spiritual life is often compared to a journey - a pilgrimage - ala John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Therefore, I was intrigued by these words of Canadian author Margaret Atwood:
"What should we have taken with us? We never could decide on that; or what to wear, or at what time of year we should make the journey, so here we are in thin raincoats and rubber boots on the disastrous ice, the wind rising. Nothing in our pockets but a pencil stub, two oranges, four Toronto streetcar tickets and an elastic band holding a bundle of small white filing cards printed with important facts."[3]
We are forever taking trips - we mobile Americans - and we always take adequate provisions. We have travel club maps and advice. There are first aid supplies in our glove compartments. There are the games to keep the kids happy. There is our national public radio guide so we will not miss the news of the day. There is a full-size spare tire and jumper cables and the emergency kit. There is, of course, the computerized global positioning system. We've arranged for neighbors to feed the cat. We pronounce ourselves ready to go.
But if life is a spiritual journey, what should we take with us? Hafiz, a 14th century Persian poet, warns us of the very real perils to be found on this sojourn:
'It is always a danger to the aspirant on the path
When one begins to believe and act
As if the ten thousand idiots who so long ruled and lived inside
Have all packed their bags and skipped town or died."[4]
Now we enter the dangerous and mysterious world of the intangible, the ephemeral, the subjective. Being spiritual has been likened to "nailing down the air in a balloon." Spirit in Latin means "to breathe" or "to blow"; 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.[5] It is the inner dimension of things.
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."[6]
It is possible to develop spiritually both in isolation and in community, but much of contemporary spirituality deprives itself of an ongoing community of faith and, I believe, is thereby impoverished.
We have perhaps confused the container with the process. 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. I believe that growth is facilitated best by a community that has a history, a world-serving mission, a regular worshipping community, a commitment to care for one another 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.
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. But, absent the rigorous ethical and spiritual disciplines of a community of faith like our Polish forbears, many seem to want spirituality on their own terms. A church of one. No obligations save to themselves. Are today's spiritual pilgrims looking for the challenges of a deeper faith or are they merely searching for assurances that the way of life they are already living is pretty much OK. It is, as one observer notes, "Religion 'lite.' To get the flavor without the substance."[7] Spirituality is too often equated with personal success - whatever that may mean.
However, life is about failure and success, victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, enjoyment and suffering. There is too much of the "feel-good" mentality in what passes for the contemporary spiritual journey. Can it deal with the inevitable bumps in the road? Could it deal with Jonathan Rosen's feelings as he lost his grandmother?
America is obsessed with spirituality. It is ubiquitous. We are surrounded by is a very profitable spiritual marketplace. Book store shelves groan with spiritually-oriented self-help books. We are awash in McSpirituality: junk food for the soul, a mix-and-match world with a "Designer God," religion a la carte, The Divine Deli, a cafeteria menu, "smorgasbord spirituality.[8] We already have a book entitled The Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators.[9] Poet Kathleen Norris worries about treating the soul "as just one more consumer on the American landscape and spirituality as the commodity that fulfills its every whim."[10]
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.[11] 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.
Consciousness guru Ken Wilbur critiques the superficiality of some New Age spirituality in these words: "We baby boomers have to be on guard against the belief that we're the only ones who ever got anything right. As if we're about to bring in 'a new paradigm' - whatever that means - that will heal the earth and lead to the greatest transformation on the face of the planet. . . . That requires spiritual practice, not just mental thinking - and that takes many years to come to fruition. That's not a very popular message at a weekend seminar where people want to hear about how earthshakingly important they are."[12]
We seem to reside in two different worlds - the outer world of the consumer culture and the inner world of the spirit. Dissatisfaction with the world of getting and spending seems to drive the passion for something more. Yet that something more often seems little more than a blessing of the seeker's status quo.
Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk writes of her experience with Benedictine monks, who seem able, in her words, to raise ". . . inefficiency to an art form. I've come to value the monastic witness to a model of institutional behavior that is not 'all business,' that does not bow down before the idols of efficiency and the profit motive."[13]
Elsewhere she writes, "At its worst, spirituality becomes just another consumable in the quest for a more fulfilled life. A gym membership, masseuse, and personal trainers to take care of the body, weekend retreats, gurus, and shelves weighed down with how-to books for the soul. . . . "[14] Such pop spirituality "does not content itself with sharing the commonalties of the human religious impulse but seeks to elevate our ordinary narcissistic impulses into a religion." A friend told her of an address by a popular self-help author who defined "meditation as focusing on your plans for the day and thanking God for making them happen."[15]
We need a faith that helps us live "beneath the bottom line."[16] As much as I protest many of the machinations of our economy, I confess I am inextricably enmeshed in its bottom-line-thinking. I have so much stuff that it distracts me from my pilgrimage. I'm at the stage of life where I am beginning to consider how to reduce the amount of "stuff" that clutters my life. I can't bear to pare down my library just yet, but I am trying to streamline my wardrobe, such as it is. I have been too long concerned with ownership. A child of the Depression, I have a somewhat anal personality - though you may have noticed I'm quite oral too.
In any event, I don't want to be defined by the "stuff" in my life, but by the "stuff" inside of me. That's why I am taken with a poem by Fredrick Zydek which closes with these words: "Once I had a dream. I stepped before the throne of God. He asked only one question: 'Did you become what you were supposed to be?' 'I'm not sure,' I told him. 'But when I died, I had so much stuff, it took three days to find me.'"[17]
The late Mircea Eliade, professor of world religions at the University of Chicago, used a story from the Hasidic Jews of Eastern Europe to illustrate the spiritual journey. Once upon a time in Krakow, a rabbi dreamt three times that an angel told him to go to Livovna, and that in front of the palace there, near a bridge, he would find a treasure. When the rabbi arrived in Livovna, he told his story to a sentinel who told him that he, too, had had a dream in which he was told to go to a rabbi's house in Krakow, where a treasure was buried in front of the fireplace. So the rabbi went home and dug at his own hearthstone and found a treasure.
"This means," Eliade would explain, "that the spiritual treasure is already there, with you, in the heart. But often you have to go somewhere else, to another teacher outside your tradition, to find the treasure. To find yourself you must sometimes go to a stranger."[18]
I'm not sure I agree with that. We might also find the treasure right here among us in religious community, in this religious community. For, unlike forms of contemporary spirituality which glorify the private quest apart from connections with others, the Unitarian Universalist church provides a communal setting that ideally integrates an emphasis on personal search with a sharing community. After all, one of our denomination's basic principles is to "affirm and promote. . . acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations."[19]
The pilgrimage is complicated in our free religious movement, however, in not having many signposts sunk in concrete along the way. To paraphrase Robert Frost's comment about writing free verse, formulating a faith in our movement is akin to "playing tennis without a net." To change the figure, we will necessarily doodle, write, erase, scratch out and find our journey a bit messy as we go. However, no one promised us an easy trip.
But what should we take with us on our spiritual path? What are the intangible spiritual gifts without which we dare not make the journey? Shall we take the equivalent of the Talmud or the Internet? I cannot speak for you - only for myself. But here are - for me - the indispensable provisions:
1) A sense that life matters. Whether or not there is a cosmic eye observing our lives, I believe it makes a difference what we are and what we do. Most ministers of religion speak of their "call" to ministry - some inner urging to give themselves to something beyond their own lives. It is a grave mistake to limit this sense of calling to professional clergy. Too many among us settle for "an uncalled life, one not referred to any purpose beyond one's self."[20] Life does matter.
2) At the same time we say life is a serious business, I would bring along a sense of humor - a way of gaining perspective on my finite self in an infinite cosmic setting. As serious a man as Benjamin Jowett, Greek translator and master of Balliol College at Oxford University, wrote, "We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?"[21] If the trip isn't enjoyable, why go at all?
3) I would also take with me a powerful sense of connectedness - connectedness to my fellow pilgrims, to the earth, to the cosmos, to the Source of Life itself. I'm only kidding myself if I think I can make it out here all alone. That sense of connection is necessary for people of all theological persuasions. Poet Maxine Kumin has described herself as "an unreconstructed atheist who believes in the mystery of the creative process."[22] The soul shrivels without connections.
4) Then, I would take with me a commitment to justice. "A sage once asked if there was more in his philosophy than meditation and quiet introspection. Was there a place for social action? 'Oh, yes,' he replied. 'That, too. Social action is another way of working on yourself.'"[23] We cheat ourselves if we neglect the spiritual growth that comes through social action.
5) Finally, I would take with me a conviction that the good life is necessarily messy - that I must learn to live with ambiguity and love it just the same. That is the message of Jonathan Rosen - his computer crash reminded how much he had lost. As Ogden Nash somewhat more jocularly put it,
"Well, I have learned that life is something
which you can't conclude anything
except it is full of vicissitudes
and when you expect logic
you only come across eccentricitudes."[24]
This is a spirituality for the doubting soul. Creation is not neat, no matter how scientists try to reduce it to its basic elements; no matter how philosophers seek to find reason in everything; no matter how theologians try to tie everything together in a great divine package. It is full of caprice; surprise is around every corner - sometimes ecstatic; sometimes tragic. Creation wasn't really made for me - it wasn't really made for anybody. It was just made. And we are fortunate enough to enjoy the beautiful messiness of it all.
The poet Adrienne Rich sums up our task:
"No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study,
as if learning natural history or music,
that we should begin with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying the hard ones,
practicing till strength and accuracy
became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence,
take the chance of breaking down
in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
And in fact we can't live- like that:
We take on everything at once
before we've even begun to read or mark time,
we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born."[25]
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