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Okay, I’ll say it straight out. When I hear
the term “spiritual” in casual conversation,
I instinctively recoil. I tend to hear it through
the cultural filter of other-worldly solitude, divinity
as center stage in a magic show, and an aura of
glazing over and leaving behind all the troubling
realities of our world; so I need to take a deep
breath and ask what significance “spiritual”
holds in the liberal faith to which we aspire.
First, rest assured that I do believe the spiritual
does hold a space, central at that, in a faith based
on reason, freedom, tolerance, and justice making.
For perspective, I turn to the late E. Powell Davies,
minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington,
DC during those years right after World War II.
“It is not the supernatural that is spiritual,”
he observed. “The supernatural is a flight
from the spiritual—a flight into something
projected as material—a thing of childish
imagery. The spiritual remains with the natural,
learns to live with reality, tries to understand
it and itself as part of it… It is in the
natural that the soul can grow.”
Each of us is comprised of roughly 60% water, a
natural substance. The rest—bone muscle, ligaments,
neurons and more—are also natural substances,
material even. We come from nature. We return to
nature; and in between we are of human nature. In
between, the soul can grow. In between, our essence,
our spirit, moves within us and defines us. This
is amazing. The spiritual is life-giving, and life,
claims poet Wendell Berry, is a miracle. Berry speaks
also as a Kentucky farmer. His perspective is of
the earth and sympatico with that of Davies. The
spiritual is at home in the natural.
So how does the soul grow in the natural? Davies
had more to say:
“If we are to be equal to the times we
live in—and to the greater problems that the
future will bring—we must outgrow our childishness.
We cannot afford to trust the unreal, to exchange
the courage of struggling for the cowardice of begging
for miracles.
Too much of our moral energy—pitifully
too much—is expended in the wastefulness of
false beliefs, too much impounded in the painted
vaults of superstition. We must become free, spiritually—free
to achieve the greatness of a truly human stature.
And only the truth can make us free.”
Consider the cultural context of Davies’
ministry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, this
country and most of the world was jarred to the
bone by the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust
that raged within it. Those were years also when
the simmering mindset of anti-communism blew into
a national bonfire. All that was evil had a ready
“ism” as its scapegoat, and communism
was it, just as terrorism is now for us.
The fanatic anti-communism of Senator Joe McCarthy
took root in the widespread paranoia that defined
the spirit of that slice of our history known as
the Cold War. It was in this milieu that Davies
preached from his pulpit in our nation’s capital
about what is spiritual and what is not.
“Only the truth can make us free”
he proclaimed, echoing the words ascribed to Jesus
in the Gospel According to John. (John 8:32)
It is in the nature of the spiritual that I believe
we find religious truth, far from the inclination
toward superstition, far from the appeal of miracles
better suited for side shows than the main attraction.
I believe the main attraction in our lives, the
divinity which infuses our humanity, calls us to
seek and question, to do justice and practice compassion,
and to celebrate and wonder—all, in this world
in which we find ourselves.
To seek and question. We are born curious. We are
born astonished, as we take in that first breath
and behold the utter newness of where we are. Who
we are hasn’t yet occurred to us. We ingest
our brand-new habitat. As young children, we pretend
and we imagine. If we are nourished in all our modalities,
we learn to balance “the pretend” and
“the real.” We learn to inform our thinking
with our imagination. We learn to think with our
feelings and feel with our thoughts.
Robert Coles, the Harvard psychiatrist who has
spent so much of his life observing and advocating
for children, takes quite seriously the spiritual
life of children. In his book by that title, he
recounts a day spent with a fifth-grade class in
nearby Lawrence. Coles had long been attentive to
how children define themselves—in words, in
drawing, however. On this day, he posed to youngsters
whose demographics were richly diverse the invitation:
“Tell me, as best you can, who you are—what
about you matters most, what makes you the person
you are.” He added the qualifier, “Try
to single out one [quality or trait or characteristic]
for special mention…”
The youngsters took to their challenge with gusto.
The responses were wide ranging, but one girl took
longer than any of the others to complete her assignment.
When she did, she paused for a moment, then took
the paper on which she had written and crumpled
it. Coles became concerned, walked over to her desk
and asked to read it.
These were her words:
“I’m the one who’s writing
this! I’m the one at home who can make our
Gramps laugh. He’s old, and he doesn’t
laugh much. I don’t tickle him. I just tell
him jokes. My mom said without me Gramps would be
sad.”
Coles was moved and said so. The child replied,
somewhat downcast, “I don’t know
what else to say about myself.” Coles
asked her permission to keep her paper, and she
agreed, but reluctantly: “OK, but maybe
I should do another one, too, because in this one
I’m boasting, and you shouldn’t do that,
the nuns tell you.”
Coles acknowledged her feelings, affirmed the value
of what she had written, and the child, with a few
reticent smiles, moved on to her second statement.
Again, she took her time, disregarding the growing
impatience of her classmates. Then she walked up
to where Dr. Coles was sitting and handed him her
thoughts:
“I’m like I am now, but I could
change when I grow up. You never know who you’ll
be until you get to that age when you’re all
grown. But God must know all the time.”
This fifth-grader had risked sharing her internal
truths, an act of spiritual daring. Coles was the
caring facilitator of this process that freed her
to write what mattered. But before she wrote a word,
she reflected long and hard. She was a seeker and
a questioner. Coles chose an apt title for the chapter
that holds this account: “The Child as Pilgrim.”
As spiritual beings, we seek and we question. To
become spiritually free, we are called also to do
justice and practice compassion. This is the uphill
stuff of the spiritual, the stuff that is kept well
under cover by popular conveyors of a spirituality
that is solitary and safe from the troubles of our
world, like a gated community with a halo over it.
My thoughts move toward the prophets of the Old
Testament—Jonah, Micah, Amos, Jeremiah—not
easy people to be around, and can you imagine them
as members of your family? Jonah, who fled by sea
from his knowledge that he must speak truth to the
powers of injustice in Nineveh and ended up being
tossed overboard by sailors who decided he was bad
luck, Micah who bid us to “do justice and
love mercy and walk humbly with our God,”
Amos who carried on about despising feasts and solemn
assemblies and invoked justice to roll down like
waters, and Jeremiah who kvetched and railed about
God’s judgment on Babylon and more.
That late and great Unitarian theologian James
Luther Adams refers to them all as “political
theologians” and has this to say about the
prophetic perspective of contemplation, for example:
“The prophets…viewed the power
of God—law—as operating through social
political institutions and in international relations,
the expression of human freedom. This is a conception
of divine power which in its magnitude staggers
the imagination; indeed, it is the conception which
the pietist, typically preoccupied with the immediate
relations between the individual soul and God, always
had greatest difficulty in comprehending or in taking
seriously.
…Prophetism…laid a burden of responsibility
upon all people. Escape from action to contemplation
was rejected as a mode of irresponsibility. …The
fulfillment of meaning is inextricably related to
things earthy, to soul and body, for both soul and
body are God’s creatures.”
Adams affirms the prophetic claim that we are called
to act in this world, in the here and now, and that
this is a spiritual calling.
Christian liberation theologians move in the same
spirit as Adams. Spiritual freedom lies in undertaking
acts of compassionate justice in the here and now.
Christian feminist theologian Beverly Wildung Harrison
takes this one step further.
“I believe” she contends,
“that women have always been immersed
in the struggle to create a flesh and blood community
of love and justice and that we know much more of
the radical work of love than does the dominant,
otherworldly spirituality of Christianity. A feminist
ethic…is deeply and profoundly worldly, a
spirituality of sensuality.”
I refer to Beverly Wildung Harrison with respect
and affection. Beverly was amid her doctoral dissertation
at Union Theological Seminary when I just arrived
there; in fact, she was the resident advisor in
my dorm and taught me how to make cheese fondue—that
sumptuous dish that invokes the senses and goes
right to your heart, not always with the best of
results, of course. We were all fortunate to have
survived those evenings in the kitchen
Beverly has taught and written for several decades
about what it means to deal with the heat in larger
kitchens. The “crucible of human struggle,”
she observed, “is the base from which rises
whatever is authentic in the history of faith.”
It is a struggle at the heart of a spirituality
that is embodied in the here and now of our relationships
with each other and our world.
Living spiritually is to seek and to question,
to do justice and to practice compassion. It is
a matter of body and soul, flesh and blood, earth
and air, fire and water. The spiritual is grounded.
In the Creation story of Genesis, it was a garden
that was the first stage set for the entrance of
humankind.
“And the Lord God planted a garden in
Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom
he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God
made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the
sight and good for food, the tree of life also in
the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil.”
Planting a garden is an act of hope, a connecting
with the earth in a mode literal and metaphorical.
We plant seeds. We transplant seedlings. We dig
and place saplings into ground that we fertilize
and water. And the rest of nature does the rest.
We turn to our gardens, remarks gardener writer
Carol Williams, “not to escape reality
but to observe it closely.” As we plant
and water and watch, we find ourselves kin with
the ground, the sky, the sea, which all nurture
that which we dedicate and far more. Herein we come
to celebration and to wonder.
Williams describes an age-old custom that calls
for gardeners to bury seeds saved for spring planting
between December 24 and January 6, when they are
taken back. It is a custom inspired by ancient knowledge
that in this part of the earth, these are the twelve
longest nights. As such, they are considered “holy
nights.” In the Christian calendar, they mark
the time between Christmas Eve and Epiphany and
are holy indeed.
“After the coldest nights,”
observes Williams, “frost flowers appear
in the window. Contemplating these, gardeners ponder
what might be happening underground when nothing
intervenes between earth and bright winter stars.”
As our imagination hovers underground, our wonder
rises, and we know again the miracle of life that
is the miracle of natural things, the inquisitive
pondering that marks the deeper layers of who we
are, the amazing intertwining of body and soul and
heart and mind, the claim to do justice and love
compassion, the call to caring community, and the
celebration of it all, the wonder of it all.
The words of Davies ring again:
“Faith is not a thing of contemplation
only, but of our experience on the earth. There
is no way of knowing how much of meaning there is
in life unless we trust the meaning that we find.”
Trust the meaning that you find. Trust the meaning
that we find together. Seek and question. Discern
justice and do it. Experience compassion and practice
it. Be in this world and of it. Celebrate it. Wonder
at it. Within you too is a pilgrim child, reflective,
joy giving, capable of humility, and attuned to
possibility. Trust the meaning that is born of living
a life of reverence for life. This, I believe, is
spiritual.
Sources:
Roberta Bard, “Earth Was Given as a Garden,”
in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist
Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 207.
Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against
Modern Superstition, Counterpoint, Washington, DC,
2000.
The Bible, Revised Standard Version.
Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children,
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1990.
A. Powell Davies, “Spiritual Nurture,”
from “Personal Religion in a Time of Tension,”
(November 30, 1952), in without apology: Collected
Meditations on Liberal Religion, Edited by Forrest
Church, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998.
A. Powell Davies, “There Is No God in the
Sky,” from “There Is No God in the Sky,”
(February 25, 1951), in without apology: Collected
Meditations on Liberal Religion, Edited by Forrest
Church, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998.
The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays
and Addresses, Edited by George Kimmich Beach, Skinner
House Books, Boston, 1998.
Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections:
Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, Edited by Carol
S. Robb, Beacon Press, Boston, 1985
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making
of American Spirituality: From Emerson to Oprah,
HarperCollins, San Francisco, 2005.
Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life, A Bantam
Book, 1998.
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