What Is Spirituality?

"Untitled"  (©  Erik Walker Wikstrom  2015)

I have often been asked what is meant by the word, "spirituality."  It's a word that's thrown around a lot, yet one which those doing the throwing seem to assume is clear to everyone.  This might be true, if it weren't also true that there are almost as many different understandings as there are people talking about it.  As an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister serving several congregations over the past two decades, I've had more than a few people ask me what I think it means.

I have an answer.

In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau described his experiment of living alone in a 10' x 15' single-room cabin in the woods around Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts with this words:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life ..."

In this he seems to me to be saying that there are two ways of living -- life and not-life.  Remember, this is the man who also said, "The mass of [humanity] lead lives of quiet desperation."  You can imagine, then, which way he thinks most of us live, and why he, "wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life."

Thoreau was not the first person to observe this dichotomy between life and not-life.  Buddhists have long said that most people live in samsara.  This is sometimes called the state of "delusion," or "restlessness."  It's what the Buddha was pointing to when he said that "life is suffering."  Yet Buddhism also teaches that there is a way to be free from samsara, to live in nirvana, which is to say, to really and truly live.  Life and not-life.

Christians talk about being "dead in sin" and "alive in the spirit (or "in Christ")."  It's the same distinction -- life and not life.  Nearly every one of the world's great religions, and most schools of psychology, agree on this point.   Regardless of the words used, though, the idea is the same -- there's a way of living our lives in such a way that we are really, truly, fully alive, and there's a way of living in which we're not.  And most of us, most of the time, are living in that second way.  In the book of Deuteronomy (30:19) God is remembered as having said, "I have set before you life and death ... choose life."

Which brings me back to "spirituality."  As I understand it, "spirituality" has to do with learning how to live in that real, fully engaged, awake, mindful, rich, deep, marrow-sucking way.  You can certainly use traditional religious language if you wish, but there's really no need to.  Spirituality is about living life and not not-life.


Pax tecum,

RevWik