"Everyday Spirituality: What is Spirituality, and How Do You Know if You’re Growing Spiritually?"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
November 19, 2006

This is the second in a series of sermons on topics of Everyday Spirituality that I’m planning to give between now and mid-June. The first was the sermon on Aging with Grace and Guts that some of the members of our West of 50 group so graciously helped me with last month.

This one probably should have been the first sermon in the series, though, because more than a few people asked me, after the first one, just exactly what it was I meant by the word “spirituality.” And more than one person wondered aloud with me if the word could honestly be applied to or would be meaningful to someone who was an atheist or humanist. I told them that I’d be covering that in this sermon, of course!

Spirituality can seem like an over-used word these days. There are a bazillion definitions for it out there – most of which are far cry from what my colleague Mark Belletini names as the word’s origins in Catholicism as a term used to distinguish religious practice from religious belief. Type the simple phrase, “what is spirituality?” into an internet search engine, and nearly fifty thousand possibilities come back – including these two short definitions: “devotion to metaphysical matters, as opposed to worldly things,” and “Activities which renew, lift up, comfort, heal and inspire both ourselves and those with whom we interact.” And then, of course, there are those ten different ways of definining spirituality that Mark Belletini heard when he talked with UUs around the country…

What is spirituality? Our prosaic old friend, the dictionary, offers us some light. Spiritual is defined as “relating to, consisting of, or affecting the spirit,” and spirit is defined variously as:
1.an animating or vital principle held to give life to physical organisms
2.a supernatural being or essence – usually capitalized, as in Holy Spirit
3.the immaterial, intelligent or sentient part of a person, or
4.the activating or essential principle influencing a person.

Of course there are a few other definitions as well for the word “spirit,” like “ghost” and “liquor,” but they seem a bit far off our track for today. Adding the ending “-ity” to some of the more on-track definitions gives us spirituality as a life-giving quality, a quality of intelligence, a quality that affects the principles which are essential to us. I like those words: life-giving, intelligent, and essential, for I think spirituality is all of them. I also like the way Catholic Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, poet of the Amazon Indians, defined spirituality: “(It) is a measure of our humanity – personal depth, conscience, deep will.” (Found in “Spiritual Literacy,” Brussats, eds.) He reminds me of the words from David Rankin we used when lighting the chalice today…

I think it is important that as Unitarian Universalists we stop believing that the word spiritual must imply something metaphysical or supernatural. Not that it can’t imply those things – at least for some of us. But for others of us, spirituality might be better described for us in these phrases from John Dietrich, the great humanist minister of the first half of the 20th century who served the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis for nearly 25 years. He wrote, "There is an energy which springs from the heart of humanity. What it is we do not know, any more than we know what electricity is. How it works we cannot say ... But that it is real, that it produces results, is as certain as that we can breathe."

It’s like Brother David Steindl-Rast wrote, “Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, …. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being. Someone will say, ‘I come alive when I listen to music.’ or ‘I come to life when I garden,’ or ‘I come alive when I play golf.’ Wherever we come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual. …” (In “The Music of Silence.”)

I'm sure you can sense this: language is a barrier when we try to use it to nail down something like spirituality – which is why the great religious teachers of the world usually taught through stories. Words cannot truly describe the realities they sought to convey, so they use analogies, and say, as Jesus did, “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” Or as Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Whenever I touch a flower, I touch the sun and yet I do not get burned. When I touch the flower, I touch a cloud without flying to the sky. When I touch the flower, I touch my consciousness, your consciousness, and the great planet Earth at the same time….” Spirituality has to do with the way we read the world around us and within us for meaning. It’s about leaning into the stories and symbols that resonate with us and invite us to go deeper with our questions and our meditations.

Mary Oliver’s poem is one of those resonant symbols for me: the seeming dualism of the spirit dressing up “like this – ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders and all the rest” is, functions for me, like the Buddhist saying, “the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” She’s not saying that the spirit is an airy and shapeless thing, (pure light that shines only where no one is) unless it pulls on human flesh in the morning like a suit of clothes. That’s the limitation of language. Instead I believe she is saying that – no matter whether we affirm that there is a spirit or not, and whether it is metaphysical or not -- the only way we can understand that which is essential, vital, awake, fully aware, fully interdependent with all life, is through our full, embodied humanity.

It took me a long time to come around to this. The first time I heard her poem, I thought, “Yeah, yeah, spirit, eh? There’s no way I’m gonna believe in that old airy and shapeless supernatural thing.” But the poem, which I’d memorized for a class in seminary, wouldn’t leave me alone. It is stuck in my memory bank in the same annoying repetitive way that the Oscar Meyer wiener song is stuck in there. (sing both…) About ten years ago, I was deeply considering theism and ideas about God that were very different from the beliefs of my humanist childhood, and started to enjoy the poem more literally.

Today, fourteen years after I first heard it, the poem's playful profundity has redefined spirituality for me: as something inherent in earthy, earthly humanity. Lately even I’ve been thinking of spirit as a quality of body, an intelligence that arises from the body. And, of course, those words don’t hold what I mean as well as the poem does.

I would encourage each of us to redefine and reclaim spirituality as a useful word, in part, because “encouragement to spiritual growth” is one of the principles we covenant to affirm and promote as Unitarian Universalist congregations. Actually, this principle is written this way: we covenant to affirm and promote “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.” It’s interesting that those two things would be coupled in that way, isn’t it? For what I have noticed over the last twenty years or so in our religious movement is that it has been a struggle for some of us to accept others of us particularly in the area of spiritual growth!

You see, the Unitarian Universalism of forty years ago – the Unitarian Universalism of my childhood -- was fairly fully shaped by the radically refreshing humanism of ministers like John Dietrich and Curtis Reese (which had been introduced into the fertile ground of our non-creedal faith thirty years before).

Dietrich and Reese had come out of traditional mainline Christianity rejecting its beliefs in the miracles of Jesus and the authority of the Bible and came to honor the scientific method as the only acceptable approach to understanding truth. They held supreme no deity, but instead, "belief and trust in human effort." Most of those who came through the doors of Unitarian congregations from 1940 to 1970 – including my family -- did not argue with this – they saw us as something like an alternative to religion – since religion supposedly required a god, scripture and doctrine of some kind, and we mostly had none of the above.

In more recent years however, many of the people who come into UU congregations are not seeking an alternative to religion, but instead, a religion that will allow them many alternatives -- paths or practices which can aid them in going more broadly, deeply and personally into a spiritual quest in a way that did not feel possible in the churches or religious congregations in which they were raised – if, indeed, they were raised with a religious background at all. These are people who have experienced the explosion of spiritualities and religious practices Eastern, Western and New Age that has taken place in the past twenty years outside of traditional church life. Many of these newer UUs are quite comfortable believing in god in some way and they are quite interested and curious about spirituality in its many manifestations. We’re all in this together now: the atheists, and humanists with the theists, the agnostics with the mystics, the earth-centered religious people with the people who meditate and the people who pray; all of us spiritual people in one way or another. We're all bound up together in this interesting venture of community and depth we call Unitarian Universalism.

So how are we going to make this work? Recently, in an electronic forum, one of my fellow UU ministers was seeking to know what the rest of us thought might be “authentic UU spiritual practices.” A whole bunch of us answered him, and our answers were as diverse as we were as individuals. One person sagely mentioned the spiritual practices noted by Ralph Waldo Emerson and some of his Transcendentalist Unitarian brothers and sisters: writing, contemplation, the appreciation of nature, reading, observing the Sabbath, and conversation. (These are explored in more depth by Dr. Barry M. Andrews, in his book “Emerson as Spiritual Guide” – and I say they were sagely mentioned for the Trancendentalists, in many ways, laid the groundwork for much of our contemporary UU spirituality and practices.) Several of us brought up the spiritual practice of gratitude. Another said that an authentic UU spiritual practice had nothing to do with beliefs, for those would always be individual and personal, but instead, was whatever led a person to greater integrity, meaning that it helped them integrate into their lives our common Unitarian Universalist values.

Yet another person spoke of four essentials in Unitarian Universalist spirituality: One, that a certain amount of skepticism is involved. We’re always testing what we learn against what we know of our world and ourselves in that world, and our questions and our doubts are essential to the unfolding of our spirituality.

Two, we’re open to change in what we believe. A belief, of course is something we hold to be true whether or not we can prove it in any scientific way. But rather than having our doubts result in beliefs we hang our hats on once and forevermore, we strive always to be awake to new insight and knowledge. This is our best defense against dogmatism!

The third essential is that we’re willing to flirt, at least, with mystery. We recognize that there are questions in life for which we cannot have scientific, rational, logical answers, and indeed, that the constant quest for certainty is itself a distraction from and a drag on the process of our spiritual deepening. We understand that not all mysteries are meant to be solved – that some are meant to be contemplated, absorbed, enjoyed -- and we develop fluency in something beyond our cherished rationality. We cultivate a willingness to dance on the edge of the known dipping our toes over into the numinous – even though it may be rather uncomfortable.

And finally, UU spirituality leans on how we live. It leans on our morality, on the practice of doing, on the ways in which our values drive our behavior. We tend to agree with theologian Thomas Moore when he says, “A spirituality that doesn’t touch every single aspect of daily, personal, and commercial life is bogus.” (From the foreward to “Spiritual Literacy,” Brussats, eds.)

My colleague, Dr. Marilyn Sewell writes, “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,” she continues.  “We all have our demons.”

Spirituality is what many of us hope will help us fight off those demons. It is what we thirst for, a quality we often wonder if it is missing from our busy or lonely lives. How do we know if we have it – how do we know we are growing spiritually? I think of this story from Sharon Welch, chair of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri and a self-described mystic, political activist and atheist.

She writes, “I remember my fascination as a teenager with tales of angels. When I left for college in 1971, one of the stories being commonly told was of people picking up a hitchhiker, the hitchhiker telling them that Jesus would soon return to earth and then the hitchhiker disappearing. I told my father (who was a minister) about these stories, sure that he would be thrilled at the announcement of the imminent return of the messiah. His response was measured and clear, ‘Well, Sharon, I don’t know if the people really saw an angel or not. What I would want to know is this – did the encounter change their life? Did it make them a better person?” (Found in the Meadville-Lombard newsletter, Spring 2002, reprinted from Tikkun magazine, May/June 1999)

Spirituality these days can come with a lot of bells and whistles – sophisticated definitions, difficult practices, ecstatic experiences, well-trained teachers or gurus -- or perhaps versions of all of these which are more simple and humble. But the measure of our spirituality will always parallel the measure of our humanity – our personal depth, conscience, and deep will. It will always be reflected in the ways in which we are becoming better persons, the ways in which the people and groups our lives touch grow more fluent and effective, the ways in which our living leaves ground more fertile than when we came; the ways in which our lives bear fruit.

Remember: the spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders -- and all the rest – just like you, just like me.

Amen.