What is spirituality anyway?

Perspective is a grace that comes with age, with life experiences, with wisdom-grown-deep. It is one of the hallmarks of the spiritual life.

We each live a universal story that winds and intersects its way through our own personal story. There’s a wounding of innocence, a healing or understanding, and a coming to an experience of wholeness that unites. This occurs in spirals, over and over in different ways, deepening into an ever-widening perspective of all this as one movement from different vantage points.

This occurs in every life, at different levels or intensity, in different circumstance and periods of history. The spiritual movement is the same. Seeing our story as part of the larger story of human kind offers courage, resilience and meaning to our own walk in the dark.

When wounding happens early in life, a person develops defensives and distractions to protect their wounded child within. It takes a long time to dissolve and integrate these protective walls or energies back into our natural energy flow. When wounding happens over a lifetime, in natural, everyday woundings, it comes with wrinkles, wisdom and, hopefully, a lightness or sense of humor about things.

Spirituality is about becoming more comfortable with the rhythm of this experience of wounding and deeper awareness; coming to see it as, not only part of life’s normal journey, but as something that enriches and enlivens our capacity to experience life in general. Our wounds hold the blessing of our being opened to the non-physical world of spirit so we can integrate more spirit into our person. How we respond to this so called blessing colors our spirituality.

Our early years provide us with all the energy and entitlement required to embrace with full exuberance every experience we can get our hands on. Our middle years provide space and time to sort out the importance of and meaning of the choices we have made about how to use this energy and how to embrace this world.

Our later years slow us down, weight us down, just long enough so the grieving process, the letting go process, has the time it needs to befriend us and to not frighten us. Our intuition deepens. We become more comfortable with listening to and trusting the non-physical world. We move ever so slowly, as if swayed by this non-physical presence, toward our last, and perhaps our greatest, performance — our final-letting-go.

All of this comes with gifts and challenges. Whether it’s through a wounding and healing process, or through the normal aging process, our perspective softens, becomes less judgmental, more compassionate. As we experience wounding and allow healing, we become more curious about other people’s stories, how they did, what they learned. We don’t waste energy on regrets, but use these energies to enjoy the little things of every day life.

When all this happens naturally, our spirituality flourishes naturally as well. There is an open and free dialogue with the imagination, a curiosity about new metaphors and perspectives. A healthy spirituality is free to investigate these new metaphors, new ways of expressing emerging truths without threatening the tradition given one by one’s family. There is no reason to block the new.

If we are burdened by others’ biases – religious certitudes, demands made on our natural preferences – our spirituality gets sidetracked from its natural ability to assist us in the life tasks we face. This can actually foster in us a reaction against life as trustworthy. We cannot trust our own experience or intuition, for fear of what others will think of us. 

Soul grounds our spirituality in life. Soul dialogues with the non-physical world of spirit; asks the transcendent to inform the soul while it is in the body. Soul seeks to connect with the transcendent in the world, not separate from it.   

Spirituality devoid of soul tends to focus on transcendence, perfection, righteousness, places the goal beyond human frailty. It suggests that the meaning of our suffering and wounds lies beyond this life, that the earth is not our home and the body is not our friend. Soul softens this perspective. Soul draws meaning from our struggles, suggests that our suffering gets us more in touch with our humanity, makes us more aware of what it means to be fully alive, not less.

With Jesus the Christ, said Paul the apostle in 2nd Corinthians, it “was never Yes and No”, as it is with us. “With him,” said Paul, “it was all Yes.” Yes to the wounding in life, yes to the healing possible, yes to the brokenness of the world, yes to being broken by the world himself – all Yes.

It is all one movement, cannot be separated out. Jesus taught that, and the Buddha, and Muhammad – as did all the wisdom teachers. Blessing comes with wounding; they come as a pair, inseparable, one movement. Our spirituality, if it is grounded in soul’s deep commitment to life, will witness to this life truth.  

Soul reaching in, spirit reaching out and up, each dancing in rich communion, always in motion, working together, never stagnant. The longing and the reaching and the finding in continuous flow, up and out and in, again and again, up and out and back in again. Spirit that loves soul’s depth, soul that loves spirit’s soaring radiance — unafraid and alive, the two move together.