Blob spirituality

“Spirituality” is a big word these days, a vogue word; even people who don’t like the word “religion” or anything to do with it are often proud to call themselves “spiritual.” I think for instance of the comedian Bill Maher, who says, “I would describe my spirituality as exactly the opposite of having a religious affiliation”; having seen a good bit of his work, I’d agree. Of course, while most people would say that being “spiritual” is a good thing—even that, as the Buddha put it, “Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, people cannot live without a spiritual life”—there’s little consensus on what exactly that is. Which for many is the point; they would stand with the guru Baba Ram Dass (aka Dr. Richard Alpert, Harvard psychology professor and LSD advocate), who declared, “The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”That statement captures, I think, why so many people set “spirituality” over against religion—religion requires adherence to something outside the self, while it’s perfectly possible, in this view, to be “spiritual” on one’s own terms. For all of that, though, “spirituality” tends to fall into predictable forms. One big one is nature spirituality; the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, declared, “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” On a lighter note, the Scottish actor and comedian Billy Connolly once said he loved fishing because “it’s like transcendental meditation with a punchline.” Folks like this would agree with the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki that our spiritual needs “are ultimately rooted in nature, the source of our inspiration and belonging.”Another view might be described as “self-oriented spirituality”—rather than looking for the god in nature, look for the god in yourself. This sort of spirituality can take higher forms, as captured by the American intellectual Felix Adler, who wrote, “The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. . . . For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.” Unfortunately, it can also take quite crass forms that simply put a spiritual veneer over complete self-absorption. It’s easy to say, with the Dalai Lama, that “our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness,” but if your self is your temple and there’s nobody but you to tell you whether an act is kind or not, there’s nothing to stop our natural tendency to use what we say we believe to justify doing what we want to do.With the language of spirituality everywhere, it’s easy to forget that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, a reaction against views of life that were either all in the head, all about “definitions, explanations, diagrams, and instructions,” or all about work, consisting of little but “slogans, goals, incentives, and programs”—views of life which, as the pastor and writer Eugene Peterson notes, took over the church as much as anywhere, thus tending to take spirituality out of religion, and out of the life and work of the church. He continues, in his brilliant book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, with these words:

There comes a time for most of us when we discover a deep desire within us to live from the heart what we already know in our heads and do with our hands. But “to whom shall we go?” Our educational institutions have only marginal interest in dealing with our desire . . . In our workplaces we quickly find that we are valued primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of our usefulness and profitability—they reward us when we do our jobs well and dismiss us when we don’t. Meanwhile our religious institutions . . . prove disappointing to more and more people who find themselves zealously cultivated as consumers in a God-product marketplace.

In consequence, as Eugene notes,

“spirituality” . . . has escaped institutional structures and is now more or less free-floating. . . . The good thing in all this is that . . . hunger and thirst for what is lasting and eternal is widely expressed and openly acknowledged.

The downside is that this is a view of spirituality which is set against religion, which is to say, against any sort of external shape, governance, direction, or even definition; it’s a view which intentionally sees spirituality as formless and unconfined. The problem is, we can’t live without forms, and in the absence of anything else, we tend to take the forms with which we’re already comfortable and familiar. As a consequence, though our spiritual longing is driven by the desire to “liv[e] beyond the roles and functions handed to us by the culture . . . much of it ends up as a spirituality that is shaped by terms handed out by the same culture.” There lies the lost opportunity of American spirituality, and one of the great challenges for the church in our country.