Getting Spiritual

I was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in May of 1975. At that time I never, ever would have expected, or expected any UU minister, to begin a sermon in the way I am going to begin this morning. I want to share with you that I believe in the soul. I believe that every living thing – and perhaps more importantly for this morning is that every person – has a soul. The soul is that place or that spot in us (and it really makes no difference if it’s visible or simply a metaphor, because it is real) that is a kernel of the cosmos, a piece of the divine; the soul has a sprinkling of eternity. When we are in touch with our soul, we are in awe of what surrounds us. We return over and over to find meaning in our lives. That’s about all I can say, which is, of course, part of the difficulty: talk of the soul is not easy, nor precise.

So what we do is we come up with other words to describe soul. One of those words is spirit. We talk about people who have a lot of spirit, and that spirit is like a gauge, a barometer of whether or not the soul is on fire. When one has spirit, we talk of that person as being connected, as being alive, of being grounded, of being passionate and compassionate. A person who has spirit is someone whose soul is afire. Sometimes you can tell more about a person from an absence of spirit: they can walk into a room and it’s like all of the energy is sucked out. It’s a reflection on the state of their soul. Or perhaps the fire of the soul has been turned way, way down to a bare flicker.

But when the person you are with has spirit, it’s an incredible experience. I’m sure you’ve been around people who have spirit, and their energy, charisma, or divinity pervades the room, it permeates everything. Perhaps when you have experienced the spirit in this way, you are on top of the world, everything is alive, you just sense and connect with everything.

Spirituality is the way we go about the commitments that we make, the practice that we follow, the discipline we participate in, in order to nourish and support the soul. So you see how these three are connected. Spirituality is the nourishing and supporting, the feeding of the soul; spirit is the word we use to describe that person, those qualities of a person whose soul is afire. And soul is our kernel of the cosmos, a piece of the divine.

There is a line that I often use in ceremonies of union and weddings. I say to the couple and congregation: “The world does a good job of reminding us of how fragile we are.” Just watch the news, read the newspaper. You feel yourself being pulled and tugged, hassled. Spirituality is about restoring yourself, keeping yourself whole, helping to put all the pieces together to keep your soul intact, to keep the flame burning.

There is a story about a teacher who shows up on Monday morning in her classroom and she’s really grumpy. She’s not looking forward to seeing one particular student who always gives her a lot of grief. He never does his homework, he always mouths off in class, and on this Monday she wants nothing to do with him. So she walks into the room and sure enough, there he is sitting in the front row with a smirk on his face. She gets really angry and she loses it. She walks over to the wall where there is a map taped to it and she rips the map off the wall. And since it was taped up, it is left in pieces that are still on the wall, and she rips those pieces off, rips the map up, throws them down on the desk in front of the student and says, “Take these pieces, leave the room, and don’t come back until you have put it together.” Well she thinks she has gotten rid of this guy for the rest of the day: He is kind of slow, he’s never going to be able to put this map together. Well, he shows back up in five minutes! She is stunned. She can’t believe he’s done it. “How did you do it?” she says. He replies, “I discovered on the back there is a picture of a man. And all I had to do was put that face together. And then I turned it over and the world was put back together again.”

What a great metaphor for a spiritual journey! It doesn’t make any difference where you start – putting the world together in order to provide meaning and awe in your life, or putting yourself together in order to provide meaning and awe for the world. Either way, it’s a story about putting pieces together, it’s a metaphor for spirituality.

Over the centuries there are a lot of different ways that people have gone about putting the pieces together, of nurturing and supporting the soul and having spirit. Remember that spirituality is not new. A lot of times you hear all about spirituality as though it was something that arrived on the scene just in the last 50 years. Spirituality has been around for centuries. There have been practices for nurturing the soul forever. All of the world’s religious traditions have a spirituality connected to that tradition. This is one of the marks of the old spirituality – that it was connected to a faith tradition. Oftentimes you had to go through the institution in order to be spiritual. 20^th century spirituality has distinguished itself by dropping the institution and becoming individualistic: now you can have spirituality without participating in a traditional faith institution; now you can be spiritual without being religious! You don’t have to integrate with the institution’s definition of spiritual. Consequently, 20^th century spirituality can look like a version of connect the dots, or paint by numbers, and you’ll come out with a picture of the way it’s supposed to be. It would appear that there are no more institutional insights and support, just your own way.

20th century individualistic spirituality is also very eclectic. Even in most of the major faith traditions, it’s recognized that there are many paths to the top of the spiritual mountain. And what’s more, when you get to the top of the mountain, not all the views are going to be the same; there may be a big plateau and you can walk around and from everywhere on top of the mountain you are going to get a different view. So there’s this eclecticism that just did not exist in previous kinds of spirituality.

But, with this 20th century new form of spirituality, or what I like to think of as laissez faire spirituality, there come some difficulties, some obstacles. One of the obstacles that I am sure we are all familiar with is that there is a spiritual entrepreneurialism. There are a lot of people out there who are selling their goods and selling their ways. Some of these work. That’s for you to decide. But some of them don’t work and you can invest a lot of time and energy in an entrepreneurial spirit master, only to be severely disappointed.

Elizabeth Lesser, who was cofounder of the Omega Institute, talks about the ten pitfalls to 20th century spirituality. I don’t look at them so much as pitfalls, but as caution signs on our journey to spiritual health, to keeping the soul on fire. I want to talk a little bit about these ten caution signs, what they say and what they might look like as we embark on our own spiritual quest.

The first caution sign reads, “Beware of the never-ending process.” Now on the one hand, this could be very positive because I really do believe that spirituality – nourishing your soul – is a never-ending process. While the soul is perfect, nurturing and nourishing continues. But that’s not what Lesser or what I am trying to talk about. What she means is making it an obsession, at the exclusion of everything else in your life. Often what happens is that you can become so obsessed with your spiritual journey that it becomes the center of your life, so much so that you block out everybody else and you can develop a social apathy, not only toward the injustices of the world, but other people. It can be a detriment, this never-ending process. So one of the caution signs on our journey says beware of the never-ending process.

A second caution sign reads, “Be careful of romanticizing indigenous cultures.” It seems that with some of the New Age practices, it’s as though there is an unspoken rule that states: If it’s Western, it’s bad. Yet there’s a lot to be offered by the great Western religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. They all have their own spiritual traditions. In some cases we are going to be more comfortable with these simply because we are of the West, and we are going to understand a lot of that language. A second caution sign says, beware of romanticizing indigenous cultures.

Another caution sign, a third one, says, “Beware of superficiality.” Beware of all the sunny answers, of solutions that are too good to be true. And right along with that is another caution sign that says, “Beware of instant transformation.” It’s not as though you read three or four books, or you attend five or six workshops, and suddenly you have been reborn, your soul is in unbelievable shape, you’ve got spirit. I am reminded of a person who described his own awakening regarding sunny solutions. He spoke about his computer’s spellcheck, his spellcheck always changes sacred to scared. It’s almost as though the spellcheck knew something he didn’t: When you pursue the sacred, it can be scary. Spiritual work is not all roses and sunny answers.

A fifth road sign would say, “Be cautious about magical solutions.” We love – I love – magic. A colleague, a good friend of mine who just died recently, was a parish minister and a magician. I always wondered if he took his magic into the pulpit on Sunday. What a great thing to be able to use, I thought, what fun. He said he never did. At pot luck dinners, at Sunday school, he did magic shows, but he never took it into the pulpit because he didn’t want people ever to confuse magic with spirituality.

Use your common sense. I hear people say they like to come to Unitarian Universalist congregations because we don’t ask you to check your brains at the door. So use it, use your common sense. And enjoy the magic of everyday life. We don’t need magic potions because there is a lot of magic and wonder in the everyday.

A sixth caution sign would read, “Beware of grandiosity.” It’s so easy when we are in the rhythm and routine of a spiritual journey to think we’ve got it now, this is what it’s all about, nobody knows what I am going through because nobody is experiencing it the way I am experiencing it. And that’s right – no two people’s experiences will be the same. And we forget that we’re human, that we are going to make mistakes. We do forget that we’re not perfect. And that living, as one person said, is just stringing together the moments of imperfection.

In the Sufi Islam tradition, there is a storyteller named Mullah Nasrudin who would tell parables, stories about the culture, stories about the religion. But one of the great things about Mullah Nasrudin was he told stories about himself. One of the stories deals with this topic of grandiosity. He and a friend are sitting down and having some tea. His friend says to him, “Mullah Nasrudin, you never married. Why? Couldn’t you find somebody whom you truly loved?” And he said, “Oh no, there were many, many women whom I really loved and I thought were going to be perfect. There was one woman in Cairo. Her hair was as black as coal and her eyes were as brown as olives. And we just had the best time together, but our personalities didn’t mesh. Then there was the woman in Medina...” And he goes on to describe her and another woman in Cairo. They always seemed to have an awful lot to offer but it just wasn’t right. Then he said, “Ah, but there was the woman in Baghdad. She had all the qualities of all the other women. Our personalities meshed just perfectly. Everything was wonderful. I really wanted to marry her. She was perfect. But alas, it didn’t work.” And his friend says, “It didn’t work? Sounds like it was perfect. What was the problem?” Mullah Nasrudin says, “Alas. She was looking for a man who was perfect!”

We are not perfect. Even in our spiritual journeys, even when we think everything is perfect. Beware on your journey of grandiosity – of pumping yourself up far bigger than what you really are.

Also beware of narcissism. It’s so easy on a spiritual journey to become self-centered, self-focused, so that you close out those people who are most concerned for you, with whom you have the strongest relationships, who really would like to participate on the journey with you. There is a thin line between taking care of yourself, taking care of your needs in your spiritual journey and becoming self-obsessed about it, becoming self-centered about it. So beware on your journey, beware, the sign says, of narcissism.

And be aware of appropriation. It seems to be such a fad nowadays to appropriate from other sacred traditions, often indigenous cultures, their sacred rituals, which can trivializes those rituals. Because we don’t live in those contexts, and often we cannot even begin to fathom the context and culture that produced those sacred rituals, be aware of appropriating sacred rituals from other cultures.

Then a ninth caution, a very big one. Beware of the entrepreneurial guru. The person who promises you everything, and often lives by a double standard. Beware of those people who provide what seems like the unbelievable because chances are it is.

Finally, be willing to say “No” to yourself. The messages you hear, the things you dream about, sometimes aren’t reality based. They aren’t good for you. Learn a little bit of humility. Learn some humbleness. Learn how to say “No,” even to yourself.

So there they are: Ten caution signs for your journey of spirituality.

Last summer at a minister’s meeting, I heard a psychiatrist describe spiritual enlightenment, using a textbook psychiatric definition. He said that spiritual enlightenment among psychiatrists is known as grandiose exhibitionist libido energy. What a suspicious sounding definition! We have come a long way from defining spiritual enlightenment in these terms to the other extreme of where now it’s almost like anything goes.

21^st century spirituality will be characterized by a return to religion, to faith communities. Rather than being supported by the spiritual homogeneity of like-minded people, we’ll see individuals practicing their spirituality in the context of religious communities where diversity is a strength. This diversity might make some nervous, but it can deepen and mature your spirit in ways that going-it-alone or like-mindedness won’t. We can turn to the faith community for support.

There’s a story about a father and son that illustrates my point. They’re walking on a path through the woods when they come across a big rock. The son turns to his father and says, “Do you think I can push that rock? I think I can.” His father says, “If you use all your strength, I’m sure you can push it.” So the boy tries – he pushes and pushes, but can’t budge it. He takes a deep breath and tries it again. Finally, tired from his effort, he turns to his father and says, “Dad, I’ve tried with all my strength to move the rock, but I can’t.” And his father says to him, “You haven’t used all your strength. You haven’t asked me to help.”

I hope that 21^st century spirituality will be characterized by a similar attitude, where we turn to those around us who maybe don’t see it just the way we do, but support us and are there for us on our journeys, as we are there for them. It’s this kind of support and care that I expect to see in faith communities where 21^st century spirituality is practiced.

I’m told that in traditional Quaker communities, when they greet each other they often ask, “How goes it with thy spirit?” This is an appropriate question for us to reflect on. Not only how goes it with thy spirit, but what is the state of one’s soul. Reflect about those people whom you have known whose flame of the soul is turned up. Think about the way you feel when you are around them. Reflect on how it goes with thy spirit.

Thank you to Ms. Claire Morgen for transcribing this sermon.

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