My last post on Spirituality was long winded. If you ran it through a distillery, what would you get? What's the "elevator" version? What's the one-liner? "Spirituality: the surrender of self to God, as when lovers surrender self to each other and so find their true identity". 1. Spirituality means I acknowledge I have a spirit, that there are other spirits too, and that I'm more than my material parts. 2. There are levels to spirituality ... my self, self+God, self+God+others -- in relational terms perhaps these could be alternatively stated as incest with self, or an unequal relationship with another, or fully expressed as teamwork under a leader. 3. True relationship with others requires a (partial?) surrender of self and an abdication of power to dictate the full terms of interaction. 4. The world is full of people claiming they've found a "new understanding" of spirituality ... but for the most part they've simply rediscovered perspectives that have been talked about for thousands of years. Current expressions of new spirituality are mostly re-packaged combinations of the past, and at best express an ignorance of what’s already been said, or else show a deep chronological snobbery that conveys "people of the past understood less than I've discovered now". 5. The attraction of "new spirituality", especially the "love is all you need" version, can often be used as a smoke screen to avoid facing disturbing realities while promising an easy road to somewhere comfortable. Usually they imply a lot of "all you need to do is...", partnered with undue optimism of the outcome. Yet, if it is so easy for me to understand, why is it all only being discovered now? 6. Spirituality requires me to realize my spirit is but a tiny little spark in the face of incandescence - with all that this metaphor implies. Secular spirituality pushes me to become lost in the incandescence, Christian spirituality says "fly high on the currents of the incandescent one, shine like a star". In the end spirituality begins with a realization that there are far more important things than my material experiences, that my personal shortcomings are no hindrance, knowing that my life so far is only a blink before what lies ahead, and that God asks only for the surrender of lovers who surrender self to each other - without dictating the terms. Thus the critical questions to ask are: is there a God, can I relate to this God, does this God want to relate to me, what are this God's terms, and does a religion point to this God?
So I must choose, and choose wisely. For my spirit is made for a relationship where my full identity is found in communion with another, bound to another, surrendered to another. That's spirituality.
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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