Category Archives: Redefining Spirituality

Spiritual Practice

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Windy Sails

Photo by Margy Dowzer

As we grow older, we begin to understand non-object realities such as the wind, or electricity, or heat. We experience the wind through clues such as blowing leaves, or the feeling of its force on our faces in the cold, or the tug on a kite at it rises into the sky. There are many forces of connection that are so ever present that we might never notice them without flashes of insight. One of these is gravity. 

We are used to being held to the ground, we are used to thinking in terms of up and down. Let yourselves notice the force of gravity on your body right now.

Do you feel the heaviness of your body?
Imagine floating up out of your chair into the air above you.

Try to do it.
(Do you need more time?)

Now can you feel the pull of the earth keeping you attached?
What would it be like if we all just floated off the earth into the vast reaches of empty space?

If we wish to begin a spiritual journey, we need a way to shift our attention, to tune in to the larger reality of which we are a part, to the mysterious forces that connect and uphold life. A method for shifting our attention is called a spiritual practice.

We usually don’t notice radio waves which surround us all the time. But if we turn on a radio, and tune into a particular frequency, we will hear the sounds of music. The radio waves are always there—it is us who need to tune in to hear them. Spiritual practices are the radio tuners that help us to tune into the music of the universe. We are trying to move beyond our ordinary experience of everyday life, into a different channel of consciousness. The very beginning of spiritual practice is to shift our attention to the energy of the present moment. 

Beginning a Spiritual Journey

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A spiritual journey is our path of waking up our awareness to the larger reality of which we are a part. It is simpler than we think. It is so simple, that if we don’t pay attention, we can miss it entirely. I invite you to experiment with me:

Start by noticing the energy level wherever you are at this moment, both around you and within you. Are you alert? Restless? Calm or anxious? Tense or relaxed?

Now, sit up as erect as you can without straining. Notice how the energy level changes.

Now I invite you to breathe deeply, breathe all the way down into your belly. As you breathe in and out, let go of whatever might be on your mind, and let yourself relax and recharge. Just pay attention to your breathing in and out, as you sit quietly for a minute in the silence.

Now pay attention to the energy around you and within you. Do you notice any changes?

The very beginnings of a spiritual journey are in the practice of paying attention to the energy of the present moment. When we are first born, we see and hear everything around us without definition or understanding. Gradually, we come to assign meaning to shapes and colors and sounds. We say mama, or daddy, or ball, or doggie. We separate the world into smaller objects that we can name and grasp. Perhaps we learn about God as a kind of separate object that we might name and grasp.

But once we assign such names, once we divide the world into objects, we sometimes forget to see what is actually before us. When I was in high school, I took several drawing classes. Our first lesson was to stop drawing objects, and to start sketching out shadows and light. In order to draw, we have to see at a different level from the level of objects. To pay attention, spiritually, is like that. We are shifting our consciousness from small separate objects to larger connecting energies.

Shadow & Light

Photo by Margy Dowzer

I learned the awareness meditation from Starhawk, in her book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess.

Face to Face

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Clouds DSC04297When I was a devoted Catholic child, I learned about the saints who had visions of angels or the Blessed Mother Mary or even Jesus himself. There were the children in Fatima, and Bernadette of Lourdes, and Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Joan of Arc. I wanted to have a vision, too. I prayed for Jesus or Mary to come and show themselves to me and speak to me directly. I imagined spirituality should include a holy person coming down from the sky and standing in front of me. It never quite happened that way. Why not, I wondered? Why tell us these stories if we could not have those experiences?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of the 19th century intellectuals who became known as the transcendentalists, wrote something similar in 1849:

The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

A spiritual journey is our search for our own “original relation to the universe.” A spiritual journey is our search for our own face to face, personal experience of “God and nature,” whatever those might turn out to be. A spiritual journey brings us to our own experience of the larger reality of which we are a part, our awareness of connection to the earth, to each other, and to the Mystery within and between all life.

When I was growing up, it seemed that only a few special people might have such a personal experience of that Mystery. But now I believe that I was confused about what I was looking for. Let me use an analogy here. I was looking for something like a trip to a great auditorium to see “The Mystery” in concert; but the Mystery really emerges more like the sound of a tune in one’s own imagination.

Quote from the Introduction to Nature; Addresses and Lectures (1849).

The Larger Whole

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Reflected SkySpirituality is our experience of connection to the larger whole of which we are a part. I believe that each being is sacred, and we are all one family, one circle. My deepest experiences convince me this is true, even though we may forget, even despite the ways we may be estranged. Linda Hogan writes that the purpose of ceremony is to remember that all things are connected. She says:

“The participants in a ceremony say the words ‘All my relations’ before and after we pray; those words create a relationship with other people, with animals, with the land. To have health it is necessary to keep all these relations in mind.”

As we begin to build bridges across the broken places within our hearts, across the broken places between peoples, across the broken places between people and the earth, we are doing the work of mending the world. We are awakening, we are remembering, the reality in which we actually live, the unity of all. The Buddhists call it inter-being. In South Africa it is called ubuntu: we are all born to belonging, and we know ourselves in just and mutual relationship to one another. We move beyond the small self of the ego, into the larger Self some call God, or what I have called Mystery. Thomas Merton writes,

“We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

The purpose of spirituality is to remember that all things are connected and to heal the brokenness between us.

An old Rabbi once asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and day had begun.
“Could it be,” asked one of the students, “when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?”
“No,” answered the Rabbi.
Another asked, “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it’s a fig tree or a peach tree?”
“No,” answered the Rabbi.
“Then what is it?” the pupils demanded.
“It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that it is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.”
                                                                             (Hasidic Tale)

Quotes from Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, (New York: Norton, 1995)
Thomas Merton: Essential Writings, edited by Christine Bochen. (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2000)
Hasidic Tale, Quoted in Spiritual Literacy, edited by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, p. 502. 

Broken Shards of Light

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The Jewish practice called Tikkun Olam has been translated as the mending of the world. This practice draws from the Kabbalistic ideas of Isaac Luria, a sixteenth century Jewish mystic.

He believed that when God created the world, God formed vessels to hold the Divine Light. As the light began to fill the vessels, they were unable to contain divinity and shattered. Sparks of Divine light were trapped in the shards of these vessels; they scattered throughout the cosmos and formed our world. The task of humanity is to reunite the scattered sparks of Light, to repair the broken world, and thus participate in finishing God’s work.

Light in HemlockBy acknowledging our brokenness we take the first step toward returning to wholeness. I observed this so often during my practice as a psychotherapist. As painful things happen in our lives, we learn to block off the memories and feelings that cause our pain. We become divided from ourselves, and divided from others. Perhaps we may shut down the angry feelings we feel, or despise the needy child that is deep within us. The first step in healing is to acknowledge those parts of ourselves that we have broken off.

According to the healing process of psychodrama, one might begin by imagining the broken off parts of the self as separate entities. A woman came in for therapy, anxious and lonely, and we chose an empty chair to represent her loneliness. I invited her to talk to the loneliness. At first she is dismissive. “I don’t need anything from you,” she says to the empty chair. “Just stop bothering me.” But then I asked her to move over and sit in the chair of the loneliness, to imagine herself as the loneliness talking back to her. In that other chair, tears start to fall, and something like a light dawns in her eyes. She has brought the loneliness back together with her own center.

People often come to therapy thinking they are going to get rid of the pain inside themselves. But they find healing only when they have learned to embrace the brokenness with love. It is that embracing of the pain which finally eases their pain, the return to wholeness.

Webs of Connection

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Think about language. Humanity is a social species. Not only our bodies, but our minds are interwoven. Human beings speak to each other. I am able to create sounds with my voice, and a certain meaning awakens in your mind. When I say the color blue, you can hear the word blue, and see it within your imagination. When I say the word love, you can call to mind a whole wealth of feelings and memories.

Web

Photo by Margy Dowzer

We belong to each other. We are part of a larger whole. And yet, we forget. Wars rage on in the Middle East, millions die from disease in Africa for which treatments are already known, poverty sits alongside wealth, industry pollutes the air and water. This is why we need to understand brokenness as well as wholeness. Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan tells a beautiful story of a broken clay woman. She writes:

I remember the first time I saw the clay woman …in a museum gift shop. …Her black hair flowed behind her, and on her clay feet were little black shoes… Her stomach attached to earth, just above North America. Her name was written on a tag, “The Bruja Who Watches Over the Earth.” Bruja is the Spanish word for a woman healer, soothsayer, or sometimes a witch.

I loved the flying soothsayer who protected the lands beneath her. She was connected to them by her very body, the very same clay. …I bought the clay woman and asked the clerk to mail her back to me, then I returned home, anticipating the day The Woman Who Watches Over the World would appear.

When she arrived, she wasn’t whole. Her legs were broken off, the gray interior clay exposed beneath the paint. I glued them back on. Then she began to fall apart in other ways. Her nose broke. Soon one of her hands fell off. The woman who watches over the world was broken. Despite my efforts she remained that way, fragmented and unhealed. At first I was disappointed, but then I thought, Yes, the woman who watches over us is as broken as the land, as hurt as the flesh people. She is a true representation of the world she flies above. Something between us and the world has broken. That is what the soothsayer says.

Linda Hogan’s bruja is an image of a creator who is connected to us in our actual reality, broken as we are broken, not merely a perfection to which we might strive. Broken Web DSC01269The brokenness is within us, the brokenness is between us, and also between people and the earth. But—this is important—we feel broken because we are meant to be connected.

Quote from Linda Hogan,The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (New York: Norton, 2001) pp. 17-18.

DNA, Breathing & Trees

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There are many signs all around us that can help us to awaken from the illusion of our separateness, help us to awaken into an awareness of the larger whole to which we belong. Science has always been a form of revelation for me. For example, I am amazed when I think about DNA. All forms of life are propagated by this microscopic code. The human DNA includes elements in common with the DNA for yeast. Even microbes discovered deep within caves—bacteria that feed on poisonous chemicals and never enter the light of the sun—these strange bacteria also have a DNA code that has been measured by scientists. All life, as we know it, is written in the same language.

Our biological unity is present in the continuous interconnecting of all life on earth. It was bacteria that first began to create oxygen, billions of years ago, originally as a volatile waste product. Now, all of us are breathing oxygen every minute of every day.

Take a moment to notice yourself breathing right now.
As you breathe in, small molecules of oxygen are entering your lungs
and then passing through the membranes of its cells into your bloodstream;
from there those molecules flow to every cell in your body.

Imagine those oxygen molecules flowing down
into your belly, your legs, your toes.
Imagine the oxygen flowing up
into your arms, your face, your brain.

Without oxygen we cannot survive for even ten minutes. When we breathe, we bring into our bodies molecules that have been inhaled and exhaled by other beings. This air is common air. These molecules may have sailed here from the winds of Africa, or through the tempest of hurricanes in Japan. Lions may have roared these molecules; whales may have spewed them forth in a fountain above the sea.Misty Trees

Look at the trees outside your windows.
We breathe each moment with the trees.
As we breathe out, we release carbon dioxide into the air,
which the trees need for life.
As the trees breathe, they take in carbon dioxide
and exhale the oxygen that we need.
Breathing teaches us that we are one.

The Mullein Plant

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Mullein Plant

Photo by Forest & Kim Starr, Creative Commons License

As a young adult I became intrigued with herbal healing. I read books that identified particular herbs that could heal different ailments of the body. I learned, for example, that mullein tea was helpful for a sore throat. Then one day, someone showed me a mullein plant growing wild by the side of the road. I suddenly felt the connection: human beings and plants belong together! That mullein plant can actually heal my human sore throat. We are related to each other in some deep essential way.

Spirituality is about experiencing our connection to the earth, to each other, and to all that exists. According to Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” Seeing that mullein plant beside the road brought me a moment of awakening. For that moment, I knew deep in my being, that I was not separate from any of the plants or animals or people on the earth. I realized that, in reality, we all are one.

But time passed, and the illusion of separateness took over again. We are all one, and yet we are also divided from one another. Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Certainly, for most of us, we go through our days forgetting this essential truth. How often do we feel isolated from, or even in competition with, the people around us? In fact, every day we are encouraged to see ourselves as separate and individual, we are encouraged to watch out for “number one.”

A whole series of television commercials come to my mind: a grandmother telling her grandchild to “Get your own bag of chips,” or a man guarding his chicken fingers from his co-workers, or a family getting individual pizzas so everyone can have their own topping… it just goes on and on. There are messages all around us that promote the illusion of separation.

In much more devastating ways, the political idea of a common good is being taken apart in favor of privatization. Programs like Social Security and Medicare are under fire, under the guise of some kind of freedom of choice, with the argument that people can do better on their own, that individuals can maximize their retirement options through private investing.

I am pretty sure that is not true, but what goes unspoken is the shift in the very terms of the debate—we are no longer arguing how to best care for all the members of our society. Rather, we are being asked to buy into a fragmented and individualized world, a place where the important goal is to get the most for myself. Thich Nhat Hanh, Mother Teresa, and other teachers, call us to a different outlook. They call us to remember that we are part of a larger unity. They call us to return to our true wholeness.

Reverence

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There is another challenging aspect to embracing a spirituality of experience. It is not only a matter of paying attention to our own experience. It is also a matter of being open to the experience of others. How do we affirm each other’s spiritual experience when that experience may be very different from our own? How do we bring individual spiritual experience into the cauldron of community? If we approach these questions in a merely logical way, we can come up short.

For example, those of a skeptical nature might find it challenging to understand the experience of someone who relates vivid encounters with non-physical beings: gods or angels or spirits. If you do not experience such beings, you might find it inexplicable that others might. It might contradict everything you know about the world. Could there be such a reality, beyond the reach of our ordinary senses? I am not going to ask you to believe in it, but to take into account the possibility that some people may experience it. There are times when experience—our own or that of others—goes beyond our rational understanding.

Some cultures tend to be more at ease about such phenomena. I have a friend who is Puerto Rican. In her culture, one of the ancient traditions brought from Africa is called Santeria. When my friend opens her awareness to experience the larger reality, images from her culture come to life. She sees the spirits of Elegba and Oshun and Oya, with vivid colors and songs that others in her culture also report. These spirit beings interact with her and have been very significant in her life. Who is anyone to say they are not part of reality, when a whole culture affirms and cherishes them?

I am not saying we should not bring our reasoning to bear on our experience. My encounter with people of other cultures has made me more appreciative of the mystical elements of reality, and ironically, also more skeptical. It has taught me how our cultural context shapes our experience, even at what we imagine to be the most intimate and personal levels. If, as a child, I felt held in the loving arms of Jesus, was that reality, or was that an image shaped by what I had been taught to expect? Or could it be both?

When I was twenty six, I learned how my religious tradition had been shaped by the dominance of men in my culture, and I became suspicious of images of God that excluded the female. These male God images had been influenced by the assumptions and values of those in power. I had received no cultural mirror in which to imagine divinity in a feminine way.

So there is a paradox. Our experience of reality is shaped by our cultural context. This can affect our lives in both positive and negative ways. There are times when we need our rational understanding to be able look critically at experience. Experience is the essence of spirituality but it is not infallible. We must measure spiritual experience by the values and thoughtfulness with which we should measure all parts of our lives.

But there are times when our reasoning may be confounded. Let me tell you another part to the story. My Puerto Rican friend fell in love with a white woman who was a cynic about spiritual matters. Her passion was the work of social justice. However, when she entered a relationship with my Puerto Rican friend, her cynicism was challenged in an unexpected way. She began to see Elegba and Oshun and Oya in her inner imagination. She said to me once, “Those Puerto Rican spirits don’t care if I don’t believe in them. They show up whether I want them to, or not.”

There is so much about reality that is mysterious and hard to explain. We rely on our experience, and the experience of others, to give us evidence about the world. If we acknowledge our own experience, our own inner reality, then we must acknowledge the inner reality of others. That leaves us open to dimensions that might be difficult or impossible to measure. So while I would never ask anyone to believe in the unproven, I do invite you to keep an attitude of reverence for all that is unexplained in yourself and in others.

The poet D.H. Lawrence describes it this way:
This is what I believe:
…That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest
into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me,
but that I will try always to recognize and submit
to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.

Clearing

 Quote from D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature:. (Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 26. Excerpt was first published in English Review, December 1918 in the article “Benjamin Franklin.”

Trust Your Own Journey

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Gate The spiritual journey is a path of waking up our awareness. It demands that we trust our experience, become friends with our burning. It does not matter if your hunger is a different hunger than mine: you must trust your own hunger. Sufi mystic Rumi writes that our hunger itself is proof of the existence of bread. Our thirst is proof that there is such a thing as water. If we trust our deepest inner hunger it will lead us on our own spiritual path.

I cannot tell you what your spiritual path must be. I can only offer you some gleanings, some sparks of light for your spiritual journey from my experience of following my own burning, and my experience of being in community with the people of my congregation and other spiritual searchers. Hallway with DoorsSomeone once described our faith community as a hallway with many doors to the holy. One temptation is to get stuck in the hallway, celebrating the freedom to choose whichever door we want, rather than to open any of them. There is a Buddhist parable that says we can’t find water by digging many shallow wells. To begin a spiritual journey we must actually open a door, and walk through to where it leads us.

Albert Einstein’s questioning hungers led him to open a door into scientific experimentation and mathematical reasoning, and he followed that pathway more deeply than most minds are able to fathom. Was that a spiritual journey? I think so. He became a friend to his own burning. His vision has inspired and changed our lives, even if most of us could not explain the theories he developed.

Spirituality is not an escape from the world. Spirituality is about experiencing more deeply our relationship to all that is. Spirituality is awakening to awe and gratitude for all that is. We don’t have to be a Rumi or an Einstein to enter a spiritual doorway. We only need to become friends with our own burning.

Frederick Buechner says,“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace.” 

To be spiritual means to pay attention to our own experience of the mysterious reality of which we are a part. I am inviting you to take a risk—to befriend your hunger, to pay attention, to go through the doorway, to see what you might experience about our miraculous world.

To take that next step through the door can be difficult. We might be suspicious of what lies on the other side. We may be drawn to mystery, but uncomfortable with the irrational or unproven. We might discover old wounds triggered by the symbols or language from difficulties in our religious past.  How do we heal?  How do we re-imagine or reclaim our own connection to divinity?

For now, I invite you to notice what is in your heart.  Notice the hungers you feel, the questions, the passions, the fears.  Notice, just notice, any wounds you may carry that surface when you approach a doorway into spirituality. Make a list.  Explore what triggers those wounds, and let yourself remember any painful experiences from your own religious past.  I will continue to explore these questions in future posts.