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So, What is Spirituality About?

So, What is Spirituality About?

Last updated on: March 19, 2024 at 4:50 pm by James Ford

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So, What is Spirituality About? 2024-03-19T16:50:48-07:00 James Ford

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Ecstasy of St Teresa
Bernini

I am currently at a retreat for Unitarian Universalist clergy meeting at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s lovely being with colleagues, the larger majority actively engaged in ministry, most in the parish.

The theme presentation in on trauma, personal and institutional by the Reverend Dr Elizabeth Stevens. (It’s really good. If you’re responsible for a religious organization like a church, you should book her to do a workshop)

But what’s caught me and spurs this brief reflection was how a number of my colleagues when talking of spirituality and spiritual practices seemed to assume the point of “spiritual” was a deep equilibrium. Kind of a psychological balance.

I know this isn’t just a UU thing. I’ve looked at the training opportunities for several progrms on spiritual direction, and this seems exactly what they train people to teach as spiritual directors. Balance. A sense of harmony. Maybe a sense of peace. Possibly even some joy.

And let me be frank. I have no dispute with these goals. We all can use perspective. We all need a little peace and hopefully even joy in our lives.

But this isn’t what I think of as the spiritual project. Now, I do think there are two things deeply connected, and hopefully intertwining. I call one the project of awakening and the other the project of growing up. What I see in this use of spiritual as a goal of equilibrium is a focus on a very important part of growing up. Not all of it. But important.

For me spirituality is about something else. It’s about waking up. Awakening or Enlightenment to use my generally preferred Zen Buddhist language. But I see much the same in those striving to know God in the Abrahamic traditions. And with similar language in Hinduism. I think of Pantajali’s yoga aphorisms, which are usually rendered as How to Know God.

Finding the Beloved.

For me spirituality is the project of meeting ultimacy. The Real. God. This. Words that call us to capitalize them. (Even if in my own tradition there’s a drive to see the exact identity of the sacred and the profane that calls us to render buddha without a capital B…) Lifting the wisdom of the Dharmic traditions I’ve come to call this the nondual. Different religions take this nonduality in somewhat different ways. But at heart it’s finding an intimacy with what is.

And spirituality is that part of us that drives us, that carries us, that is fully concerned with this meeting.

Now part of the problems I’ve seen in the spiritual and religious worlds is how people who give themselves exclusively over to the spiritual, should they end up spiritual teachers, too often collapse in one scandal or another. Often there is a gap, and when put to the test, too often leads to suffering. That’s why I’m interested in the growing up part of the equation.

But. In this I certainly hope we don’t lose that spiritual which is more than happiness or equilibrium.

Our heart’s dreaming.

The whisper from the deep.

That’s all. Just a mind bubble informed by a moment in a retreat.

I leave it here, for now.

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History and Religion

About James Ishmael Ford

James Ishmael Ford's sixth book The Intimate Way of Zen: Effort, Surrender, and Awakening on the Spiritual Journey is available for pre-order from Shambhala Publications or Amazon. You can read more about the author here.

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