What Do We Mean . . . “Spirituality?”

The term “spirituality” is much in vogue today. Probably few words carry a broader range of meanings.

From New Age fascination with astrology to humanism’s concern for ecology, the broadest cross section of folk in perhaps any era in history are talking about spirituality.

In a very real sense all this talk of spirituality is a return to roots. Spirituality originally was a holistic term. It implied that the whole of reality is connected.

The individual, the community, the very universe itself were understood to be permeated by a transcendent reality. Spirit referred to the mysterious Presence that underlies and unites everything.

The era of Christendom changed this. There was a constricting of people’s understanding of spirituality. It came to mean not that which joins everything into a seamless whole, but a separate and otherworldly reality.

The pseudo spirituality of the Dark and Middle Ages attempted to escape any deep contact with the material world. Spirituality became detached from the world of everyday life. Consequently it furnished us with no real vision for life beyond the thought of escaping it.

Indeed, to be spiritual meant you viewed the material world as inferior to a “heavenly” realm. That spirit was opposed to matter was the predominant worldview through fourteen centuries.

Ever since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution some four centuries ago, we have been suspended between two polarities—a “sky pilot” mentality on the one hand, and a purely physical scientific mentality that sees the universe in mechanistic terms on the other.

But in our time, once again the term spirituality is regaining its holistic flavor. To hear both atheists and people of faith speak of spirituality is to sense a coming together of polarities, and to experience a renewal of the spirit.

Spirituality is about being deeply enough in touch with our experience of life to truly love it. Such a love of life is what grounds and shapes an authentic spiritual vision. For when we love things, we don’t abuse them, we use them well.

We can learn more about the transcendent by plumbing the depths of our everyday experience than we can ever discover by spinning webs of speculation about the hereafter or other dimensions of existence.

Spirit manifests itself not in airy fairy imaginings but in the particular of our everyday lives. It is in the concrete, not the abstract, that spirit reveals itself in us.

Because the transcendent is transmitted in the real and the down-to-earth, only when we ground ourselves in our actual experiences, not in speculation, do we find a sustaining meaning for our lives. As the fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich understood, the humble hazelnut holds within it the mystery of the entire universe if we have eyes to see it!

To be grounded in our experiences, we must plumb their depths. Skirting across the surface of life in a helter-skelter existence is not only stressful, it robs us of both meaning and fulfillment. Only allowing ourselves to experience the depth dimension of our daily experiences can fulfill us.

When we embrace the depth dimension of our experiences, we come to view life as sacred. Rather than being a scattered series of random events, our lives become an unfolding of divine Presence, in which we find meaning and contentment.

Montana writer William Kittredge says in his memoir, Hole in the Sky, “If we want to be happy at all, we have to acknowledge that the circumstances which encourage us in our love of this existence are essential. We are part of what is sacred. That is our main defense against craziness, our solace, the source of our best politics, and our only chance at paradise.”

What do we mean by the depth dimension of our lives? Kittredge puts it nicely: “I want to think that all creatures, even us, are in love with the makeup of their actualities like bats at the throat of some desert flower while no one is watching, spreading pollen in ways the flower would love if flowers did such things. And maybe they do.”

Two great spiritual teachers of our time not only echo Kittredge’s insight, they show us how to experience it in practical terms. Michael Brown and Eckhart Tolle ask us to embrace the whole of life as a seamless expression of divine Presence.

To be spiritual is to allow the deepest currents of our being to rise to the surface and animate our lives. The goal of spirituality is not to leave life, but to learn how to be fully present in it.

Spirit is that which pulses within and unifies all being. To be spiritual is to recognize ourselves as cells of one universal organism. As our individual experiences become grounded in the spiritual dimension of life, we find our concern for depth in our own lives washing over into a concern for depth in the way we treat the world around us.

Three books available on this website, coupled with CDs by the same authors, have helped me deepen my awareness of the divine Presence in every dimension of my life. They have helped me find wholeness in the life I lead every day.

The Presence Process, by Michael Brown, and A New Earth and The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, are unsurpassed for their ability to bring one in touch with spirit in each and every facet of life. They may be the best investment you ever make. They certainly have been for me.