A
SPIRITUAL LIFE
The earth, the sky, the sea..
the bird, the ant, the you, the me...
the rock, the fruit, the tree..
it's all God....
it's called to Be.
I use the word Spiritual a lot. I define myself as seeking to live a spiritual life.
By that I mean a life where I have a
lot of time for God and little or no time for religion.
Religion can of course be spiritual
but often it is not. And spirituality can be religious but it does not need to
be.
For me reacting to life from a
spiritual perspective means that I see everything, and I mean everything, as
having purpose and meaning as part of my spiritual growth. Nothing happens by
chance and good can come out of everything. It is of course far more complex
than that. And yet, at the same time, incredibly simple.
Having explored many religions in my
life I finally decided to stick with God and stay away from religion. Hence I
began to use the word spiritual a lot. So what do I mean? I have started to ask
myself that question.
We need to understand what we mean
when we use words to describe who we are or how we live. We need to understand
what we are saying for our own sake.
The dictionary definition of
spiritual includes:
·
religious: concerned with sacred matters or religion or the church; religious
texts; a member of a religious order; lords temporal and ... (Yes, I am
concerned with sacred matters but not religion)
·
apparitional: resembling or characteristic of a phantom; a ghostly face at the
window; a phantasmal presence in the room; spectral emanations; spiritual
tappings at a seance (this is a part of what is defined as spiritual but not
an important part for me. These are effects not substance.)
Everyone
is different, every journey is different, every Soul is unique and that is why
each and every spiritual journey is unique. We may learn from the experiences
of others but we must always walk the spiritual path alone. Perhaps that is why
spirituality and religion make such odd bed-fellows. A religious life demands
that we obey rules, that we believe what others tell us, that we conform. While
a spiritual life demands that we live by our own inner rules; that we question
everything we are told by others and that we are guided by our own truth... a
truth which emerges from our intuitive relationship with God.
With
religion God is given to us - handed out on a patriarchal platter in the main.
With a spiritual life we are called to search for God in every moment of our
being. Religion hands God out in defined shapes and forms; spirituality offers
God without shape or form.
A
religious life is bounded and hounded by rules; a spiritual life has no
boundaries and no urgency. A religious God is made in the image of man (mostly
men with female support staff) while a spiritual God is in any and every image
and yet without image for it is the source and being of all things.
It's
interesting trying to define what one means by the use of a word and it makes
me realise how inadequate words are to describe such things. No wonder the
ancients decided that God was beyond words.
Carl
Jung said, 'symbol is the lost language of the Soul,' and the spiritual journey
is always symbolic. Within those images we find God without turning God into an
image. It is not an easy journey because so much of it is solitary and their
are no rules, except for the ones that you discover upon the way. But within
that place of terror where you realise that at the end of the day, it is between
you and God and your job is to do the hard work, there is freedom. When you
depend upon others and the beliefs of others you remain dependent; when you
depend upon yourself and your relationship with God, only then are you truly
free.
And
the beauty of the spiritual path is that you can find God in your own way. It
requires a commitment to walk with open eyes ... most of the time anyway ...
and to remain open to all that is, knowing that within any 'death' there is
always 'rebirth.'
And
there will be many 'deaths' along the path. It can be no other way. And that is
why so few choose to walk the Spiritual Path for, as W.H. Auden so succintly
wrote:
We
would rather be ruined than changed.
We
would rather die in our dread
than
climb the cross of the moment
and
let our illusions die.
This
is actually the only quote I remember and I am sure there is a reason for that
as well. Perhaps as a reminder of how hard it is to let our illusions die. And
the most powerful illusion that we have and which most of us refuse to let die,
is certainty. For it is such a comfortable illusion that we never cease
striving to attain it. But illusion it is.
Living
with uncertainty is the First Lesson on the Spiritual Path.
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